not tell them, wherever an Englishman might travel, shame would stick to him he would disown his country? You would exclaim: England! proud of your wealth, and arrogant in the possession of power, blush for these distinctions, which become the vehicles of your dishonor! Such a nation might truly say to corruption, thou art my father, and to the worm, thou art my mother and my sister. We should say of such a race of men, their name is a heavier burden than their debt.

THE STABILITY OF OUR GOVERNMENT.-C. Sprague.

If there be on the earth one nation more than another whose institutions must draw their life-blood from the individual purity of its citizens, that nation is our own. Rulers by divine right, and nobles by hereditary succession, may, perhaps, tolerate with impunity those depraving indulgences which keep the great mass abject. Where the many enjoy little or no power, it were a trick of policy to wink at those enervating vices which would rob them of both the ability and the inclination to enjoy it. But, in our country, where almost every man, however humble, bears to the omnipotent ballot-box his full portion of the sovereignty, where, at regular periods, the ministers of authority, who went forth to rule, return to be ruled, and lay down their dignities at the feet of the monarch multitude, where, in short, public sentiment is the absolute lever that moves the political world, the purity of the people is the rock of political safety.

We may boast, if we please, of our exalted privileges, and fondly imagine that they will be eternal; but, whenever those vices shall abound which undeniably tend to debasement, steeping the poor and ignorant still lower in poverty and ignorance, and thereby destroying that wholesome mental equality which can alone sustain a self-ruled people, it will be found, by woful experience, that our happy system of government, the best ever devised for the intelligent and good, is, the very worst to be intrusted to the degraded and vicious. The great majority will then truly become a manyheaded monster, to be tamed and led at will. The tremendous

power of suffrage, like the strength of the eyeless Nazarite, so far from being their protection, will but serve to pull down upon their heads the temple their ancestors reared for them. Caballers and demagogues will find it an easy task to delude those who have deluded themselves; and the freedom of the people will finally be buried in the grave of their virtues. National greatness may survive; splendid talents and brilliant victories may fling their delusive lustre abroad; these can illumine the darkness that hangs round the throne of a despot, but their light will be like the baleful flame that hovers over decaying mortality, and tells of the corruption that festers beneath. The immortal spirit will have gone; and along our shores, and among our hills, those shores made sacred by the sepulchre of the pilgrim, those hills hallowed by the uncoffined bones of the patriot, even there, in the ears of their degenerate descendants, shall ring the last knell of departed Liberty!

THE AMERICAN UNION.-E. Everett.

It would be an unprofitable consumption of time to attempt to point out the innumerable ways in which the Union has auspiciously influenced the destinies of the country. Could any doubt arise on this point, it ought to be removed by a glance at the disastrous effects of discord among the republics of ancient Greece; among the Italian cities in the middle ages, or even at the present day, when we behold that lovely region, once the garden of Europe and the mistress of the world, by the sole want of a comprehensive nationality, lying at the mercy of foreign foes, and, what is worse, of foreign friends; or at more than one of the groups of states which have been carved out of the colonial dominions of Spain, in the southern portions of this continent. These are all so many warning examples of the disastrous effects of a want of union among kindred states; like discordant brothers, in danger of being led into fiercer warfare by those very circumstances of common language and origin, which, under a well-adjusted central power, would form the natural cement of the union.

It was the great happiness of the American people, that they followed the counsels of their patriotic and thoughtful leaders. In the midst of a wholesome jealousy in favor of local rights (which they carefully secured), and in opposition to some strong centrif ugal tendencies, they had the discernment to perceive the advantages of a common bond, and followed with steadiness that line of policy which gave us our constitution. Nor have the conditions of our well-being, as it seems to me, been at all changed in the course of seventy-five years. What was matter of prospective prudence on the morning of the Revolution, is matter of experi enced wisdom now. The same patriotic instinct (if I

may adhere to that language) which brought the men of Massachusetts and Connecticut, of New Hampshire and Rhode Island, side by side, to the summit of Bunker Hill, and mingled their blood on that day, has, at every subsequent period of our national existence, cried out not less loudly for the preservation of the Union.

