Fault-finding.
--It is an easy matter to find fault. It is only necessary to be self-conceited, querulous and dyspeptic. Any man with these qualifications can criticize Homer, Shakespeare or Napoleon. There is no work of man's hands, no statue or painting, no oratorical achievement, in fine, nothing human, which is perfect. In every thing earthly may be found a flaw, and it is the instinct of fault-finders to alight upon that flow, and direct the attention of others to it. Their use in this world is to disenchant the mind of man of its proneness to idolatry, and its tendency to look for that perfection here which cannot be found short of Heaven. Nothing, in the economy of Nature or Providence, exists in vain. Thus, buzzards and fault finders all have their uses.It is chiefly in seasons of prosperity that a fault-finding disposition finds full scope for it energies. In times of great misfortune and real peril, men are less disposed to grumble than in the sunshine of good fortune. When real danger is at hand, the sky dark and the roar of the breakers audible, the clamor of the most complaining tongue gives place to silence, solicitude, and a hard struggle for life or death. When the tornado puts forth its wildest fury upon the ocean, the waves are pressed down to the smoothness of a mill pond, and not till it releases its grasp are they able to rise up again and free and fume. In like manner the pressure of some vast, impending peril hushes for a time the growling and grumblings of the most restless and discontented.--But it is only for a time. With a returning sense of security and success, there is leisure to criticise the very means by which that security and success have been achieved. The disposition of men and dogs is not as different as their physical conformation. Many a dos will keep perfectly quiet during a thunder storm, and as soon as it is over, come out an bark furiously at the slightest noise or the smallest provocation. Physicians consider irritability and querulousness a sign that the patient is convalescent. If that be true, the Southern Confederacy is out of all danger; for the disposition to "pitch in" to the physicians and nurses of the State, and the household generally, would seem to indicate that the crisis of the disease has passed, and that the body politic will soon be in a state of complete salubrity.
To declare that the new Southern Government has committed errors and blunders, that it is not perfect, immaculate and infallible, is simply to assert that it is human. We are no the apologists of any Government or any party. Undoubtedly this Government has sometimes "done things which it ought not to have done," and "left and one what it ought to have done" The best men in the world make that confession substantially every Sunday.--In the main, however, it has done well; as well, we think, as any other leader would have done under the same circumstances; better than there was any reason to expect; a good deal better than Lincoln, with all the money, means, and men of the North at his back. We feel confident therefore, that the Southern people in the late election for the Presidency and Vice Presidency have given, by a universal vote such a testimony of their approval of the leaders of their own choice, and thoroughly them, of the great military Captains to whom we are indebted for our safety, as will convince the whole world, both in the North and Europe that, however, we may inherit the grumbling propensities of our English ancestors, we are, nevertheless, a united people with no taint of Toryism or Unionism.--the same thing under a different name — in our views, and that reconstruction is as impossible as subjugation
We should be among the last to deprecate the very freest discussion of the merits and conduct of the Southern Administration. A wanton abuse or error ought to be exposit and assailed in the most vigorous and unsparing manner. But, at least for the present, lemere fault-finders forego their pet luxury Otherwise, the world will say of us that we are a peevish, fickle, discontented race, who will never be satisfied in any Government under Heaven; that we have just cast off Lincoln, and are now as anxious to be rid of Davis; that those who dissolved the old Union a year ago are getting ready to dissolve the now, and will are long be precipitated into remediless chaos and ruin. This has always been the prediction of open enemies abroad and of secret traitor and tories at home, who are stealthily fanning every spark of discontent in the vain hope of insuring the fulfilment of their malignant prophecies. Let us never forget that we cannot expect perfection in any human Government. Let us be thankful for the good we have; for the independence, the security, the renown, and for that grand and glorious future which must be our own if we are true to ourselves and our country.
