hand, that no legislature, fairly chosen by free citizens, will make a bad general law. Specific laws they will make as bad as the occasion calls for; they will wink at corruption, they will sell incorporations, they will pass acts even like the one referred to above, of a mortgage stop law, if the interest of a majority among them require it; but it is to be observed, that the limitation of the effect of that law to mortgages already existing, is a proof that it was present relief it was contrived for; and that the makers of it saw, and recoiled from, the effect of making such a principle permanent. The existing mortgagors, they said, are caught— we will deal with them as we please, but we must be content with that, or we shall not catch any more. It may be for one man's interest that there should be an act passed to incorporate a certain bank, or for another's that some of his existing contracts should be nullified or impaired, and enough such interests may combine and logroll to do a little present mischief, but rarely any thing permanent. It is for no man's interest, not even for a thief's, that thievery should be encouraged by law, or fraud, or violence; and, therefore, our general legislation is good; and by means of juries, its execution is impartial. These are excellencies of our institutions, not benefits conferred by the men in whose hands we place their administration. For a legislature is not a cream rising on the surface of our population by a natural and healthy process; it is the secretion of a periodical disorder called an election, with which the body politic is affected, and which seems to be an indispensable condition of its existence. The wisdom, the civilization, and the true interests of the people are not largely represented there; but a set of men are brought together, usually less enlightened a good deal than the average of their constituents. Not less educated, but less enlightened; because they have had light in them, and had it turned to darkness by political sinuosities and burrowing, because they have sacrificed in the meannesses of vote-hunting the manliness which would have enabled them to sympathise with the real majority, and to know by intuition what acts would be really popular. They have joined in party war-cries which meant nothing; and won party badges, which were only a livery, till they have forgotten that there is in the nation a thinking mass, which thinking mass, reciprocally and culpably, on the day of election forgets and neglects them.

Whoever heard of a man in his senses defending the usury laws in conversation? Who knows even by what arguments their defenders, if any there be out of the legislature, seek to maintain them? Their effects, when made visible by public recourse to them, are atrocious; and when invisible, their hourly secret mischief

is incalculably great. The lender dreads them, and demands a premium for his fears; the borrower curses them and pays it; and the tender and careful legislator, who protects us all against the extortion of eight per cent., makes an exception for the poor wretch who takes his coat to the pawnbroker, and allows him on that condition to pay thirty. But this legislator has obtained his seat by unmeaning noise and stump speeches; he has talked about misers and usurers, and the griping hand of oppression squeezing out the life-blood of the industrious poor, till his brain has become callous in this spot, and incapable of apprehending a new idea. He really believes the usury law is popular, and he never looks to see if it is ever appealed to, or, if it is, by whom, and what the public voice has said to the appeal.

In this instance this voice has been distinct and somewhat ef fective. The defendants in the suit in question have heard it, and have attempted to reply to it; and they say they plead usury merely to stave off temporarily an insisting creditor, and avoid making an assignment; intending in any event to pay him his dividend from their estate with the rest, but not choosing to pay him in full to the injury of the rest.

We shall not discuss these points; we have to do only with the law and its effects on society, and not with any body's personal character. The view taken of the morality of the case by these defendants themselves is a severe satire on the legislation which offers a premium to dishonesty; to use the law for the purpose for which it was made, they think evidently, as we do, would be down. right swindling.

The Judge charged the Jury that the law was with the defendants; and the Jury, notwithstanding, found a verdict for the plaintiffs. So would any Jury in this city or this state; for nothing short of an express enactment by law, that bills of exchange are money, could make it usury to sell them dear on credit. And such a law would equally make it usury to buy them cheap for cash; and in order to determine when they were dear or cheap, the law must also furnish a criterion to determine their actual value. A bill in England at sixty days for a hundred pounds is money, but how much money is it? Must it only be sold at par? We think even Albany legislation will not go quite that length. May it be sold at the current rate? But there is a current rate for credit and a current rate for cash, neither of which can ever be fixed exactly. And if you buy at the cash rate and pay cash, you expose yourself, for an error of half per cent., to an action for usury-a bill in chancery calling on you to surrender up the bill of exchange you have paid for, or its proceeds. Such procedure would be infamous, and make the law

so which made it possible; and, on the other hand, the abstinence by common consent from procedure under the laws as they now are, while it dilutes their infamy a little with contempt for their impotence, makes them no way less shameful to our statute book.

But Albany, as we have already said, is no Areopagus of collective wisdom; it is a sort of city of refuge for the people who talk, who can be best spared from among those who have something to do. Here and there you find an instance of a good man who sa crifices himself, and whose sacrifice is accepted; his best friends probably vote against him, and do what they can to deter him; but he is mounted on his public spirit, and, like another Curtius, plunges into the gulf, but all in vain. He gathers round him, as well as he can, the better class of those among whom he is thrown; but they are too often a minority, and their voices are lost in the clamor of a many-tongued majority. There is to be heard the shrill pipe of the unfledged lawyer, a scrub Demosthenes, practising to the waves of faction. There is the patientless physician, bestowing on the public the years so useless to himself, and the skill he has in vain endeavored to recommend to individuals. There is the broken-down adventurer of any class, whom politics, as a lowest deep, have received; he has failed in all other pursuits in this land where success waits on merit, and he comes with the recommendation of talents misapplied, of not having been faithful in the few things, and seeking to be lord over many.

