The necessity of Production.
--The high prices of every article of food and clothing, with a constant tendency upward, indicates to us the greatest danger of the Confederacy at the present moment. There are many sacrifices which men can make, and which a great majority of the people of this country have made, for the defence of their liberties. They can dispense with the luxuries and superfluities of life — they can give life itself for the cause of independence — but while life remains there are certain essentials which it can only surrender at the cost of extermination. In the first place the army itself must be supplied with bread and clothing, and if there were no other mouths in the country to feed, none others to be kept from nakedness, the supply of this portion of the population alone would require that the producing power of the country be carefully husbanded, and its industrial capacities developed, instead of diminished. But, besides the army, there are millions of women and children whose wants must be provided for, and who are in serious danger of suffering if the regular operations of the fields and workshops are interrupted by calling off old men and youths — incapable at best of efficient military service — from duties which they are capable of performing, and which are as essential to the welfare of the country and the success of military operations as the use of the musket and the cannon by those in the field.Already we are beginning to feel the want of labor in those mechanical and manufacturing employments which are indispensable not only to comfort, but to existence. Every day lost by the withdrawal of operatives from factories involves a deficiency of a vast amount of fabrics necessary to the use and comfort of man, and for the supply of which we can no longer look to foreign countries. What are the people to do this winter for clothing, food, fuel, and other articles of prime necessity, if, in addition to the sufferings resulting from extortion, the few producers who are left be turned into consumers, thereby diminishing the scanty means of supply and increasing a demand which already taxes to the utmost our labor and industrial skill? We have already in the field an army large enough and brave enough to encounter and defeat our foes, and, if the present laws of Congress be faithfully executed, we do not require another man. The Northern draft is now admitted to be a failure, and our most pressing danger is the immense privation and suffering which our own people must endure if the producing power of the country be any further diminished.
This subject deserves the serious consideration of our public men. Organizations for home defence are one thing, and an important thing, but a levy, en masse of the population is at this time about as suicidal a piece of policy as the Yankees themselves could desire us to perpetrate. In noting down an amendment to the militia bill which proposed to require the same service from legislators that they demand from boys of sixteen and old men of fifty-five, legislators here expressed the opinion that there ought to be some exemptions from the service they require, and they will pardon a suffering community for believing that there are other classes — agriculturists, manufacturers, and artisans — whose producing capacity is quite as important to the general welfare as the exemption from draft of the members of the General Assembly.
