ments of every walk in life, and oppressing the honest industry of the country in supporting the wretched objects with which they fill our hospitals and our streets.

Such are some of the causes of hard times. Time would fail me to enumerate them all. Our patient, we perceive, is laboring under a complication of diseases, and is, we confess, very sick, and very much reduced. But we have, as we think, discovered the main causes of disorder, and have, therefore, the requisite grounds to proceed upon in prescribing our remedies. The disease is evidently chronic, and no sudden cure is to be expected. The recovery can be only gradual, and procured by regimen rather than violent remedies.

The first indication of cure is, the prohibition of foreign luxuries by which the money of this country has been abstracted by foreign nations, just as the poor Indians are stripped of every thing valuable by the glass beads and worthless trinkets which their more civilized neighbors carry among them. The gloves, and silks, and jewelry of France and England, are performing the same office for us, in lightening us of our cash, as the filigree and frippery of a western trader does for the savages, after the receipt of an annuity from government. This drain being stopped, we should keep specie enough in the country to be a safe basis for our paper curren

cy, which will always, more or less, obtain in a great country like ours. We can manufacture every thing we want, and we ought to do it; and the moment we throw open our ports to the competition of all nations, we forego all the advantages of a fresh soil and a sparse population, and put our labor on the low level of the starving millions of Europe and Asia.

In the second place, we must have a uniform and stable currency; or all the advantages of the union of the states, in time of peace, are lost. It is of no advantage that we belong to the same nation with Pennsylvania, if the exchange between their currency and ours, amounts to as much as the duties between the different states of Europe. There can be no general prosperity without a uniform and a stable currency, and this can not be restored without the aid of the general government.

The third remedy is, a calm submission to the inevitable evils which we have brought upon ourselves. The disasters of the last few years have ruined about one half of the people; that is, every body that was in debt. But their property is not annihilated. It has gone, or must go into the hands of those who were rich before; so that we shall emerge from these troubles like the Egyptians from the famine kings and beggars, masters and slaves. But

death and labor, those two great agrarians, will immediately commence the process of equalization, and they will carry it on much faster than we at first imagine. As soon as we cease to regret the past, and conform ourselves to the present, that moment we begin to lay the foundation for a new career of prosperity. For a while, the ruined will despond, and sink under their misfortunes; the laborer will prefer idleness to low wages; but, after a while, wisdom will get the better of pride, action will restore health and cheerfulness to the mind, and many a person will learn, though late, the valuable lesson taught by Hesiod, almost three thousand years ago, that "half is sometimes greater than the whole."

The fourth remedy for hard times is, the more general diffusion of scientific and general intelligence. What but want of intelligence in the highest classes, has led to the mad legislation of the last ten years, by which millions of money have been sunk in enterprises of internal improvement, which the least scientific knowledge might have demonstrated to have been hopeless from the beginning? What but ignorance, could have led a whole people into the delusion that the commercial and monetary affairs of a great nation could be successfully conducted by any other than a stable system of legislation, let the policy of that legislation be

good or bad? What but ignorance, could have led a whole people to imagine that a nation can continue to spend twice as much in a year as they can earn? What but ignorance, can lead people to suppose, that a third part of a thriving population can be drones, and still the hive be filled with honey? The schoolmaster has, as yet, done but a small part of his work. The last census has revealed some mortifying facts, as to the number of persons in this nation, which boasts itself the most intelligent on earth, who can neither read nor write. It is intelligence, after all, that, more than any thing else, raises one nation above another. It does so by directing their physical power to the best objects, and then employing it to the best advantage. In precise proportion to the want of it, must we approach the destitution and misery of the savage.

Finally, the grand means of remedying hard times is, the moral elevation of the people. One gigantic step has already been taken towards it in the temperance reform. This I consider as the most important, as well as the most wonderful movement of the age. In an economical view, no one has, as yet, comprehended its vastness. Millions of money have already been saved from worse than waste; but those millions are nothing when compared to the labor and the moral energy which have been redeemed

from annihilation, and set to work for the common benefit of all. It is computed that thirty thousand drunkards have been reclaimed from brutality and degradation, and restored to sobriety and usefulness. The saving that is thus made in our expenditures and receipts is enough, of itself, to pay the interest on our public debts which press so heavily upon us.

Moral reform is not likely to stop here. Public opinion, which has been directed with such efficiency to one vice, will be turned successively on every other; and thus the sources of national poverty and crime will be dried up. Morality and intelligence are our only hope. He who does any thing to promote these, does just so much to relieve us from the pressure of hard times. Education, the press, and the pulpit, these are the means of elevating the morality and intelligence of a community; and on them we must steadily rely gradually to extricate us from our present difficulties, and lead us onward to a condition of prosperity, such as we have not yet conceived.

Gentlemen, I have given you a few plain and practical ideas on the causes and the cure of hard times. It is a subject in which each one of us is deeply interested, and which comes home to the experience and business of every day. Let us hope that this very Association may prove one of the means of alleviation to