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We have spoken several times in these columns of the grossness of the disorders in which the government of several States is plunged in the hands of the negroes and carpet-baggers, gathering our opinions simply from newspaper articles and correspondence and occasional private advices. Very recently, business men of the highest character, both from this city and from Boston, have been examining the state of things there with reference to investments both for themselves and their friends, and, of course, one of the very first things to which their attention was turned was the government, for govern ment means taxation, and on the manner and amount and application of taxation depend the rate of profits, the prospects of immigration, and the probability of internal improvements. No man will willingly invest much capital in a State whose revenues he has reason to believe will be squandered, or credit destroyed, or whose legislation cannot be depended on for a reasonable degree of uniformity and honesty. Now the reports of these gentlemen—and the two we have in our eye have been ardent Republicans and supporters of the Reconstruction policy of Congress, and do not believe any other policy was possible or desirable—describe things as being nearly as bad as bad can be. The effect on the freedman of the spectacle of large bodies of his fellows in a state of the grossest ignorance put suddenly in possession of the government of great, civilized, and wealthy communities, is of course as demoralizing as the sudden discovery of a parcel of diamonds, and just as likely to turn his mind away from steady industry, and to destroy his faith in the political value of knowledge. But this is not the worst of it. Their management of the State funds has been such, and is such, as to endanger American credit everywhere, to frighten away capital, and make general bankruptcy at some not very distant day by no means improbable. Moreover, no society was ever long subjected to such a regime without suffering in its very vitals, without finding the stock of honor, truth, decency, and patriotism on which it has to draw every now and then, to carry it through exciting. times, greatly and perhaps fatally diminished.
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