over the whole life. In their school no one ever becomes too old to learn, to be made wiser and better, a better man and a better citizen. Vice is the moth which corrupts, and the thief which steals the accumulated treasures of industry and economy; and when it prowls unchecked and unrestrained, it is in vain for a people to hope ever to be rich. A quiet and religious Sabbath makes the labors of the other six days more cheerful, more efficient, more profitable. And let the Sabbath cease to be observed, let the divine light which shineth upon the path of man be extinguished, and vice, barbarism, poverty, would rush in and overwhelm the fairest portions of the globe.

One of the postulates of national wealth, is education, universally diffused. It is this alone that can give skill to the hand, and wisdom in the general conduct of affairs. Without this, the physical power of a nation is like the strength of the sightless Cyclop, working in the dark. Physical strength is generally available in proportion to the intelligence by which it is guided. Most of our readers have heard of the Lowell Offering, a periodical written exclusively by the girls, who are engaged every day in carding, spinning, and weaving. Mr. Dickens tells us that he carried home a number of that work, as one of the most wonderful phenomena of this western world. I was told myself,

The

in a récent visit to that place, by one of the superintendents, that the principal writers in that publication were the most profitable operatives in the several establishments, obtained the highest wages, and made the best use of their money. So, after all the sneers which are cast on literary ladies,-to wear blue stockings is no disqualification for the most common employments of life. So it is all the world over. schoolmaster's wages is an investment which yields, in an economical point of view, the highest per centum. It is to enlightened education that we must look for the extinction of that false sentiment, so adverse to the true prosperity of a nation, the degradation which sometimes attaches to personal toil. No community can ever grow rich, when it is thought to be more respectable to be a genteel loafer, than to get an honest living by the labor of the hands.

Finally, no nation can be prosperous and rich without a good government. And what is a good government? It is one which protects, instead of making war upon, property. It is one which hallows the marriage between capital and labor, two things which God's providence has joined together, and nothing but human folly will ever put asunder,-a union from which proceeds the fair family of industry, wealth, contentment, harmony, peace. Once divorce

them, and the whole structure of society is broken up. A good government is one which is steady in its policy, and thus establishes the confidence of the people, and induces them to make permanent investments of their money in the great pursuits of agriculture, manufactures and commerce, which give profitable employment to a whole population. A bad government, is one which is perpetually changing its measures of commerce, taxation, and finance, annihilating at a blow millions of the very property which its own enactments had created, thus, instead of being the centre of life to the whole system, sending the dead palsy into the remotest extremities, silencing the hum of busy industry, and drying up the very springs of national wealth, by destroying all motive to enterprise and exertion. A good government is one which is administered by statesmen and patriots, men whose experience in public affairs, whose tried fidelity and known disinterestedness fit them to preside over a nation's destiny, men who go for their country, their whole country, and nothing but their country. A bad government is one that is administered by demagogues and politicians, men whose incapacity, whose follies, or whose vices have ruined them in every other pursuit, and who turn to office-seeking as the last resort,-men who are always in the market to the highest bidder,

and ready to sacrifice truth, integrity, and their country, to their own selfish schemes of personal aggrandizement. From a country cursed with such a government, riches take to themselves wings and fly away.

PROPER COURSE OF READING FOR THE YOUNG.*

THE literary association which have established this course of lectures, by the zeal and efficiency with which they have carried their enterprise into execution, have given the strongest demonstrations of the estimation in which they hold the cause of science and letters. Those, therefore, who have the honor to address you, have the satisfaction of believing that the benefit you have derived from our endeavors, if any such there be, will not be confined to the present hour, but that you will be disposed to keep up the impetus you have received, to drink deep of those fountains from which we have brought but a few drops to your lips, to explore for yourselves those fields whose boundaries, merely, we have pointed out.

You will soon be left to the ordinary motives of self-cultivation, which operate upon the mass of society, and to those means which are in the hands of all.

* A Lecture delivered before the Mechanical Library Association of Baltimore, 1840.