which meet and concur, every time a fresh impulse is given to the great mechanism. A majority of the states, neglecting or refusing to act on any such occasion, could bring the government to a dead stand. Consider that the people not only interfere on such critical occasions, but also that they are continually supplying the necessary force to sustain the movements of the subordinate parts of the machine. There are two and a half millions of electors, and every one of these is charged with the performance, for the most part annually, of four classes of functions, in as many distinct spheres. Once, generally in each year, the electors choose a mayor or supervisor, aldermen or trustees, or selectmen, justices of the peace, police officers, clerks, assessors of taxes, commissioners of public charities, commissioners of streets, roads and bridges, and subalterns, or other officers of the militia, in their respective cities, towns, or other forms of municipalities. Again, the electors, generally once in each year, choose officers nearly as numerous, and of a higher grade, to execute judicial, ministerial, and fiscal powers of a similar nature, within the counties, which embrace several cities, towns and municipalities. Again, they elect governors, lieutenant-governors, senators and representatives, judges, treasurers and ministers of finance, of education, of public works and of charities, in the states constituted by such counties, states sovereign in all things, except the few departments they have voluntarily assigned to the Federal Union. Once more, the citizens choose, once in two years, representatives, and once in three years, senators, who exercise the legislative powers of the republic; and once in four years, the vice-president and president of the United States, its chief executive magistrates. The peace, order, prosperity, and happiness, and even the safety of society, rest manifestly on the soundness of judgment with which these many and various electoral trusts are discharged. Reflect, now, for a moment, on the perturbations of society, the devices and combinations of parties, and the appliances of corruption, to which the electoral body is at all times exposed. Could these functions bet performed with results so generally auspicious if the people of the United States did not, as a mass, excel other nations in intelligence, as much as in the good fortune of inheriting such extraordinary institutions?

Look at the operation of this system in yet another aspect. Not only the constitutions of the several states, but even the constitution

of the Union, stands only by the voluntary consent of the people. By physical force, which the government could not suppress, they could subvert any or all of these constitutions. Even without force, and acting only by agreement, but in conformity to certain established conditions, they can change or subvert all these constitutions. There is indeed no restraining power acting upon them, from within or from without. Practically, they do change the constitutions of the several states once in twenty years. Yet they work such changes generally without commotion, and they have never made one without replacing the constitution removed by a better one. A few of the states inherited the jurisprudence of the civil law, and all the others the common and statute laws of England. Does any one deny that they have sagaciously retained all the parts of those excellent codes which are essential to order and civil liberty, and have modified others only so far as was required by the changing circumstances of society and the ever-unfolding sentiments of justice and humanity? Let our logical amendments of the rules of evidence, and our simple processes of pleading and practice in courts of justice and our meliorations of imprisonment for debt, and of eleemosynary laws, and of penitentiary systems, vindicate the intellectual vigor and wisdom of the American people.

Modern invention, until the close of the last century, was chiefly employed in discovering new laws of nature, and in shaping those discoveries into the forms of theories and maxims. Thus far, in the present century, invention has employed itself in applying those theories and maxims, by various devices of mechanism, or otherwise, to practical use. In Europe, those devices are chiefly such as regard aesthetic effect. In America, on the other hand, those devices are such as have for their object the increase of power. Required to subdue nature through a broad range quickly, and to bring forth her various resources with haste, and yet having numbers inadequate and capital quite unequal to such labors, the American studies chiefly economy and efficiency. He has examined every instrument, and engine, and combination, and composition, received from his elder trans-atlantic brother, in the light of those objects, and has either improved it, or devised a new and better one. He aims at doing the most that is possible as quickly as possible; and this characteristic is manifested equally in his weapons of war and in his instruments of peace, whether they are to be used in the field, or in the work

shop, on the land, or on the sea, the fire-arm, the ax, the plow, the railroad, the clipper-ship, the steam-engine and the printing-press. His railroads cost less and are less perfect than those in other countries, but he builds ten miles where they build only three. He moves passengers and freights on such roads and in his ships with less safety, but with greater cheapness and velocity. He prepares his newspapers, his magazines, and his treatises, with less care, but he prints a hundred for one. If the European has failed to give him necessary principle, or to embody it in a practical machine, he finds out the one, or constructs the other promptly for himself. He wanted machines for working up his forests, and he invented the saw-gang, and the grooving and planing machines; for cleaning his cotton, and he invented the gin; for harvesting his wheat, and he invented the reaper. He needed mechanical force to navigate his long rivers and broad lakes, and he converted the steam engine into a marine power. He needed dispatch in communicating intelligence, and he placed his lightning-rod horizontally, and beating it into a wire, converted it into a writing telegraph.

Fifty years ago there was no American science and no American literature. Now there is an American tenancy in every intellectual department, and none acknowledge its presence and usefulness more freely than those whose fame has least to fear from competition.

