October 10, 1861 — Scoundrels
We are mortified beyond expression to remark that there are men in the South who, in this war of independence, find the dictates of selfish interest stronger than that of patriotism, to a degree which is only not criminal in the popular understanding because there is no law that makes it amenable to criminal statute. — The Richmond papers state that certain persons have secured in advance the product of a number of mills which the government chiefly relied on for furnishing the cloth for the manufacture of winter clothing for our soldiers at the Confederate factory in that city, and now hold their bargains, demanding an exorbitant profit on the prices of fabrics.
If there is no law to punish such offense, it is simply because law makers never contemplated that human nature would assume so degraded a phase. The act — whether committed by native southerners, or merely men in the South, we know not — is worthy the Yankee contractors who are remorselessly sucking the lifeblood of the Lincoln administration, and to sympathetic fellowship with whom they should be dispatched without delay. Their offense of preying on the necessities of the government is only a more magnificent phase of that of less pretentious scoundrels at many points in the South, who pocket exultingly the vile profits accruing front preying on the necessities of the people.
These small change plunderers and traitors to the spirit of patriotism which they affect, recreants to morality and standing disgracers of the country of which they are or must soon become citizens or leave, are every where practising their petty pillage upon soldiers and absent soldiers’ wires and children, and upon all; securing monopolies of necessaries in local markets that they may exact exorbitant profits; playing into each other’s hands that they may force, necessary articles up to fictitious ruination which will enable them to make a cent per cent, depreciating the credit of our patriot government by shaving its currency; and practicing all the unhallowed tricks of trade and finance which will enable them to wring a few more cents from the ill-provided purses of the needy.
We have no patience to discuss the turpitude of the creatures who coin the necessities of the people into profits for themselves; who give a dollar to a volunteer aid society while they extort an hundred from the people: who, in those fearful times, guage their profit on merchandise not by the cost, but by the necessity which compels tho people to have it; who unblushingly continue their practices simply because there is no law to inhibit; who dare to walk out before their fellow-man and in the blessed sunlight of heaven without a trembling terror that a bolt will fall from the just arm of the Ruler of its azure heights to punish their iniquity as it exists before Him, their country and their fellows. Judas sold the Lord of Heaven for a price, and it is strange that there should be other Judases to sell their own worthless selves to Satan for a price? Let them go to their purchaser. — Mobile Register.
Arkansas True Democrat, Little Rock, AR
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