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THE OLD GUARD,

A MONTHLY JOURNAL, DEVOTED TO THE PRINCIPLES OF 1776 AND 1787.

VOLUME II. - FEBRUARY, 1864.—No. II.

PEACE COMING THROUGH BANKRUPTCY.

ARE there any signs of peace? Are there signs of humanity and reason breaking through the black clouds that hang over our country? Yes, there are signs of peace, but not of humanity and reason. The authors and managers of the war were lost to those virtues long before the war began. Peace, when it comes, will come in spite of them.

They will fight against it, plot against it, and abandon the field of blood only when forced by inexorable necessity. As long as it is possible for the war to last, the party in power will hold on to it, from motives of momentary self-defense, as well as of avarice and revenge. The day of peace ends the theatre of their malice and plunder. Peace is to them what war is to their country-ruin; what the day of judgment is to the sinner, a final settlement of the whole course of crime. Like the cornered highwayman, they will give up only through exhaustion. That point cannot be far off. They cannot get on much further without an amount of money which it will be impossible to raise by the system of fraud and deception, which appears to be the only means compre

hended by the Administration. In the sums required for the prolonged prosecution of the war, real money does not exist, within the possible reach of the United States; and printed, or counterfeit money, is rapidly approaching a crisis where it must burst like a bubble, leaving nothing but its own froth behind it. Already the wily Secretary trembles for its fate. His printing presses are not worn out. It is easy enough to strike off a hundred thousand millions of printed moneybut the entangled Secretary begins, at last, to comprehend that the faster he prints, the swifter he hurries on the inevitable hour when a ship-load of these printed promises to pay will not be worth the price of a single soldier's uniform. He begins to understand that his paper balloon is in danger of collapsing at any moment. To-day the debt is beyond the reach of real money. Even the New York Tribune, of a late issue, was forced to confess that the people begin to fear that repudiation. is only a question of time. The New York Times, moved by a spirit of intelligence and candor quite unaccountable, warned the Administration that

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Very Truly Yours. Mi HG Rymour.

"The Union I desire is a Union of hearts
and of hands, such as our fathers gave us

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