Franklin Repository

Whatever of evil exists in the world is, ordinarily, and doubtless with truth, attributed to the Devil. His agency in promoting secession and his purpose, the bolstering for an indefinite series of years of a favorite institution, slavery, are facts firmly held by every loyal mind. The utter failure of the movement in behalf of wrong is regarded, accordingly, as a triumph over diabolical interference. We are taught, however, that the arch enemy is pertinacious and industrious, and we may well believe that the bitterness of disappointment is but an incentive to fresh attempts upon the integrity of our hated race. As he plied Job with argument and vexed him with sophistry, by the mouths of his own familiars, after calamity and grief had but illustrated the constancy of the man, it would not be unprecedented, were resort, now, discoverably, to be had to the same expedients since the circumstances are so strikingly the same. For, as with Job, under the pressure of the greatest calamities endured by any people wide spread bereavement and universal loss--the national conscience grew the more steadily in strength to the acknowledgement of national wrong and the general resolve became but the firmer to do right in pursuance of belief. The strain of vehement trial rooted conviction more deeply; delays quickened impatience, disappointment incited to fresh efforts difficulty inspired zeal; emulation prompted sacrifice and fervor opened martyrdom as the gateway to success. Out of the war came a people, chastened, purified, enlightened, ennobled, and cheered because triumphant.

But the embers of a triumph often light the watch fires of the foe. Evil is deathless and survives defeat. Men are not made to act the hero's part through life's whole round, nor people to sustain the constant stress of the sublime. However it may be, and is, where great interests are at stake, rousing strong passions and making the otherwise impracticable possible, even certain; it is, experience shows, quite as probable as it is natural, that indifference will follow with the inevitable reaction of exhaustion. In such a slough are we mired today. The elections point this moral. The devices of the adversary show that he knows it. Prejudice and ignobler passions are never so alive as when their masters, enlightenment and the virtues, are wearied and sluggishly content with their work. The six years of this decade have been glorious ones for our people. A huge sin desisted from; the sole cause of distraction removed from the land; a narrow, jealous, false, theory of government exploded; the true and its accordant policy established; it is not wonderful, though unfortunate, that they, who have wrought all this should grow inert, because complacent. Hence the disasters of yesterday.

Steadfastness is the price of supremacy. They who fought and won so often, so long, must gird themselves for other battles. The field it's true is changed, the tactics of the enemy altered. Troops of Sabeans and Chaldeans no longer slay our young men with the sword, nor carry away our camels, in the hope of deferring our manhood from a further persistence in uprightness and of shaking our faith in truth, but Satanic industry was never busier in pouring into our eats by familiar voices, the juggleries of sophistry and untruth.

Whence come the suggestions, that after the bloodiest civil war of history, causeless save for the deliberate resolve to uphold the most stupendous of all crimes--a war the authors of which are guilty of every sin enumerated in the decalogue, a thousand times committed, all unrepented of and unatoned for--that these murderers, robbers, burglars, thieves should be reinvested with the rights of citizenship, without punishment and without bail, that enormity of offence ought to insure impunity to the offender and, that the injured are the gainers by forbearance; that a people staggering under a load of debt can best relieve themselves by dishonesty, by repudiation; and that the ignorance which our own injustice enforced upon a captive race is the best reason for perpetuating their inferiority and our own wrong? If they do not spring direct from the author of all evil they belie their looks.

The whisperers of these suggestions reckon on the weaknesses of humanity and their recent successes testify to their shrewdness. Will we consent to an unqualified restoration of criminals; will we sully our integrity by breaking our plighted faith with them who fought for us and who sustained us by their substance; will we sink our liberated Helots into a new serfdom; will we not rather so guard our peace that malcontents, hereafter, will seek other climes as a refuge for their griefs, and, supplying their places with the zealous and true of any race or color, make good our claim to the name of an invincible because an upright and a truthful people? These questions must be answered when next we gather to the ballot box.

VIRGINIA has decided in favor of a constitutional convention by a majority of perhaps twenty thousand. She thus expresses her acceptance of the terms offered her by Congress, and earnestly enters upon the work of restoration. Her convention will contain a radical majority of twenty at least, and the speedy consummation of the work is thus assured. The result gloriously vindicates the wisdom and justice of the Congressional plan of reconstruction. Virginia will be restored, not as an oligarchy, but as a model Republican State, based upon pure democratic principles. Henceforth her government will be directed and controlled not by any particular class but by her people. She presented a spectacle at her last election that should confound the enemies of popular government, and an example that other States may profit by studying. Without distinction of race or color her people all participated, with a regard for law and order that would have been remarkable in her former history. She has rebuked those who predicted a war of races no less emphatically than those who have all along asserted that the negro population of the South was not qualified to exercise the great franchises of American freemen. The result proves what any impartial mind would have accepted without actual demonstration, that hostility between the races if it comes at all, must come through the oppression of one, rather than from the enjoyment of equal rights by both. It further proves a stern devotion to principles by Blacks upon which we can build in perfect safety.

We rejoice in the triumph because it assures us of the speedy consummation of the great work of reconstruction, and indicates an early and happy pacification of our country.

A recent visitor in the oil regions of Pennsylvania describes the desolation which reigns in a once famous locality. Between Oil City and Meadville, not one well is in operation. It is only a long line of rotting derricks, and rusted boilers and engines. At Franklin, where the French creek empties into the Allegheny, they show with pride the great court house that they are building, the tall marble monument to the martyrs of the war, and the tumbling down farm-house of the Evans family. Three years ago, $100,000 were offered to this family for their house and ground. The offer was refused as too moderate; and the daughter of the house, in the flush of sudden wealth, scorned her rustic lover, and cancelled her engagement. Now the estate house, farm and all, will not bring $1,000, the daughter in single blessedness, and the family can only remember in their present misery, their former hope.