THE TIMES | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 19, 1879

THE TIMES.

Is our republic stable? Is it fairly established? Has it cohesion enough to withstand successive shocks of internal eruption? These are questions that every man must ask himself sometimes. The war partially answered them in the affirmative, but there are elements at work in our body politic that must arouse the gravest apprehensions in the mind of the thoughtful citizen. The oft-recurring conflict between the executive and legislative departments of the government; the destruction of commercial confidence, caused by ignorant and corrupt financial legislation; the multitude of un-enforced laws; the unlaid wraith of State Rights, that Banquo of legislation that will not “down,” together with the undenied corruption in high places of the government, and the ills that attend unlimited and illiterate suffrage, make a problem before which true statesmanship must quail, but which the politician faces with confidence born of ignorance. It is a good thing to have faith in God, to believe that his providence will not allow this first intelligent attempt at self-government to fail because such failure would set back the cause of civilization in the earth, but God will surely let it fail if it prove unfit, for the fittest only survive in the world today, as in those uncounted ages while the world was being made ready for the flower of civilization.

It behooves us to seek out the causes of our weakness, and to seek a remedy for them. There are two prominent causes at work for ill in our body politic. The first and foremost is the voice that ignorance has in our popular government, and the second is the conflict of opinion in regard to the relations between the States and the union of States.—The Alliance.