chosen to look to other conservative principles. Our allegiance is sworn to a Mistress of higher than regal lineage, and more than Queenly beauty;-whose cheek reveals the dawn, that many martyrs have died to hasten ;-whose adorning jewels, are the tears of the oppressed, worn in remembrance of a day of liberation. To assert that allegiance, these States would rise, we firmly believe, against the World!-With this declaration of political faith, and the assurance, that no allusion will be had to any individual, or party, we hope to be indulged in the utmost freedom of remark.

With no constitutional superiors; responsible only to magistrates of their own choosing; being the fountains of power, and the dispensers of office, and therefore flattered by the venal, as all-wise, allgood; is there no danger lest the People become heady? aspire to dictate in things they can not understand? mistake lawlessness for freedom, and licentiousness for liberty?—Whence proceed the outbreakings of popular violence through the land-Whence comes the fierce, the deepening clamor for the People's right,—namely, men whose skill is with the plowshare, and the workman's hammer, -to instruct their legislators,-to govern, like automatons, those whom they have selected, or ought to have selected, for their integrity and wisdom, and whose decisions common sense would leave to judgment and conscience, enlightened by debate?

Many of our faults, much of our danger, are chargeable on a reckless Press. No institutions, or principles, are spared its empiric handling. The most sacred axioms of jurisprudence, the most unblemished public characters, the vital points of constitutional policy and safety, are dragged into discussion, and exposed to scorn, by presumptuous scribblers, from end to end of the nation, simply because bread is a necessary of life to them, and politics to the people. Made masters, as they imagine, of the gravest interests by these shallow and mischievous disquisitions, some become puffed up with a dangerous conceit of their own intelligence;-others, misled, by falsities, err with right intentions;—and thousands corrupted by the abuse heaped, in turn, on all men and all measures, lose their belief in political virtue, and cease to reverence any thing.

So torpid in our moral sense, and so short-sighted our policy, that, from trivial motives, we patronize public prints, whose conductors we believe, and admit, to be profligate; we help to diffuse their pestilential matter through the land, and then murmur, and tremble, at the plague-spots which break out upon the people. No

other nation has passed in so short a time from the use, to the abuse, of this tremendous engine.

The standard of national taste and acquirement is thus exposed to depreciation. Men lose their intellectual ardor, their sensibility to glory; they are paralyzed by an atmosphere whose influence they can not resist, and will not yield to,-in which laurels wither, and garlands fade.-Look around and look back: compare the public men of our later, with those of our earlier day; and be yourselves the judges. Number the illustrious heads whom you would now bow down to with irresistible respect. Where are they?-Whom do we trust or reverence?-Where is our cohort of civic wisdom? where is the solitary example of unslandered patriotism?-Yet with our physical increase, extending fame, and independent rank, one would suppose motives might be found, inspiring enough to carry us onward in intellectual and moral glory.

The passion for office, and the parties which it combines and inspires, fills the country with disquiet, the villages with dissension, the cities with violence; it troubles our hearts with bitterness, our firesides with disputes, and the universal atmosphere with conflicting falsehoods. It frightfully expedites that corruption, which all history teaches to be sufficiently inseparable from a nation's growing wealth. It engenders heart-burnings in these States, whose smothered embers will break out in future mischief. It has struck alarm into the hearts of the most sagacious statesmen, and drawn from them bodings which ought to sink deeply into ours.

Politics and the Love of Money control our hearts, and direct our energies, with an exclusiveness not elsewhere found. In Greece, literary and intellectual distinction, in Rome, military glory, in Europe, political privileges and noble blood, left mere wealth a secondary title to consideration. Here, there is nothing to refine, nothing to limit, its injurious influence. This is our other Demon. He is an arrogant, yet a base spirit. In his need,-he boweth,-he subserveth, he waiteth to take advantage,-he speaketh double meanings, -he hath a covetous eye upon his neighbor,-he pincheth,-he hoardeth. Over the wheels of his splendor, he crieth to Learning, to Genius, to Philanthropy:-'What have ye been about all your days, unfortunate foot passengers ?'-Precluded, as we are, from founding families, the desire is aggravated to accumulate rapidly while there is a span of life to enjoy: possessing no touchstone of rank, all imagine, that wealth will admit them, especially in the cities, to upper seats, and they are impatient to occupy. But alas!

no sooner are we transferred from dust, toil, and parsimony to the far-off and brilliant firmament of Fashion, than cruel apprehensions assail us, lest our stellary position should lose its luster by fresh intruders from our native sphere!

CORRECTIVE FORCE OF LITERATURE.

But how can this excess be reclaimed? To whom shall it be resigned? What force can now unclench the giant grasp of the People?-The young Titan has risen up, and shaken his 'invincible locks,' and proved his surpassing strength.-Though he can not be deprived of his power, may not his eyes be enlightened, his heart be refined, his purposes and aims made beneficient and wise? Therein lies our hope!—And in casting about for the means of opposing the sensual, selfish, and mercenary tendencies of our nature, (the real Hydra of free institutions), and of so elevating man, as to render it not chimerical to expect from him the safe ordering of his steps, no mere human agency can be compared with the resources laid up in the great TREASURE-HOUSE OF LITERATURE.-There, is collected the accumulated experience of ages,-the volumes of the historian, like lamps, to guide our feet-there stand the heroic patterns of courage, magnanimity, and self-denying virtue:-there, are embodied the gentler attributes, which soften and purify, while they charm, the heart-there lie the charts of those who have explored the deeps and shallows of the soul:-there, the dear-bought testimony, which reveals to us the ends of the earth, and shows, that the girdle of the waters is nothing but their Maker's will:there stands the Poet's harp, of mighty compass, and many strings: -there hang the deep-toned instruments through which patriot eloquence has poured its inspiring echoes over oppressed nations:there, in the sanctity of their own self-emitted light, repose the Heavenly Oracles. This glorious fane, vast, and full of wonders, has been reared and stored by the labors of Lettered Men; and could it be destroyed, mankind might relapse to the state of savages.

