REASONS FOR THE PUBLICATION OF THIS WORK. 1ST. GENERAL. THE truth needs neither eulogy nor apology, whilst the most extravagant praises and pretensions are powerless to shield falsehood from exposure. A review of the unfortunate condition of the country presents but little to captivate the reader and even less to stimulate the writer to a style which may entertain the mind which does not at the same time mantle the soul with unutterable shame. Reckless tyrants have trampled down the rights and manhood of the people together, and the poor privilege of complaint conceded to the dying culprit and not denied to the rich man in hell, prohibited in one-half of the United States. Our Government is in nothing uniform except its contempt of law, and powerful only for the oppression of the people. Every officer seems to contemplate his office as an engine of destruction in which he is engaged to work the ruin of the particular department of government entrusted to his care. The Postmaster General for the last five years has been violating the mails. The Secretary of the Treasury has been squandering the public wealth. The Secretary of the Navy has been enfeebling our Naval power. The Secretary of War, all crimsoned with innocent blood, is employing the army for the destruction of the country. The Secretary of State has been subverting constitutional law, and disgracing our form of government at home and abroad. The Secretary of the Interior has been conniving with public jobbers to defraud the government of its most valuable lands. The Attorney General is gravely burlesquing nonsense itself by defining the Constitutional construction of unconstitutional laws, and is in conspiracy with Military Commissions to murder inno cent women. The President is administering the government through Military Satraps in a manner unknown to Republican systems and disgraceful to despotisms which regard the character of those entrusted with power. We now witness among our kindred the debasement of a civilized people who are forced to submit to the insult and domination of barbarian negroes and foreign vagabonds. The Courts of the country are infamously corrupt. The State Legislatures and Congress are flagrantly accessible to bribes, which have become the only tangible basis of special and an essential necessity in general legislation. The people of the late Confederate States, after encountering the terrible vicissitudes of war, were overtaken by a famine which inflicted frightful forms of starvation, and are now overrun and robbed by predatory invasions, and endangered by the insurrection of domestic savages incited by foreign incendiaries. Each step of advancing usurpation upon the part of these tyrants has been met by a receding cowardice upon the part of the people, which has yielded to its behests. Capital has availed itself of the general distress to combine its powers to oppress labour; labour has conceded and begged in the vain hope of appeasing capital, until Banks, Tariffs and Usury, the three great criminals of all governments, are now employed by the funded system to create revenues, keep up military establishments and enslave the people. This enquiry into the causes and remedy of the condition of the country is prepared for the plain thinking people, who determine to be free from the dangerous errors of demagogues and the overshadowing power of capital. While a people should not be insensible to the glory, grandeur, and power of a good government, and should duly award its just meed to courage, it should never be forgotten that there can be no glory won by self-destruction; that civil wars should find no lasting place in our records; that magnanimity to a fallen victim who has proven his courage on the battle field, should consign to oblivion his faults. Upon the other hand, the thief, robber, murderer or incendiary who, loaded down with the plunder of defenceless families and leaving a desert waste in his bloody trail, fled before avenging armies, should be held up to mankind on the gibbet of history to warn others who have started upon the mistaken road to glory, not to strew their pathway with the relics of virtue and prosperity, nor pave their line of march with human skulls. The people yet, have it within their power to restore their freedom, retrieve their lost character, though unable to bring back the dead, or efface those terrible scars inflicted upon the violated person of liberty in her contests with arbitrary power. The people can no longer look for safety in mercenary party organizations, or rely for relief upon demagogues. The freemen of America must learn to think for themselves. These following questions must be searchingly put to the people: I. By what right can any generation contract to enslave successive generations, and mortgage the labor of future centuries to pay the debt created to satiate hate and aggrandize a lawless cupidity? II. Can any government justly levy a tax upon the labor of the country to support and increase its untaxed capital, and enslave industry to speculation? III. By what earthly power can such a claim be enforced upon |