There is one view of this subject of so much importance, that I cannot forbear to present it more particularly to your consideration. Among the great ideas of the age, we are authorized in reckoning a growing sentiment in favor of peace. An impression is unquestionably gaining strength in the world, that public war is no less reproachful to our Christian civilization than the private wars of the feudal chiefs in the middle ages. The hope of adjusting national controversies by some system of friendly arbitration -a hope which philanthropic minds have distrustfully cherished in other periods - has of late been openly avowed by men of a more practical class, by men conversant with the policy of the world, and fresh from its struggles. The last year witnessed the assembling of a peace convention, of a very imposing character, at Paris; a similar one is about to be held at Frankfort-on-the-Main. Delegates from this country are on the way to join it. A congress of nations begins to be regarded as a practicable measure. Statesmen, and orators, and philanthropists, are flattering themselves that the countries of Europe, which have existed as independent sovereignties for a thousand years, and have never united in one movement since the crusades, may be brought into some commu

nity of action for this end. They are calling conventions and digesting projects, by which governments the most diverse, empires, kingdoms, and republics, inhabited by different races of men, — tribes of Sclavonian, Teutonic, Latin and mixed descent; speaking different languages, believing different creeds, -Greeks, Catholics and Protestants, men who are scarcely willing to live on the same earth with each other, or go to the same heaven, can yet be made to agree in some great plan of common umpirage. If, while these sanguine projects are pursued, while we are thinking it worth while to compass sea and land in the expectation of bringing these jarring nationalities into some kind of union, in order to put a stop to war; if, I say, at this juncture, the people of these thirty United States, most of which are of the average size of a European kingdom, — destined, if they remain a century longer at peace with each other, to equal in numbers the entire population of Europe, states which, drawn together by a general identity of descent, language and faith, have not so much formed as grown up into a national confederation, possessing, in its central legislature, executive and judiciary, an efficient tribunal for the arbitration and decision of public controversies; an actual peace congress, clothed with all the powers of a common constitution and law, and with a jurisdiction extending to the individual citizen (which this projected congress of nations does not even hope to exercise), if, while they grasp at this shadow of a congress of nations, the people of these states let go of-nay, break up and scatter to the winds this substantial Union, this real peace congress, which for sixty years has kept the country, with all its conflicting elements, in a state of prosperity never before equalled in the world, — the admiration and the envy of mankind, — they will commit a folly for which the language we speak has no name; against which, if we rational beings should fail to protest, the dumb stones of yonder monument would immediately cry out in condemnation!

Friends and fellow-citizens! we live at an eventful period. Mighty changes in human affairs are of daily occurrence, at home and abroad. In Europe, the strongest governments are shaken;

the pillars of tradition, rooted in the depths of antiquity, are heaved from their basis; and that fearful war of opinion, so long foretold, is raging, with various fortune, from Lisbon to Archangel. Have you not noticed that in the midst of the perplexity and dismay, of the visions and the hopes, of the crisis, the thoughts of men have been turned more and more to what has passed and what is passing in America? They are looking anxiously to us for lessons of practical freedom, for the solution of that great mystery of state, that the strongest government is that which, with the least array of force, is deepest seated in the welfare and affections of the people. The friends of republican government in France, taunted with the impossibility of making such a government efficient and respectable, point to our example as the sufficient answer. Austria, breaking down beneath the burden of her warring races, offers them too late a federal constitution modelled on our own; and even in England, from which the original elements of our free institutions were derived, scarce a debate arises in Parliament, on an important question, without reference to the experience of the United States. The constitutional worship of mankind is reversed ; they turn their faces to the west. Happy for them, happy for us, should they behold naught in this country to disappoint the hopes of progress, to discourage the friends of freedom, to strengthen the arm of the oppressor; and may God grant that those who look to us for guidance and encouragement may be able to transplant the germs of constitutional liberty to the ancient gardens of the earth, that the clouds which now darken the horizon of Europe may clear away, and the long-deferred hopes of the friends of freedom be fulfilled!

But chiefly let us trust that the principles of our fathers may more and more prevail throughout our beloved country. We have erected a noble monument to their memory; but we shall not have performed all our duty, unless we catch ourselves some portion of their spirit. O! that the contemplation of their bright example and pure fame might elevate our minds above the selfish passions, the fierce contentions, and the dark forebodings, of the day! We need the spirit of '75 to guide us safely amidst the dizzy activities