wily trickster-the third was confided to a brainless fop. But, thanks to that Providence which educes evil from good, and to the elastic genius of Frenchmen, some valuable reforms were secured during the first revolution, which, though often in abeyance, have never been wholly lost amidst subsequent changes in the government. The liberal principles mixed with the atheism and crime of the revolution of 1789, are gradually regenerating not France only but Europe. A glorious destiny awaits this brilliant people. God grant it may be heralded not by the avenging sword of war but by the olive branch of peace!

Now, compare the French revolution, and the subsequent progress of that nation, with ours. We, like her, blotted out old institutions with the pen, and defended new with the sword. But, our Declaration of Independence was a sober document, and commended itself to the common sense of mankind. Our Constitution was the product of genius happily tempered with gravity; and its authors, so far from demolishing their work, like the French, and constructing substitutes as factions rose and fell, made it so perfect, that it. has met the exigencies of two generations of great men and great deeds. Our revolutionary assemblies never appeared ridiculous to contemporary nations, nor their orators absurd to posterity. Our Shermans, Lees, Franklins, and Adamses, did not denounce each other as traitors, on the lamest suspicions, at one moment, and the next,

under the inspiration of an apostrophe from the tribune, rush frantically into each others' arms and smother their resentments with kisses. Our entire civil transactions wore an air of dignity and grace, and were not disfigured by the convulsive frenzy, stage trick, and transcendental rodomontade, which deformed those of France. Never for a moment the dupes of theorists, our fathers brought every proposition to the test of principle and expediency, and were as solicitous to preserve all that was useful in the institutions imposed upon them by monarchy, as to incorporate with them whatever was valuable in republican and democratic systems. Our war was waged with a firmness and heroism worthy of Sparta or Rome, but according to those rules which distinguish men from demons. In all places and at all times, the law was supreme, and property, liberty, and life respected. Officials did not swear to maintain order to-day, and trample it in gutters foaming with gore to-morrow. The populace did not shout hosannas in the ear of their idol in the morning, and dabble handkerchiefs in his blood at the going down of the sun. No rabble dictated decrees of the Continental Congress at the point of the pike, nor silenced its debates by shouts and the show of daggers. The prisons were not suffocated with the breath of innocence, nor made slippery with the blood of the suspected. Even spies had an impartial trial, and Tories were not arrested except by legal process issued according to established forms. We had our Hotel de

Ville, but it was Faneuil Hall; our revolutionary clubs, but they were committees of Public Safety; our revolutionary tribunals, but they were courts of justice; our States General, but they were presided over by Hancock: our Sieyes, but he was a Jefferson; our Condorcet, but he was a Franklin; our Neckar, but he was a Hamilton; our Mirabeau, but he was a Henry; our Napoleon, but he was a Washington. Grant that our previous schooling under a limited monarchy had prepared us to sustain the full measure of self-government thrown upon us by the Declaration of Independence, and that centuries of oppression had not goaded us to vengeance against our foe, thus making our condition widely dissimilar from that of France; yet this is only giving a reason for the existence of the fact, that from the firing of the first musket at Lexington till the roar of artillery announced the inauguration of Washington, a wise and humane spirit of Reform pervaded the national mind and heart, and presided in the cabinet and the field. And this spirit has ever since, with rare exceptions, been the guardian genius of the Republic, furnishing the measure and test of our progress, and making our advancement unparalleled in the history of nations. By continuing to yield to its benign influences, and holding with steady hand the nicely adjusted balance between the sovereignty of the individual States and the supremacy of the Federal head, which renders our republican system capable of expansion over peoples as widely differing in

their social tastes and local customs as in the tem.. perature of their climates and the hue of their complexions, we may, should no Erostratus brave an immortality of infamy by firing the temple of Freedom, move onward in our career of enlargement and improvement, till our population outruns the march of enumeration, till our territory, washed by two oceans, stretches from Labrador to Panama, and the sun, as he traverses this vast domain, rises not upon a tyrant nor sets upon a slave.

The progress of England, during the present century, exhibits the tardy advance of a dogged conservatism, hard pressed by a band of reformers, many of whose names find few parallels in history whether we regard the vigor of their understanding, the brilliancy of their genius, the value of their achievements, or the courage and fidelity with which they have sustained the liberal cause during the darkest nights of European freedom. The services rendered to civil and religious liberty by Fox, Erskine, Tooke, Sheridan, Grattan, Bentham, Romilly, Macintosh, Brougham, Cartwright, Cobbett, Hume, O'Connell, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Buxton, Macaulay, Talfourd, Hazlitt, Campbell, Howitt, Cobden, Elliott, Bowring, Chalmers, Hall, Wardlaw, Noel, and their associates, have covered the English name with a more imperishable luster than the victories of all the Nelsons and Wellingtons that have borne her flag in triumph over sea and land. In spite of the hostility of a throne erected before the Roman Empire fell, and of an

aristocracy more powerful than the oligarchies of antiquity, they have exploded the doctrines of constructive treason, and placed the freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembling, under the protection of juries; abolished the slave trade, and stricken the yoke from 800,000 Africans, in the Carribean isles, and from countless dusky tribes beyond the Indus; humanized the penal code, and made the civil courts more easily accessible to the poor; abolished the sacramental test, and emancipated the Catholics; removed some of the harsher features from the game laws, and infused a little of the leaven of charity into the poor laws; brought the blessings of rudimental education nearer the doors of the humble, and repealed the tax on the bread of the laborer; rectified the grosser inequalities in the national representation, and bestowed the suffrage on half a million of artizans and shop-keepers; and rendered all departments of the government more obedient to public opinion and more in harmony with the liberalizing spirit of the age. The people of England are competent to-day to maintain republican institutions ; but they are far from being prepared to demand them. Their partiality for princes and nobles, and for an ostentatious and expensive government, is an hereditary weakness which time and taxes alone can cure. Radical Reform has many conflicts to wage, many defeats to encounter, many victories to win, ere power shall be taken from the few and given to the many. That "good time" will come, but