able, complete, and candid treatise on the government of the United States. The author is of republican opinions, and he has said, "that having been bred in the midst of revolutions and counter-revolutions, despotisms, restorations, and all the miseries of insecurity, political and personal, he was the better able to view the worst that passes in America with calmness."Quarterly Review, No. 113.

I have dispensed with the aid which might perhaps have been derived from the narratives of several clever and amusing travellers, whose opinions some at least might have been disposed to call in question, as prejudiced against the United States, preferring the testimony of such as have visited America with impressions favourable to its democratic institutions. The works of respectable English travellers are of course good evidence of matters of fact coming under their own observation.

Some untravelled Englishmen, judging of other countries by flattering report, and of their own by sober experience, and having had to encounter the ills that are common to humanity, and which necessarily exist, (especially during periods of distress) in our own populous commercial nation, are desirous that England should be transformed into something very different from what she has been heretofore. They do not deny that we have rather more liberty than the Russians, the Turks, or the Chinese; but the measure of freedom we enjoy as the happy result of the monarchical, aristocratic, and popular principles, which are duly tempered and harmoniously blended in the British constitution, does not satisfy them. They long for the purer liberty of a pure democracy; and the country from which they draw their favourite arguments and most persuasive illustrations, is the United States of America.

That republican America has hitherto greatly prospered cannot be denied. But because democracy and prosperity have coexisted in the United States, it does not necessarily follow that democracy was either the sole or the principal cause of that prosperity;-far less does it follow that democracy would be the cause of greater prosperity to England, than she enjoys under her limited monarchy. There are politicians who have but one theory for all circumstances, and who would have all nations to adopt their favourite form of government. But government is a science eminently practical, and it were a most unreasonable opinion that, because the constitution of the United States may be suitable for them, it must also be proper for England, the circumstances of the two countries being widely different.

America is far separated by her geographical position from the kingdoms of Europe, and rarely need she involve herself in European alliances or hostilities. Contented with her own immense resources, she may prosper, undisturbed by the troubles and the conflicts which agitate the old world. As regards foreign powers, a neutral and defensive attitude is the natural and wise policy which was recommended to her by the great Washington, and which her best statesmen have endeavoured to maintain. That admirable man, in his farewell address to his countrymen on retiring from public life, exhorted them to be impartial and neutral with respect to the nations of Europe, to have as little connexion as possible with them. "Why," says he, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humour, or caprice ?" If the Americans ever again involve themselves in European warfare, it will be in spite of a geographical position the most favourable to peace. The immense extent of their cultivated and uncultivated territory is not less conducive to internal tranquillity.

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Numbers of native Americans, with a spirit of restless enterprise, are continually forming new settlements in the wilderness, and clearing away the forest where the savage lately pursued his game. The first cultivators reap the rich produce of a virgin soil, probably soon leave their farms to others, and penetrate yet farther into the desert in quest of new possessions. At the first approach of civilized man, the herds of wild animals, on which the Indians subsist, retire into deeper solitudes, and their Indian hunters must follow them. They part with a portion of their territory to the federal government, or to one of the states, for an almost nominal price. The land speculators occupy it, and thus the boundary of civilization is constantly encroaching on that of savage life. The power of these savages has been broken by the wars in which they have been provoked to engage, and which have generally terminated in their extirpation or banishment to a more distant part of the great forest. Their deserted territory is then added to the United States. Thus, as the Indians have said, with melancholy truth, "the red man melts away like snow, and the white man's for ever does not last long enough."* In proportion to its

"There chanced to be on board this boat, in addition to the usual dreary crowd of passengers, one Pitchlynn, a chief of the Choctaw tribe of Indians, who sent in his card to me, and with whom I had the pleasure of a long conversation. He was dressed in our ordinary every-day costume, which hung about his fine figure loosely, and with indifferent grace. On my telling him that I regretted not to see him in his own attire, he threw up his right arm for a moment, as though he were brandishing some heavy weapon, and answered, as he let it fall again, that his race were losing many things beside their dress, and would soon be seen upon the earth no more; but he wore it at home, he added, proudly.

"He told me that he had been away from his home, west

population, no other country has so great resources and so extensive a territory as America. It has a moveable frontier of indefinite extent. In Massachusetts, the most populous part of the union, the number of inhabitants in 1837 was only eighty-four to a square mile, or not one third of the general rate of population throughout England and Wales. In other parts of the United States the population is far more widely scattered. It has increased however with wonderful rapidity. In the year 1643, the number of settlers in New England was twenty-one thousand two hundred: a century afterwards they had increased to half a million; and now, at the distance of two centuries, the population of the United States is seventeen millions, and of late has doubled itself in about twenty-five years.

The English law of inheritance, which gives the paternal estate to the eldest son, was soon set aside in the United States. When an American dies without a will, his property goes to his heirs in a direct line. If there are several heirs of the same degree, they inherit equally. If there is one only, that heir or heiress succeeds to the whole. In the state of Vermont the male

of the Mississippi, seventeen months: and was now returning. He had been chiefly at Washington on some negociations pending between his tribe and the government: which were not settled yet (he said in a melancholy way), and he feared never would be: for what could a few poor Indians do against such well-skilled men of business as the whites? There were but twenty thousand of the Choctaws left, he said, and their number was decreasing every day. A few of his brother chiefs had been obliged to become civilised, and to make themselves acquainted with what the whites knew, for it was their only chance of existence. But they were not many; and the rest were as they always had been. He dwelt on this, and said several times that unless they tried to assimilate themselves to their conquerors, they must be swept away before the strides of civilised society."-DICKENS's American Notes.

heir is entitled to a double portion. But an American has full power to dispose of his property by will as he pleases, and most of the states allow entails under certain restrictions.

The destination of estates to a long series of heirs by strict entail, as in Scotland, is an unnatural and undue restraint unfavourable to national prosperity. The English system might possibly be improved, but on the whole, the legal and customary transmission of estates from father to son, without minute and perpetual subdivision, works well and in harmony with our institutions. The heir to the estate uses his influence to promote the success of his younger brothers, and all, from family attachment and mutual interests, are generally inclined to aid each other.

The abolition of the law of primogeniture leads to the multiplication of petty landholders. In France the law obliges the testator to divide his property among his heirs in equal, or nearly equal, proportions. Now, from Mr. McGregor's valuable Report respecting French Commerce, which has lately been published under the sanction of our Board of Trade, it appears that there are no less than ten millions nine hundred thousand landed proprietors in France, being nearly one third of the whole population. This parcelling out of the soil among a multitude of petty proprietors is a great impediment not only to agricultural but also to commercial improvement, and it is one great cause of the injurious illiberality of the French tariff.

In the United States the evils which result from the excessive subdivision of the land have not yet been seriously felt, for there the law does not compel the testator, as in France, to subdivide his property; and land is so easily obtained, that the father's estate generally goes to the eldest son, while the other sons betake themselves to the wilderness.