MOTIVES AND OBJECTS FOR YOUNG MEN OF WEALTH AND LEISURE.

A restless, discontented, aspiring, immortal principle, placed in a material form, whose clamorous appetites, bitter pains, and final languishing and decay, are perpetually at war with the peace and innocence of the spiritual occupant; and have, moreover, power to jeopard its lasting welfare; is the mysterious combination of Human Nature? To employ the never-resting faculty; to turn off its desires from the dangerous illusions of the senses to the ennobling

enjoyments of the mind; to place before the high-reaching principle, objects that will excite, and reward, its efforts, and, at the same time, not unfit a thing immortal for the probabilities, that await it when time shall be no more;-these are the legitimate aims of a perfect education.

Left to the scanty round of gratifications supplied by the senses, or eked by the frivolous gayeties which wealth mistakes for pleasure, the unfurnished mind becomes weary of all things and itself. With the capacity to feel its wretchedness, but without tastes or intellectual light to guide it to any avenue of escape, it gropes round its confines of clay, with the sensations of a caged wild beast. It riseth up, it moveth to and fro, it lieth down again. In the morning it says, Would God it were evening! in the evening it cries, Would God it were morning! Driven in upon itself, with passions and desires that madden for action, it grows desperate; its vision becomes perverted; and, at last, vice and ignominy seem preferable to what the great Poet calls 'the hell of the lukewarm.' Such is the end of many a youth, to whom authoritative discipline and enlarged teaching might have early opened the interesting spectacle of man's past and prospective destiny. Instead of languishing, his mind might have throbbed, and burned, over the trials, the oppressions, the fortitude, the triumphs, of men and nations:-breathed upon by the lifegiving lips of the Patriot, he might have discovered, that he had not only a country to love, but a head and a heart to serve her :-going out with Science, in her researches through the universe, he might have found, amidst the secrets of Nature, ever-growing food for reflection and delight:-ascending where the Muses sit, he might have gazed on transporting scenes, and transfigured beings; and snatched, through heaven's half-unfolded portals, glimpses unutterable of things beyond.

The mischievous, and truly American notion, that, to enjoy a respectable position, every man must traffic, or preach, or practice, or hold an office, brings to beggary and infamy, many who might have lived, under a juster estimate of things, usefully and happily; and cuts us off from a needful, as well as ornamental, portion of society. The necessity of laboring for sustenance is, indeed, the great safeguard of the world, the ballast, without which the wild passions of men would bring communities to speedy wreck. But man will not labor without a motive; and successful accumulation, on the part of the parent, deprives the son of this impulse. Instead, then, of vainly contending against laws, as insurmountable as those of physics,

and attempting to drive their children into lucrative industry, why do not men, who have made themselves opulent, open their eyes, at once, to the glaring fact, that the cause,-the cause itself,-which braced their own nerves to the struggle for fortune, does not exist for their offspring? The father has taken from the son his motive! -a motive confessedly important to happiness and virtue, in the present state of things. He is bound, therefore, by every consideration of prudence and humanity, neither to attempt to drag him forward without a cheering, animating principle of action,-nor recklessly to abandon him to his own guidance,-nor to poison him with the love of lucre for itself; but, under new circumstances,with new prospects,-at a totally different starting-place from his own, to supply other motives,-drawn from our sensibility to reputation, from our natural desire to know,-from an enlarged view of our capacities and enjoyments, and a more high and liberal estimate of our relations to society. Fearful, indeed, is the responsibility of leaving youth, without mental resources, to the temptations of splendid idleness! Men who have not considered this subject, while the objects of their affection yet surround their table, drop no seeds of generous sentiments, animate them with no discourse on the beauty of disinterestedness, the paramount value of the mind, and the dignity of that renown which is the echo of illustrious actions. Absorbed in one pursuit, their morning precept, their mid-day example, and their evening moral, too often conspire to teach a single maxim, and that in direct contradiction of the inculcation, so often and so variously repeated: 'It is better to get wisdom than gold.' Right views, a careful choice of agents, and the delegation, betimes, of strict authority, would insure the object. Only let the parent feel, and the son be early taught, that, with the command of money and leisure, to enter on manhood without having mastered every attainable accomplishment, is more disgraceful than threadbare garments, and we might have the happiness to see in the inheritors of paternal wealth, less frequently, idle, ignorant prodigals and heart-breakers, and more frequently, high-minded, highly-educated young men, embellishing, if not called to public trusts, a private station.

With such a class ornamenting the circles of our chief cities, we should soon see a modification of claims. The arrogance of simple wealth would stand rebuked, before the double title of those who superadded intellectual distinction. Accomplished minds, finding the air of fashionable assemblies more respirable, would more fre