engenders no deadly plagues; health lives in the breeze, and plenty comes teeming from the soil. Broad dominions, to be measured in leagues only by a scale of hundreds, snatch imagination from every belittling influence, and carry it out from narrow thoughts to an ennobling excursiveness. Then there are ocean lakes, in which kingdoms might be buried, and leave on the surface no ripple of their grave; rivers, that sweep over half a world; cataracts, eternal and resistless, that hymn forever the omnipotence which they resemble; mountains, that stretch into the upper light, and mock, from their snow-crowned pinnacles, the clouds and the thunders that crash below them.

All these are your country's, but your country is God's. It is God who has given you this country; it is God who has enriched it with these grand objects, and through these grand objects it is God who speaks. He speaks in the chorus of your woods; in the tempests of your valleys; in the ceaseless sobbings of your lakes and oceans; in the vague, low murmurs of forest and of prairie; in the mighty bass of waterfalls, in the silver melody of streams; and the voice that he sends out from them is a voice for patriotism, but it is also a voice for equity and a voice for goodness. Who can look through the huge firmament; who can gaze upon the golden fires with which it is studded; who can float away on the wings of the spirit through the infinity of stars; who can watch the roll of the torrent, pouring out a sea in every gush a sea of awful beauty; who can thus put his soul into communion with the universe, and not be enlarged by the communion? who can really put his soul into communion with the universe, and not be delivered from the slavery of prejudice into the glorious liberty of humanity and of God?

The measure of your duty is the greatness of your advantages, and the greatness of your advantages is the standard to which you will be subjected in the judgment of Heaven and the judgment of history. You are set for the hope or for the disappointment of the world. With such a mighty country, with such inestimable privileges, with such means of intelligence, virtue and happiness, with such means of increasing and dispensing them, so young and

yet so strong, so late and yet so rich among the nations, there is room to look for good interminably to future generations, which the one departing shall leave more abundant for the one that comes. In order that such anticipations be not empty dreams, in order that they be not promises to change into mockery, vanity and grief, it should be the labor of a genuine and noble patriotism to raise the life of the nation to the level of its privileges, to harmonize its general practice with its abstract principles, to reduce to actual facts the ideals of its institutions, to elevate instruction into knowledge, to deepen knowledge into wisdom, to render knowledge and wisdom complete in righteousness, and to make the love of country perfect in the love of man.

GROWTH OF AMERICA.-H. S. Legaré.

ONE of the most fortunate and striking peculiarities of the Revolution is that it occurred in a New World. The importance that ought to be attached to this circumstance will be obvious to every one who will reflect for a moment upon the miracles which are exhibiting in the settlement of this country and the increase of its population. Behold how the pomoerium of the republic advances in the wilderness of the West! See how empires are starting up into being, in periods of time shorter even than the interval between infancy and manhood in the span allotted to the individuals that compose them! Contemplate the peaceful triumphs of industry, the rapid progress of cultivation, the diffusion of knowledge, the growth of populous cities, with all the arts that embellish life. and soften while they exalt the character of man, and think of the countless multitudes that are springing up to inherit these blessings! The three millions by whom our independence was achieved, less than half a century ago, are already grown to ten, which, in the course of another half-century, will have swelled up to fifty, and so on, with a continually accelerated progress, until, at no distant day, the language of Milton shall be spoken from shore to shore, over the vastest portion of the earth's surface that

was ever inhabited by a race worthy of speaking a language consecrated to liberty.

no, nor all shall be gov

Now, to feel how deep an interest this circumstance is fitted to throw into the story of the Revolution, let us imagine a spectator, or let us rather suppose an actor, in that greatest and proudest of days, to have turned his thoughts upon the future which we see present and realized. Would he not, think ye, have trembled at the awful responsibility of his situation? Would he not have been overwhelmed with the unbounded anticipation? It depends upon his courage and conduct, and upon the strength of his right arm, whether, not his descendants only, not some small tract of country about his fireside, not Massachusetts alone, that shall inherit it in the ages that are to come, erned by satraps and viceroys, or as reason and nature dictate that they should be; but whether a republic, embracing upwards of twenty distinct and great empires, shall exist or not, whether a host, worthy to combat and to conquer with Jackson, shall issue from the yet unviolated forests of Kentucky and Tennessee, to spurn from New Orleans the very foe whose vengeance he now dares, for the first time, to encounter in the field, when that foe shall be crowned with yet prouder laurels, and shall come in more terrible might, whether the banks of the great lakes shall echo to the accents of liberty, and the Missouri and the Mississippi roll through the inheritance of freemen!

IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION.-R. C. Winthrop.

We have been accustomed to regard a free-school system as the chief corner-stone of our republic, and popular education as the only safe and stable basis for popular liberty. So thought our fathers before us; and the principle may be found interwoven in a thousand forms into the very thread and texture of our political institutions. Education — religious and civil, the education of the sanctuary and the school-house-was, we all know, from the first establishment of these colonies, a matter in regard to which all

property was held in common, and every man bound to contribute to the necessities of every other man; as much so as personal protection, public justice, or any other of the more obvious duties of government, or rights of the governed.

Children should be educated as those by whom the destinies of the nation are one day to be wielded, and free schools cherished as places in which those destinies are even now to be woven. It has been recorded as a saying of Mahomet that "the ink of the scholar and the blood of the martyr are equal." It would be difficult to bring an American of this generation, especially if he happened to be standing, as we now are, at the foot of Bunker Hill, to acknowledge that there could be anything equal-equal in its claim upon his regard and reverence, or equal in its influence upon our national welfare and freedom to the blood of our Revolutionary martyrs. But in this we must all agree, that nothing but the ink of the scholar can preserve what the blood of the martyr has purchased. The experiment of free government is not one which can be tried once for all. Every generation must try it for itself. Our fathers tried it, and were gloriously successful. We are now engaged in the trial; and, thank God, we have not yet failed. But neither our success, nor that of our fathers, can afford anything but example and encouragement to those who are to try it next. As each new generation starts up to the reponsibilities of manhood, there is, as it were, a new launch of Liberty, and its voyage of experiment begins afresh. But the oracles have declared that its safety and success depend not so much upon the conduct of those engaged in it during the voyage, as upon their preparations before they embark. The winds and waves must be propitiated before the shore is left, or wreck and ruin will await them. But this propitiation consists, not in some cruel proceeding, like that prescribed by the heathen oracle to the Grecian fleet, in binding son or daughter upon the pile of sacrifice, and offering up their tortured bodies and agonized souls to appease an angry deity, but in a process which is not more certain to call down the best blessing of Heaven upon the enterprise, and to secure a peaceful and prosperous voyage, than it is to promote the truest happiness and welfare

of those upon whom it is performed. Sons and daughters devoted to education are the only sacrifice which God has prescribed to render the progress of free government safe and certain.

SUCCESS OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS.-M. Van Buren.

THE capacity of the people for self-government, and their willingness, from a high sense of duty, and without those exhibitions of coërcive power so generally employed in other countries, to submit to all needful restraints and exactions of the municipal law, have also been favorably exemplified in the history of the American states. Occasionally, it is true, the ardor of public sentiment, outrunning the regular process of the judicial tribunals, or seeking to reach cases not denounced as criminal by the existing law, has displayed itself in a manner calculated to give pain to the friends of free government, and to encourage the hopes of those who wish for its overthrow. These occurrences, however, have been far less frequent in our country than in any other of equal population on the globe; and, with the diffusion of intelligence, it may be hoped that they will constantly diminish in frequency and violence. The generous patriotism and sound common sense of the great mass of our fellow-citizens will assuredly, in time, produce this result; for, as every assumption of illegal power not only wounds the majesty of the law, but furnishes a pretext for abridging the liberties of the people, the latter has the most direct and permanent interest in preserving the great landmarks of social order, and maintaining on all occasions the inviolability of those constitutional and legal provisions which they themselves have made.

In a supposed unfitness of our institutions for those hostile emergencies which no country can always avoid, their friends found a fruitful source of apprehension, their enemies of hope. While they foresaw less promptness of action than in governments differently formed, they overlooked the far more important consideration, that with us war could never be the result of individual or irresponsible will, but must be a measure of redress for injuries