The Democratic Advocate

CONGRESS,

Never in the history of any country do we find a political body coming together with more important duties to meet and labors to perform than those that crowd upon the present Congress. The whole American people—the still clamorous Radicals of New England, the Southerner who has succumbed to overwhelming power, and even the poor negro, whose status in the future is so uncertain and unsettled, look forward with no small degree of anxiety to the action of Congress. There are difficulties growing out of the recent war that demand a solution, and it is now for the party dominant to determine whether moderation and magnanimity shall characterize their action and thereby render a distracted country peaceable and happy, or that the same fanaticism that has ruled to the very verge of political and financial ruin, shall continue, for malicious purposes, to wield the fatal power with which four years of civil commotion have clothed it. If the members of Congress desire a lesson of moderation, let them visit the battle-fields of the South, let them follow in the track of Sherman's march and learn what desolation, poverty and defeat signify. If the lesson be not a salutary one, if the orphan and widowed faces that would greet them everywhere, if the submission stamped upon every brow, if the once rich and fertile lands over which the blackened track of war has marked its way, and which time and labor alone can resuscitate, be not sufficient to moderate their actions and cause them to hesitate ere they impose more heavy burdens upon the South, then all hope for a joyous peace and permanent happiness is vain.