Verily the apex of our pyramid is downward, our house stands upon its head. The man whom society drops, falls into the legislature, and rebounds, peradventure, to Congress, abasing himself most literally and most basely, to be exalted. There are other paths to distinction, honorable ones, but few there be that find them; there is one broad one, leading downwards, and many there be that go in thereat.

These are sad views of our public servants, but through them we see consolation. Honesty, common sense, and the spirit of progress are so decidedly predominant in our land, that even our rulers are not altogether deficient in them; they will not go wrong for wrong's sake, though often they will for a private inducement. But a republic makes us all one class, on most points all our interests are the same; and therefore it is that the life, liberty, and possession of property, which our admirable institutions promise to us, are assured and preserved through the agency of such instruments as are furnished us by elections.

How much better, in many minor details, we might be governed than we are, these usury laws may serve to show. How desirable it is that men of education and high standing should come forward

actively in political contests, that they should themselves be candidates for office, and serve the public when it will let them, we feel most deeply. When such men are candidates, they usually succeed; unless, indeed, they trust too proudly to their merits, and neglect the means of making them known. The fault is generally in the individuals, and rarely in the public; and of that vast mass among us, whom the stir of an election never disturbs, who never use their privilege or discharge their duty of voting, the greater part refrain because they know nothing about the candidates on either side, or because, if they know them, they see no very great reason for personal preference.

We want in our elections a certain earnestness, which is supplied in the English ones by the presence of the candidate on the hustings. He is brought into communication with his constituents, he is made to submit to tests and to give pledges. Will you vote, he might be asked, for the repeal of the usury laws, for the repeal of the Restriction act? Will you move it, or seek to effect it? If we could get at our men in this way, more of us would go to the polls. It would be pro tanto like going ourselves to Albany, and it would carry out one step further the principle of our institutions, which say to our rulers in the name of the people, what somebody has coined into immortal doggrel

SIR FRANCIS WILLOUGHBY attempted the first settlement in Charlestown adjoining the old ferry. Afterward Martha Gardner became heir to part of the same estate. What inhabitant of that region, who has passed the meridian of life, cannot remember Martha Gardner? What man or woman of sixty has not bought sweetmeats, nuts, and apples at the shop of Martha Gardner, at her little mansion measuring ten feet by twelve, which during her life was a frontier cottage between Boston and Charlestown, on the Charlestown shore, near the old ferry-way? Those who remember Martha, and recollect how silent, modest, industrious, and unassuming she was,

will think it impossible that any thing interesting can grow out of her history. Yet one incident in her long life merits solemn reflection; though it may appear to many an idle legend, yet it is not so, for the footstep of time hath already left an indelible track; and Martha Gardner, although long since in her grave, still speaks, trumpet-tongued, from her venerable ashes.

Previous to the American Revolution Martha Gardner lived in Charlestown. Her family name was Bunker, whence came Bunker hill. On the seventeenth day of June, she saw her little mansion given to the flames, and herself, houseless, destitute, and an exile from her Eden. After the war, she returned, and erected her small cottage on the border of the beautiful river; and there she lived, and there she died in 1809.

In 1785 Charles River Bridge, the greatest enterprise of that day, was erected, near the door of Martha Gardner, on the Charlestown shore. The wealthy proprietors soon began to fancy that a valuable part of the estate of Martha Gardner was their corporate property; and Martha was compelled either to resign her title, or engage in a lawsuit with the richest corporation in New England. Her distress may be imagined; a poor widow, recently flying from the flames of her dwelling, hardly reinstated in the common comforts of life, already bending with age, and now forced to contend with powerful claimants for a part of the small estate of which unluckily all the deeds and documents were (as she supposed) burnt during the general conflagration of Charlestown.

A lawsuit has different aspects to different persons. To some a lawsuit is a holiday; to others it gives the heart-ache. To some the agitation of a lawsuit is but the lullaby of a sea breeze. So the French officer thought, who, during a tedious peace, contrived to be involved in a hundred lawsuits. When he was summoned before Louis 15th as a public nuisance, the king ordered him to drop them all; but he, falling on his knees, entreated that he might retain half a dozen of them for his diversion, otherwise he should die with languor during the long peace. But not so Lord Chancellor Eldon; when his steward complained to him of a trespasser, he asked if he had stolen an acre of land. "Why no, sir." "Then wait till he does." Nor did Erskine see any amusement in a lawsuit. Ellenborough once suggested to him that his client could have a better remedy in the Court of Chancery. At the name of the Court of Chancery, Erskine, wiping away a tear, and looking the Chief Justice in the face, said, in a supplicating tone, “ Has your Lordship the heart to send a fellow-being to the Court of Chancery ?"

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But let us pause a moment to contemplate Martha Gardner.