When Cobden and the League were preaching free-trade, the agricultural mind could see in its ultimate issue, nothing but unmixed cause for despair :-agriculture would be ruined,-farms would be worth neither purchasing nor cultivating. This was said hundreds of times over by such men as Lord Ingestrie and Sir Charles Wetherall, and yet, since the settlement of the question by Sir Robert Peel, the former has been a large purchaser of land, and the latter while travelling for that very purpose, met with the melancholy accident which caused his death. For all we hear to the contrary, protectionist landlords are still receiving the rents that the six years of high prices, from 1808 to 1813 inclusive, made farmers willing to pay, and to maintain which, the corn bill of 1815, when prices had fallen to the average of the years from 1802 to 1807, and when rents should have done the same, was passed in a landlord's parliament. What such men dread, do in reality infuse into the constitution fresh vigour and life. They portend not national decay and death, but the reverse. The removal of one abuse, of one buttress behind which monopoly and class legislation have ignominiously skulked, is like stripping from the monarch of the forest the foul parasite by which his beauty is hidden and his strength devoured. From such operations, the constitution comes out with the elements of life in it more copious and active than they were before. It finds a wider base in the support and attachment of the people. It becomes more sympathetic with them,-it grows as they grow, and strengthens with their strength.

It is not true, then, that for us the future is more fraught with anxiety than hope. The theory is denied by fact. Commercially it is not the case. If we take even "Punch" as a test, we shall find that morally it is not so. There is a healthy progression in the mind of the people. They who assert otherwise, wrong the truth that, for eighteen hundred years, has been audible to men. Not only is it given to the poet, but to the student, and the workman, and the man of business, and the world, to

-"read the doom of distant time,

That man's regenerate scul from crime

Shall yet be drawn,

And reason, on his mortal clime,
Immortal dawn."

We rest our belief in England's progress, on the rise, and growth, and ultimate triumph of the principles of democracy within her. Of the fact itself, no one can have a doubt. Dr. Alison, the most laboured of modern historians, draws from it conclusions melancholy in the extreme. The more philosophical De Tocqueville sees not England alone, but all the nations of the earth, verging

towards a common and universal democracy, as surely as the tide of civilization and life is now rushing from east to west. It is not difficult to perceive why this should be so.

The fictions about unknown continents, by which our fathers were amused and deceived, have been for ever dispelled, by increased geographical knowledge. Almost every nook and corner on earth's surface has been explored and noted down. There are now no hordes of warriors to burst forth, like a volcano, scattering fire and death from the forts and fastnesses of Germany. There can be now no new revelation to proclaim to man a sublimer destiny than that which the Bible unfolds. We may conclude, then, that, with what of right there yet exists in the world, it will be left to our children to battle against the wrong. How that right has developed itself, and what direction its future developments bid fair to take, the reader will have already surmised.

They were a wonderful people,-those northern nations. They had conquered Varrus and his three legions,-they had contended with Cæsar, they had given the title of Germanicus to the first Roman of his age. Even now the Scandinavian longs for the voluptuous South, with its olive gardens and vineyards, with its blue sky and its unclouded sun, as did their fathers, as thicker and thicker they clustered, like bees, round the ill-fated walls of Rome. Those Saxons loved war even more intensely than their descendants do gold. Death for them had no terror. It but translated them

to the Walhalla, where met in triumph the godlike and the brave. The sketches given of them in Tacitus and Cæsar, show how indomitable was the war spirit they breathed. It is said that Ulphilas, who translated the Bible into the Mæso Gothic version, left out the "Kings," on account of the wars there enumerated. When Clovis heard of the sufferings of our Saviour,--how he was reviled, and unjustly condemned, and ignominiously slain,—he furiously exclaimed," Had I been present, at the head of my valiant Franks, I would have revenged his injuries." Yet, from the northern wall of China, there poured forth hordes of savages, before whom trembled Hermanric, who ruled from the Baltic to the Euxine, and his Goths. They were different in appearance from those with whom they came in contact. With broad shoulders, flat noses, small, black, sunken eyes, their presence excited unmixed disgust. They were compared to the mis-shapen figures, the Termini, with which the Romans were wont, not to adorn, but to encumber their bridges. An origin was assigned them, which rendered them objects of still greater disgust, and fear, and scorn. That they were the offspring of witches and fiends, born in the deserts of Scythia, was the tale which the Goths tremblingly, but readily, believed. Against this fresh eruption, the decaying strength of Rome could oppose but an ineffectual barrier. Soon they became as familiar with the walls of Rome, as they had been with those of

China. It was not long before they claimed the land of promise as their own. "Furious Frank and fiery Hun" divided the spoil between them. Every land that had rejoiced under the mild despotism of Augustus, became subject to their sway. They fused into one. They regenerated men whom luxury and civilization had emasculated. With them we got in Europe the NEW BLOOD.

But the great ruler of the world had fixed the hour of a yet more potent change. Through many an age, the Jews had testified the sovereignty and verity of their Jehovah. In the drama of the world's history, Palestine was now called to act an important part. From "the fair humanities of old religions," men's minds had become estranged, through the experience of their utter worthlessness. To those great questions relative to this world and the next, to which man's universal heart has ever sought to find a clue, they returned answers unmeaning, delusive, and vague. The masses of men, and more especially the educated and informed,

saw

"No God, no heaven, in the wide world,

The wide, grey, lampless, dark, unpeopled world."

