Staunton Spectator

As we walk along the streets we see in all the stores and shops dozens of corn brooms which are brought here for sale. This should not be the case. We live in a country admirably adapted to the growth of broom corn, and with an abundance of timber to make the handles.--Cannot some enterprising citizen establish a broom-factory in our town? It would give employment to a number of persons who need it, and keep a great deal of money among us which would otherwise be sent abroad.

The true secret of prosperity is to make every thing we can at home, and buy as little as we can abroad.

Many other occupations might be found which would yield profitable employment to capital and labour.

We have two large foundries now in a process of erection which will furnish the means of subsistence to a hundred or more people. Let us not confine ourselves to this department of industry. Keep the ball in motion and develop home resources.

Those countries flourish most which give a concrete form to labor, and sell manufactured goods instead of the raw material.

We have fine water-power around the town. It is a reproach to our enterprise to see it unemployed. Why not re-build the woollen factory, or substitute in its place some other useful machinery?

While we all go for re-constructing the Union, we must not forget that it is our duty also to re-construct our labor system, and re-establish our prosperity. We certainly cannot effect this latter object without the exhibition of industry and enterprise. We must sell more than we buy, and we must manage to incorporate as much labour as we can into the articles sold.

New England had the sagacity to see that she could not compete successfully with the fertile South and West in agriculture, and hence she betook herself to manufactures. We are somewhat (though in a less degree) in the same situation, and we would act wisely to follow her example in devoting a large part of our labour to mechanical pursuits.

Who will start the broom factory?

In the House of Representatives, Mr. Shellabarger of Ohio, offered a resolution, which was agreed to "directing the Judiciary Committee to inquire and report to the House on the constitutionality and prosperity of providing by law that no person who is disloyal to the Government of the United States, and who has voluntarily engaged in rebellion against such Government, shall be entitled to exercise the right of an elector in any State, or to hold office under such Government during such disloyalty; also, by law, for persons who have so engaged in such rebellion being admitted to exercise such elective franchise on proof of loyalty to the Government."

This resolution, says the N. Y. News, is in the spirit of many others that have preceded it, aiming to legislate a legitimate authority out of the hands of the President, and to render the Southern people dependent upon the will of the Radicals in Congress for the exercise of their rights as American citizens. It is about time that the question should be determined whether a faction having numerical supremacy in the National Legislature can dictate at their caprice what shall be the political status of States and individuals, that were born to Republicanism and inherited the inalienable rights of freemen. If self-government is a privilege to be accorded or to be withheld at the pleasure of a majority in Congress, there is nothing definite nor certain in our political system. Let is be established that Congress has the power to take away elective franchise from those who fail to adopt the doctrines of the dominant party, and the worst form of despotism or anarchy takes the place of our boasted Republicanism. We admit that those who engaged in armed hostility to the Federal Government may be brought to trial before the tribunal empowered by the Constitution to pronounce upon such offences: and if proven guilty, there may, in a strict letter of the law, be some kind of barbarous and sanguinary justice in making them pay the forfeit as written in the statutes. But no law, no sentiment expressed or intimated in the Constitution no acknowledged in our form of government gives to Congress an authority to snatch the elective franchise from the hands of an American citizen.

It is time that the word "disloyal," that is so often used in these Radical resolutions, should be dropped from the parliamentary vocabulary. It has no present application to any class of our people unless it be to the demagogues who are continually mouthing it to carry their point against their Southern countrymen. But the surest way to compel the Radicals to accept the fact of Southern "loyalty" is for the President to proclaim a general amnesty. His right to do so, under the Constitution, cannot be questioned, and the present moment is most opportune for exercise of such an act of clemency.--It will, of itself, restore the Southern people to all their civil attributes, and will silence the revolutionary crew who are incessantly p[unclear] of disloyalty in the very face of abundant testimony to complete submission to the Federal authority. That is the simplest way to settle the issue, and we appeal to the Executive to lose no time in his application of so sovereign a remedy.