It seems to me that this intellectual development of the United States is due chiefly to the adoption of the great idea of universal emulation. Our constitutions and laws open every department of human enterprise and ambition to all citizens without respect to birth, or class, or condition, and steadily though cautiously exert a power quite effective in preventing any accidental social inequality from becoming fixed and permanent.

There still remains the question whether the moral development is coördinate with those of physical power and mind in the United States. A republic may be safe, even though it be weak, and though it be in a considerable degree intellectually inactive, as is seen in Switzerland; but a republic cannot exist without virtue.

It will not suffice to examine the question through the lens of traditional prejudice. A kind of reverence is paid by all nations to antiquity. There is no one that does not trace its lineage from the gods, or from those who were especially favored by the gods. Every people has had its age of gold, or Augustan age, or heroic age—an

age, alas! forever passed. These prejudices are not altogether unwholesome. Although they produce a conviction of declining virtue, which is unfavorable to generous emulation, yet a people at once ignorant and irreverential would necessarily become licentious. Nevertheless, such prejudices ought to be modified. It is untrue, that in the period of a nation's rise from disorder to refinement, it is not able to continually surpass itself. We see the present plainly, distinctly, with all its coarse outlines, its rough inequalities, its dark blots, and its glaring deformities. We hear all its tumultuous sounds and jarring discords. We see and hear the past, through a distance which reduces all its inequalities to a plane, mellows all its shades into a pleasing hue, and subdues even its hoarsest voices into harmony. In our own case, the prejudice is less erroneous than in most others. The revolutionary age was truly a heroic one. Its exigencies called forth the genius and the talents and the virtues of society, and they ripened amid the hardships of a long and severe trial. But there were selfishness, and vice, and factions, then, as now, although comparatively subdued and repressed. You have only to consult impartial history, to learn that neither public faith, nor public loyalty, nor private virtue, culminated at that period in our own country,' while a mere glance at the literature, or at the stage, or at the politics, of any European country, in any previous age, reveals the fact that it was marked, more distinctly than the present, by licentious morals and mean ambition.

Reasoning à priori again, as we did in another case, it is only just to infer in favor of the United States an improvement of morals from their established progress in knowledge and power; otherwise, the philosophy of society is misunderstood, and we must change all our courses, and henceforth seek safety in imbecility, and virtue in superstition and ignorance.

What shall be the test of the national morals? Shall it be the eccentricity of crimes? Certainly not; for then we must compare the criminal eccentricity of to-day with that of yesterday. The result of the comparison would be only this, that the crimes of society change with changing circumstances.

1"I ought not to object to your reverence for your fathers, as you call them, meaning, I presume, the government, and those concerned in the direction of public affairs; much less could I be displeased at your numbering me among them. But, to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the merits of different periods, I have no reason to believe that we were better than you are. We had as many poor creatures and selfish beings in proportion, among us, as you have among you; nor were there then more enlightened men, or in greater number in proportion, than there are now."-John Adams's Letter to Josiah Quincy, Feb. 9, 1811.

Loyalty to the state is a public virtue. Was it ever deeper-toned or more universal than it is now? I know there are ebullitions of passion and discontent, sometimes breaking out into disorder and violence; but was faction ever more effectually disarmed and harmless than it is now? There is a loyalty that springs from the affection that we bear to our native soil. This we have as strong as any people. But it is not the soil alone, nor yet the soil beneath our feet and the skies over our heads, that constitute our country. It is its freedom, equality, justice, greatness and glory. Who among us is so low as to be insensible of an interest in them? Four hundred thousand natives of other lands every year voluntarily renounce their own sovereigns, and swear fealty to our own. Who has ever known an American to transfer his allegiance permanently to a foreign power?

The spirit of the laws, in any country, is a true index to the morals of the people, just in proportion to the power they exercise in making them. Who complains, here or elsewhere, that crime or immorality blots our statute-books with licentious enactments?

The character of a country's magistrates, legislators, and captains, chosen by a people, reflect their own. It is true that, in the earnest canvassing which so frequently recurring elections require, suspicion often follows the magistrate, and scandal follows in the footsteps of the statesman. Yet, when his course has been finished, what magistrate has left a name tarnished by corruption, or what statesman has left an act or an opinion so erroneous that decent charity cannot excuse, though it may disapprove? What chieftain ever tempered military triumph with so much moderation as he who, when he had placed our standard on the battlements of the capital of Mexico, not only received an offer of supreme authority from the conquered nation, but declined it?

The manners of a nation are the outward form of its inner life. Where is woman held in so chivalrous respect, and where does she deserve that eminence better? Where is property more safe, commercial honor better sustained, or human life more sacred?

Moderation is a virtue in private and in public life. Has not the great increase of private wealth manifested itself chiefly in widening the circle of education and elevating the standard of popular intelligence? With forces which, if combined and directed by ambition, would subjugate this continent at once, we have made only two very