Every where unbelief, shallow, sensual, withering, prevailed. At its voice,

"The oracles are dumb,

No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving;
No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell."

The Jews themselves had become dead to the great truths their religion embodied. They had sunk the substance in the letter,the spirit in the form. The Roman Augur was not more bereft of the inspiration of Deity than had become the Hebrew Levite. The temples were thrown down; the sacred fire had ceased to burn; the priests and worshippers were no more. Then came the NEW CREED: the truth which the Son of God preached with wondrous power, and sealed with a yet more wondrous death : the truth that came home to men's hearts, and rectified men's lives the truth that, linked with men of Teutonic blood, seemed at once miraculously to sway and regenerate the then known world, and whose banner, still associated with the same energetic race, flutters in every breeze, and floats on every sea. With these

commenced the concluding portion of the world's development. From this union has resulted an indomitable destiny. Against it no extent of territory, no swarming population, can stand. Witness in Europe the Sclavonic race, and China in the East. The old world had done its work. Greece fed and fired the human intellect. Government, social organization, law, came from Rome. A yet nobler mission pertained to the Jew. Wonderfully does each nation pass away when it has performed the part assigned it: and it seems the prelude to the great gathering in of the harvest of the earth, that half of Europe, all America, and Australia, are peopled by a race German in blood, and Christian in creed.

Among the nations, foremost for its Christian creed and German blood, is our own sea-girt home; and the former, asserting as it does man's equality, the nothingness of earthly distinctions, the common judgment awaiting the wronger and the wronged, the mighty and the mean,-sanctions and refines the democracy which had its birth beneath the forests of beech that bordered on the shores of the Baltic. Priestism may have frowned upon the common weal, may have identified itself with a class; but Christianity, properly understood and rightly applied, must of necessity have a contrary effect. Only the historian of a party, as Mr. Alison, we regret to say, certainly is, can assert that it is obnoxious to democracy: or, because "suffering is essential to the purification of the human heart," can for a moment defend the imperfection that more or less attaches to all present political arrangements. The clash of conservatism with the onward march of democracy is by no means to be deprecated as an ill. Humanity has shone brightest in the hour of its darkest struggles. It would require the most profound ignorance of history for a man to class the contest that gave the victories of Marathon and Salamis to the Greeks; that decided for ever the fate of Carthage; that roused up in the middle ages the lion-hearted followers of the crescent and the cross; that threw down the Bastile, and took a fearful, but a righteous, revenge for the wrongs of centuries: amongst the least illustrious annals that occupy and illustrate the annals of the world. By such struggles is the character of a nation strengthened and matured: by such struggles is the chaff winnowed away.

Such struggles we have had: such we may yet continue to have. With a debt of eight hundred millions, like a millstone around our neck; with a population increasing at the rate of one thousand a day; with six millions of Catholic Irish, ever ready to steep us in civil war; with large masses in our midst, degraded by ignorance, and vice, and want;—no man can have the hardihood to deny but that there may be breakers ahead. Rather from the elements of discord around us we may conclude that we shall have storms to weather, severe as any that have awakened the energy and heroism of our countrymen in days gone by. From the past we can best

discover the future. The historian acts in some degree the part of the prophet. There is order, and law, and unity in the world's development. Not by accident is modern history so rich in the possession of the new blood and creed, for want of which the glory of Athens, Corinth, and Rome, passed away as a dream of the night. Nor that England may perish does that new blood course through the veins, and that new creed fructify in the hearts of her sons. To the student of history it is given to read the beginning of the end; the final struggle of right with might; the defeat of the false; the triumph of the true. For that we are now preparing. With Tennyson we believe

"That through the ages an increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened by the circles of the suns."

We have now arrived at the close of our historical survey. Two acts seem to compose the drama of time. With ancient history closed the one; where the other shall terminate is alone known to Him "who sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and before whom the nations are as the small dust of the balance." The analogy that would lead us to talk of the youth, and manhood, and decay, of nations, as if they were men, is totally false. Decay has been the result, not of old age, against which no skill of the body politic could avail, but of causes, the results of which might have been foreseen and provided against. Peopled cities, it is true, have become solitary wastes; thrones and sceptres have mouldered into dust; the crowded streets of ancient capitals,-the busy haunts of man, where beauty thrilled, where riches dazzled, where luxury enslaved, where science taught, where idolatry debased, where rival factions armed and harangued, contended and won, are silent and deserted as the grave. But we see no reason to believe that in Paris will be renewed the fate of Palmyra, or that St. Paul's will remain, like the Colosseum, a melancholy memorial of the past. It is then to our democracy, of Christian creed and Saxon blood, that we look, as that which shall preserve England from decay. It is on the elevation of the people that compose a nation,-their growth in manly principles and deeds,-that our sole hope of its prosperity is based. In no other class of men than those forming the democracy of our land, do we see the elements of vigour and life. There have been, there still are, among our nobles, many who shed honour upon the coronets they wear; but our poets of most far-spread sympathies; our philosophers of widest grasp; our seamen of most indomitable energy; our scientific men of greatest skill: from the days of William Shakespeare to those of Elihu Burritt, have sprung from the people. Our steam-engines; our printing presses; our railways; our canals; our electric telegraphs: our cotton-mills; our manufactures; our works of art; our marble October, 1847.-VOL. L.-NO. CXCVIII.

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