every crime can be justified by an example; where nothing exists of sufficient antiquity to render its destruction an object of dread, and nothing can be figured so new that men are afraid to engage in it? What resistance would manners afford which had already yielded to so many shocks? What could public opinion do, when twenty persons did not exist who were bound together by a common tie; when you, can no where meet with a man, a family, a body corporate, nor a class in society which could represent or act upon that opinion? When each citizen is equally impotent, equally poor, equally isolated, and can only oppose his individual weakness to the organized strength of the central Government? To figure any thing analogous to the despotism which then would be established amongst us, we would require not to recur to our own annals: we would be forced to recur to the monuments of antiquity to interrogate the frightful periods of Roman tyranny, where manners being corrupted, old recollections effaced, habits destroyed, opinions wavering, liberty deprived of its asylum under the laws, could no longer find a place of refuge; where no guarantee existing for the citizens, and they having none for themselves, men in power made a sport of their people, and princes wore out the clemency of heaven, rather than the patience of their subjects. They are blind indeed who look after such democratic equality for the monarchy of Henry IV., or Louis XIV. For my own part, when I reflect on the state to which many European nations have already arrived, and that to which others are fast tending, I am led to believe that soon there will be no place among them but for democratic equality, or the tyranny of the Cæsars."* It is not difficult to see of what nations this profound observer was thinking when he made these remarks, or which of the alternatives awaits in the end the European state which ventures on the perilous experi

ment.

And for decisive proof that, if North America has not yet sunk under the despotism which invariably succeeds democratic equality, it is because she has not yet arrived at the age when

the danger arises, we may refer to the contemporaneous instance of the fate of the southern states of that vast continent. We all remember the halcyon days of South American delusion; when Captain Hall captivated the world with the details of the regeneration of society to the south of the line, and fifty millions of British capital set out, trusting to the flood of prosperity which was to burst in upon the world with the exertions of these " healthy young Republics." Where are all

these delusions now? Where are the hopes that were formed, the capital that was advanced, the dividends that were expected, the visions that were afloat? Perhaps there is not to be found in the whole history of the world, an example of such a deplorable succession of calamities as have befallen these "healthy young Republics" from their democratic institutions. Revolutions in all the states have been so frequent since the authority of the Spaniards was finally subverted, that history will seek in vain to trace them but in characters of fire throughout the whole extent of the South American Continent. We are preparing materials for some papers on the results of democratic ascendency in these once splendid colonies, and a more woful and at the same time instructive spectacle never was exhibited to the world. Suffice it to say at present, that in all the Republics population and commerce have declined in most to a frightful degree; that the population of Potosi has sunk in twenty years from 150,000 to 12,000 inhabitants; that the mines are generally abandoned, and the supplies of silver for the world obtained merely by raking up the refuse of former and pacific workings; and that the most experienced travellers and observers concur in declaring that centuries of tranquillity and peace will not restore what twenty years of democratic violence have destroyed.

Spain, too, was for long the favourite theme of the revolutionary school; and unbounded were the anticipations of the blessings which were to flow from the regeneration of the Peninsula by democratic ascendency. We now see what has been the end of these things. Attend to the picture of

government. The foundation of such a system must be, that every one is to respect the rights of his neighbour as much as his own, which is only another way of stating the Christian precept, to love your neighbour as yourself. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the sole code which can bring man to perfection, even in the social affairs of this world, and ensure, without disturbance, the exercise of those reasonable privileges, which, assumed as the basis of our temporal constitution, are not less the foundation of our eternal felicity. Mere human wisdom and virtue leave a frightful void in this particular: the Gospel alone is capable of filling it up."

It is not thus, however, that our modern reformers and esprits forts reason. The great object of their efforts is to ridicule, weaken, and cast down religion; to establish equality of privileges on the ruins of the Church; to elevate mere intellectual cultivation upon a total neglect of moral virtues and religious precepts. Certainly the coalesced herd of Radicals, rakes, libertines, roués, Dissenters, and Papists, have no intention of establishing their Utopian democracy on the great basis of doing to others as they would they should do unto them. No men have a weaker sense of the distinction of meum et tuum; none pant more ardently after a general system of spoliation and injustice, provided only that they are to be the gainers, not the losers by it; none are more ardent in the pursuit of pleasure, none more unscrupulous in the means of attaining it. From such men and such principles, we say it fearlessly, nothing but social ruin, individual suffering, and national decline can be anticipated. Their very first position, the necessity, ante omnia, of destroying the Church, proves that they are either indifferent to, or ignorant of the only basis on which a general system of self-go. vernment, and the practical exercise of the powers of administration by the people must be founded. If in the complicated and artificial system of society in which we live, it is possible with safety to any class to establish a really practical Democracy, unquestionably the only foundation on which it can be rested, is, such a ge

neral influence of religion as can_enable the people to withstand the seductions of power, and keep the rapacity of indigence from laying its covetous hands on other men's goods. But to commence the work of regeneration by destroying religion; to begin the system of national self-government, by unloosing the bonds of individual self-control; to imagine that men, released from all restraint but their own desires, are to keep their covetous hands off each other, or their bloody weapons from mutual destruction, is certainly, of all human extravagances, the most monstrous.

