Over long tracts of his journey he encountered all the horrors of hunger and cold. But his lion-heart never gave way; and he pressed on.

He reached the little Polish town Zarnavi, and lay down to die. He was resting in a Jewish cottage, where he experienced the time-honored hospitality of that ancient and venerable race. All the tenderness which the daughters of Israel are taught to show to the friendless "stranger within their gates" was shown to the dying ambassador.

His last intellectual effort was a poem he dictated a day or two before he died. It was a withering satire of resentment on Napoleon for having so cruelly betrayed the hopes of the world. He was buried at Zarnavi, near Cracow; and his remains rest there to this day.

"We have been very fortunate in our hospital," said the surgeon. "We have had a good many difficult cases; but we have lost very few. The air is pure, we have every thing we could desire, and we are almost as much out of the world as though we were on top of the Blue Ridge: so we have got along finely."

I was glad to hear it of course; and although I have never felt much afraid of disease in going through hospitals in any part of the world, still I did not feel any special hankering for a more minute inspection of the sanitary condition of this private party who had gone out to pass the heated term at the country-seat of Joel Barlow.

I breathed a little freer as the carriage rolled down the gravelled road. We stopped a few moments at the tomb of the Barlow family, which stands at the foot of the great lawn of sixty acres which slopes gracefully down from the southern front of the venerable mansion.

The breeze had freshened; fleecy clouds were drifting under the far-off mazarine-blue sky. One touch, and the grays snuffed the fresh air and left the road and the dust

behind them. We were all glad enough to go fast,-horses, passengers, and particularly the coachman, who declared that "if he had just known what a dreadful place he was going to, he would as soon have driven down to Tophet."

"That's nice in you, my man, with that face of yours so pitted up that one would suppose you had had the small-pox your life."

all

"Yes, your honor.

But I might carry it away in my

clothes and give it to the babies."

21.

XXXVI.

The Law of Empire in the Western Hemisphere.

LORD BACON somewhere says, "Men discover laws; God makes them." Philosophers interrogate Nature, and as fast as they find out her laws they mark the progress of science. The steam-engine, the printing-press, the cotton-gin, the daguerreotype, the magnetic telegraph, each has to be invented or discovered but once. One Columbus is enough for one hemisphere.

It were well if statesmen should act on the same law as applied to the political world; for both systems-the physical and the moral-came from the same source and are swayed by the same Master. The brain of Shakspeare sprung from the same moulding hand that chiselled the gothic peaks of the Alps and painted the last evening's sunset. Certainty of results, the conditions all being complied with, is the physical law of the universe. A thousand Galileos could not make the peasant of the Apennines believe that the sun will not rise to-morrow. Experience has taught him the unvarying order of nature. Why should we stop here and press along our bewildered track through the moral and political world, heedless of laws of action and of states, which just as inevitably control the fortunes of men and the fates of empires?

Let us trace these analogies into the political world, and see if we cannot find just the same certainty and precision in results there that Galileo and Newton discovered in physics,

or Shakspeare and Alfieri demonstrated in the drama, or Cooper and Scott in romance.

The question, then, meets us, What is the law of empire in this new world? There is a law of existence for all beings and all things,—from the mote that floats in the sunbeam to the Bengal tiger in his jungle. Historians have been busy with the general problem of empire from the earliest nations; and Tacitus, Gibbon, and Sismondi have helped us to a better interpretation of the law which has controlled the growth and decay of the panoramic commonwealths that have gone by in their solemn movement over the broad fields of history. From such sources we learn that the frequent captivities of the Jews, and the repeated destruction of their gorgeous capital, followed by the carrying away of the whole nation into slavery, did by no means effect their extermination; nor was that work brought about even by the remorseless persecutions to which they have been subjected by every nation' under heaven except our own. The sons of Abraham are still a nation, and they are more numerous to-day than they were when they turned their farewell gaze upon the falling towers of Jerusalem. England has at last been compelled to acknowledge the Jews as citizens; and the scattered children of Jacob could to-day send a million of armed men to recover their own land, which has been cruelly robbed from them by Pagans, Othmans, and Christians. Whence sprang this vitality, this power of endurance,-which makes them above. all the people of the earth THE ETERNAL NATION? They have always been believers in the only true God, and they have never lost their nationality.

We glance at Switzerland, and we learn that she has always been free. The hunted spirit of liberty has always found a home there. The reason is plain. Among those everlasting mountains a race of men have been nurtured, amidst the sublimest scenes of the physical creation, where the hardiest characters have been formed, the sternest wills

educated, and the deepest love of liberty inspired. Despotism never flourishes among mountains.

Another illustration. France has learned that, although she may conquer, she can never hold in subjection the nations which lie beyond her present boundaries. Those bounds are the Rhine and Alps on the east, the Mediterranean on the south, the Pyrenees on the south west, and the oceanwaters on her western and northern shores. She has often swept over them with her chivalric legions, and, sooner or later, her colors have waved from almost every capital in Europe. But she has generally lost her conquests as rapidly as they were made, and she has always been compelled to retire within her natural boundaries as soon as the tempest of revolution subsided and Europe settled back to its repose.

England may seem to be an exception to this rule; but she only confirms it. She has till recently been long the greatest of the commercial Powers, and Providence gave to her the mission of spreading civilization. This she has done through the four quarters of the globe. But the time came for her to fall under the operation of the same law which fixed the fate of Rome. Like that mighty empire, she started from small beginnings. Nineteen hundred years ago, the Roman standard first floated on the shores of Britain. Then a race of barbarians, clothed in the skins of wild beasts, roamed over the uncultivated island. The tread of the Roman legions was then heard on the plains of Africa and Asia, and the name of Rome was written on the front of the world. Nearly two thousand years have rolled by, and Julius Cæsar, and all the Cæsars, the Senate, the people, and the empire of Rome, have passed away like a dream. Her population now numbers less than that of the State of New York, while that island of barbarians has emulated Rome in her conquests, and not only planted and unfurled her standard in the three quarters of the globe which owned the Roman sway, but laid her all-grasping hand on two new continents. Possessing the