The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1867-12-02
The POIitiOai Horoscope.

The politics of the country are in a state of
evident transition. All that can as yet be
affirmed with confidence respecting the new
phase is, that the negro question will be
eclipsed by questions of finance. The number
Of financial propositions broached on the first
day of the session attests the deep interest
the country is beginning to take in that class
of topics; and its torpid interest in the old
questions will be manifest in the ease with
which the impeachment project will be shuffled
out of view. The defeat of the radical zealots
on this measure will damp their ardor and
depress their courage. They will stand aside
and let the current of business and debate
flow into the financial channels towards which
it tends.
Questions of finance irresistibly force them
selves into prominence after great wars. For
the ten years after the overthrow of Napo-
leon they predominated in the politics of Eng
land, and convulsed the country as it had
not been convulsed in the colossal struggle of
the preceding twenty years. After our war of
the Revolution, it was financial questions that
shattered and overthrow the Confederation,
and led to the formation of the present Con-
stitution. Those same financial questions
were inherited by the new Government and
the policy of Hamilton, by which they were
met and solved, was debated with altogether
more heat than any other questions of the
period. After the close of our second war
with Great Britain, the same class of ques-
tions doomed into prominence, and continued
to agitate the country with little cessation for
the ensuing thirty years, until the slavery
question and the Mexican War sup
planted them by engrossing the public
interest. The tariff and currency ques-
tons rocked the country from side to
side and the three statesmen of that
period, whose names were in all mouths, ex-
pended their best energies in financial contro-
Versies Our own history and that Of England
proves that such topics are capable of stirring
public feeling to its profoundest depths. In
fact, most of the great events of modern times
have turned on them. The French Revolution
grew out of the financial difficulties which led
to the conyoking of the States-General. The
greatest of all the English revolutions, that
which beheaded Charles the First and intro
duced the protectorship OF Cromwell, had its
source in financial difficulties between Charles
and Parliament. We are in the dawn of an
era when financial discussions will agitste the
country more deeply than in the time of
Hamilton, more deeply even than in the days
of Andrew Jackson, when they came near
lighting the torch of civil discord. Most
public questions have only distant interest
for the great body of the people; these come
home to every mans business and freside.
That they have not sooner risen into absorb
the country with the dragging sequences of
the war. Wars commonly end by definitiVe
treaty of peace, in which the future relations
of the parties are settled, and all questione
connected with the conflict closed. Had our
civil war come to like clean result, we should
long ago have been in the midst of exciting
financial discussions they would have been
two years ago what they are presently to be-
come the pivot of our politics. These ques-
tions are too pressing to be longer deferred,
and although the future relations OF the par-
ties TO the late war are not yet settled, they
will sink before the winter is half spent into
subordination to the topics which must for
some years be supreme IN our polltlos.
The public mind has been so startled by
the new theory of Messrs. Pendleton and
Butler as to disclose a deep though hitherto.
dormant interest in the subject. 1t was not
the supposed novelty, or ingenuity, or alb
surdity of their doctrine which had such an
electric effect, but the fact that it touched in
terests SO vast that everybody felt that it
.conId not safely be ignored. Had it been some
new theory on the negro, or new crotohet
about reconstruction, 1t would have burst
and disappeared like a new-blOWn bubble; the
nublio would not have remembered it week.
The fact that it has kept its place as a leading
topic of constantly growing interest; that it is
eoiipsing the impeachment question, the re-
construction question, and the negro question
proyes that the finances are felt to be topic
Of fresh interest and vast magnitude.
Tie first well-marlSed symptom of the decay
of radicalism was presented in the early part
of tbe summer in the strong disposition TO
nominate General Grant as the Republican
candidate for President. This showed that the
interest of that party in its policy needed to
he orutohed upon something extraneous; for
General Grant is in no sense representative of
the distinctive principles of the Republican
party. The next symptoms we're such as