The Republicans are aware of the absurdity of this expectation; but they have a panacea for this and all other political evils. Education is to unloose the Gordian knot: intellectual, mere intellectual cultivation is to eradicate all the vices of the human heart, and by preparing all men for the duties of self-government, render the sway of rulers unnecessary. This is perhaps the grossest delusion under which the nation has laboured for the last half century; and yet, if the subject be considered attentively, it is the one in which the sophism lies most completely on the surface. Education, that is, the conferring the power to read and write, has no tendency whatever to check crime: it neither disarms passion, nor checks desire: it confers power, but does not fix the direction which it is to take, or the objects to which it is to be applied. It is an instrument of vast force; but whether that force is to be exercised to good or bad purposes, depends entirely on the habits of the people to whom it is intrusted, and the desires in the public mind with which it coexists. It is generally considered as the deadliest foe of despotism, and the only bulwark of freedom; but this is a total mistake, and has generally spread only from the efforts of the press in this country having been hitherto chiefly on the side of freedom. But the examples of Imperial France proves that in other circumstances, and under the influence of different passions, it may become the most terrible instrument of Oriental bondage, and of Republican America the severest scourge of injured innocence.

The Devil, it has been well observed, was the great prototype of the perfection of intellect without virtue; and truly every day's experience demonstrates, that the mere cultivation of the intellectual faculty, without a proportionate care of moral and religious instruction, is only letting loose a legion of devils on the world.

The bubble of mere intellectual cultivation, however, like most of the other Whig bubbles, is rapidly bursting. Experience, that cold invidious monitor which drowns so many of their fantasies, has laid his chill grasp on this pernicious dogma; statistical details have demolished the dreams of human perfectibility. For forty years past the most indefatigable efforts have been made both by Government and private societies to promote education, in England, France, and Germany; and the result is precisely analogous to what revelation long ago declared, that wherever knowledge among the great body of mankind is made instrumental to diffusing that religion which was preached to the poor, it is productive of the most blessed effects; if it is for a time severed from this connexion, and made to rest on intellectual cultivation only, it becomes the grand and most prolific source of evil.

In France, we need not now tell our readers, an experiment has been made on a great scale for the last half century, of extending, as far as possible, intellectual cultivation, and at the same time depressing religion, so as to render it, in all but the rural parishes, practically speaking, a mere enfeebled relic of the olden time. Now attend to the result of this great experiment, upon the growth of crime, and the progress of human depravity, as evinced in the accurate and elaborate statistical tables of M. Guerry, a liberal writer, enamoured of popular education and democratic institutions, and who is in consequence utterly bewildered by the result of the returns which he himself has digested in so luminous an order. The result is thus given in his own words, which have been quoted with great candour by Mr

Bulwer in his France, or the Monarchy of the Middle Classes. "While crimes against the person are most frequent in Corsica, the provinces of the southcast, and Alsace, where the people are well instructed, there are the fewest of those crimes in Berry, Limousin, and Britanny, where the people are the most ignorant. And as for crimes against property, it is almost invariably those departments that are the best informed which are the most criminal— a fact which, if the tables be not altogether wrong, must show this to be certain, that if instruction do not increase crime, which may be a matter of dispute, there is no reason to believe that it diminishes it."

To illustrate this important statistical truth, M. Guerry has prepared maps of all the eighty-six departments of France, from which it distinctly appears, that wherever the number of educated persons is the greatest, there crime is most frequent, and that wherever it is the least, crime is most rare, and without any regard to the density of the population, the prevalence of manufactures, or almost any other cause. The tables on which these maps are founded, drawn from the laborious returns which the French Government have obtained from all the departments of their empire, are so important, and so utterly fatal to the whole school of mere intellect-cultivation, that we make no apology for transcribing them in a note for the information of our readers.† With truth does the liberal but candid Mr Bulwer add, "Mr Guerry bowls down at once all the ninepins with which late statistical writers had been amusing themselves, and again sets up many of the old notions, which, from their very antiquity, were out of vogue." ‡

In Great Britain, the whole experience of later times, since the education-mania has been systematically embraced by the Whig party, and largely acted upon by all classes of the people, goes to prove that the increase of crime, instead of having been diminished in consequence, has been greatly increased. The returns from two great penitentiaries, the Coldbathfields house of correction, and

Bulwer, i. 172.