succeeded to convince the French Government, that it was wise to espouse. His generous pupil crossed the Atlantic, at his own charge, and joined his gratuitous service to that of a commander, whom, one of those most competent to decide, characterised as 'giving more than any other human being, the example of a perfect man.' In the verse of our national bard

Fame fired their courage, freedom flushed their swords. While, with their comrades in an epic of disasters, they were achieving by force, what force alone could not effectuate, Dr. Franklin concluded that memorable Treaty, so worthy of note for its immediate results, but so much more so as a sanction and standard of politics, to whose immortal truth, more than to arms, independence is due. Its basis is the most perfect equality and reciprocity, carefully avoiding all those burthensome preferences, which are usually sources of debate, embarrassment and discontent.'-Such is the simple argument of the preamble; containing, may it not be said, the whole philosophy of government, whose deities are equality and reciprocity, whose dæmons are burthensome prefe

rences, national and individual, foreign and municipal; whose only legitimate functions and praċticable benefit is their regulation by mild provisions.

The sun of this system is not yet in the meridian; its selectest influence is shed but partially; from many dark regions of splendid misery it is excluded altogether. Yet where is the quarter of Christendom that should exclaim with the Satan of the great republican poet!

Oh thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the God
Of this new world, at whose sight all the stars,
Hide their diminished heads; to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,
Oh Sun! to tell thee how I hate thy beams.

During the many years of undermining war and pressure which the British empire has so gloriously survived, what would have become of it without those beams, not only to sustain, but to rebuke it? Instead of queen of the isles, without the popular stamina of her constitution, Great Britain must have been numbered with the bankrupt despotisms that are the insupportable burthens of

others, and the fanatical scourges of themselves. And who believes that those stamina would have remained sound without America? It has not been as colonies or customers, by "the full breast of youthful exuberance held to the mouth of an exhausted parent," that this country has been most profitable to the mother country; but as an independent rival, by the warning of a firm popular government, of which every wind from the four quarters of the globe wafted the tidings of prosperity.

Or is it France that hates these beams? The French Revolution of 89 was the lawful offspring of the American Revolution of 76. The means were not havoc. The end was not plunder. Far from it. La Fayette and his associates, many of whom traced their nobility beyond the feudal age, desired restoration :—to share again with the people at least a part of those privileges which every educated man knows they hold by titles not only more rational, but more antient, than any titles of nobility of which successive usurpations had depoiled them. The martyr king, whom a resolution of the American Congress entitled Protector

of the Rights of Mankind, swore to maintain them. The present king was their declared advocate. If the selfish, coward few, whose ancestors for centuries had sown the wind, fled from their lordly homes at the reaping of the whirlwind,—if from their hiding places abroad they scattered back the seeds of yet more terrible desolation, who is accountable ?-whose the harvest?

The

And was not the French Revolution indispensable? the only possible revival of France from the prostration of many reigns of misrule and impoverishment. Let us not exaggerate the evils nor undervalue the good of concussions in the order of things. Let not the many illustrious victims, nor the atrocities of their executioners, disqualify the mind to estimate the event. mortmain wastes of their fair country, for the first time covered with smiling homesteads; her commerce, manufactures, and agriculture flourishing beyond example; her chaos of finance restored to competency; her capital and circulation solid and affluent, with credit (the plant that withers in the absolute soil, and thrives only in the liberal,) superadded to them; a contented and educating

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people; a jurisprudence the admiration of the world; a metropolis the centre of refinement; literary and scientific institutes pre-eminent; a press comparatively free; above all, morals, long abandoned to the most profligate dissoluteness, of which the court set the example, chastened by the first prevalence of those domestic virtues which are the pure fountains of all the rest ;-these are the sequel, and the fruits of the revolution :these are the enjoyments of those who deplore its ravages.

In Europe, a clamorous and ungenerous reaction may confound all periods, persons and transactions of that agony, in one dark cloud of obloquy. But America is a sort of posterity to Europe. Here it is that the principles of independ ence are to be vindicated-not only by the wisdom of government and affection of the peoplebut by history, philosophy, eloquence, and all the means of justification. If the truth be not radiated from this luminary, where can it prevail? Though the origin of those principles in this hemisphere, like its first settlement, was forlorn and their progress long disas