It thus appears that more than one-half of the whole are employed in agricultural pursuits, while nearly all are engaged in some useful business. Only 12,236 bar-keepers and 21,413 tobacconists, included in the above tables, are engaged in labor that is harmful to society. This small number, compared with the grand army of productive industry and professional honor, affords the highest encouragement to the future of our country. If it follows that the time given to the cultivation of mind and the fine arts must be less, and the standard of intelligence, on the whole, proportionally lower, it may be justly claimed that practical knowledge is more general, and society more healthy.

The attempts at aristocratic distinctions in the Southern portion of the United States, and the release of large numbers from the pursuits of industry, have not proved favorable to the cultivation of sound learning; while the popular sentiment rendering the labor of the hands dishonorable has produced results sufficiently disastrous to serve as a warning against all endeavors to establish here a form of society so entirely anti-American.

A much graver question relates to the moral character of our population. Of course, the various nationalities brought together here must include every variety of opinions, habits, and condition. The grades of civilization from many portions of Europe extend downward even below the semibarbarous state. Crimes of the grosser kind must become

correspondingly frequent. Lust and revenge are rank, and possibly ferocious in many instances. Offences against person and property will render both insecure in proportion as these barbarous elements prevail. Crowded cities, affording most victims and most convenient concealment, will include large and dangerous numbers of thieves and murderers; and the false ideas of liberty which pervade the lower forms of society in Europe will encourage the emigration of multitudes of their vilest men and women. Now, if it be a vice, it is one not easily remedied, apparently, that these human beings, who are yet hardly human, may suddenly become American citizens; and, though without a single qualification for the high and sacred responsibilities of freemen, they are as potential at the ballot-box as an equal number of our most intelligent and Christian citizens.

The religious creeds and institutions of large numbers who come to us claim the first and highest obedience for a foreign ecclesiastical prince, and make loyalty a mere matter of temporary convenience, liable to be disturbed and overthrown by causes wholly concealed from the ordinary observation of the American people.

Candor also compels the acknowledgment, that no small number of vicious people in this country are born here, and that the antagonisms to virtue are, to a shameful extent, of native origin and growth; while the highest virtues, both of Church and State, are alike of foreign and of domestic origin; the whole resulting in the stern fact, that, in our mixed population, the extremes of virtue and vice confront each other, and all the grades of human character that can be found in any civilized country are here strongly marked and vigorously developed.

To complete this brief analysis of American population, it is imperative to bring prominently forward the fact, that a high sense of religious responsibility brought the founders of our free institutions here. As the rights of conscience were extensively denied in the Old World, and fully con

ceded in the New, yearnings for the privilege of free worship brought multitudes to the wilds of America who would have been otherwise more comfortable in the land of their birth. Providence thus secured numerous accessions to the Christian population of the Republic; and, from the first, moral and religious influences largely predominated in the several colonies. The full development of this organic force will be noticed in another chapter. Here the claim, manifestly true, is, that the broad liberty which the earlier citizens of the Republic brought with them, and passed through the deathstruggles of the Revolution to establish, was vitally Christian; and that only the growing power of this controlling element can explain the high moral status of American citizens, on the whole.

THE AMERICAN RACE.

By the large comprehensions and mysterious selections of living materials for the formation of this new nation, Providence has clearly indicated a purpose to produce a population differing from any before known. In other countries, peoples utterly strange to each other, and diverse in origin, language, and religion, are brought into juxtaposition: but, from the nature of aristocratic governments, they are only subjects; they never do, never can, become an organic unit. In the United States, it is quite otherwise. Here men must cease to be Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Sclavonic, or Celt, and, by the very force of our free institutions, become Americans, simply and only Americans, at once sovereign and subject. Hence in a period longer or shorter, according to circumstances which are neither fundamental nor permanent, republican ideas take possession of incoming peoples, gradually, but at length entirely, mastering and displacing all predilections in favor of despotic or even mild monarchical institutions; and the most profound religious prejudices slowly, and almost imperceptibly, yield to the grand idea of free toleration, and the paramount rights of

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conscience; so that Romish bigotry is modified to an extent alarming to the hierarchy, sworn to implicit obedience to the sovereign pontiff. In opinions, religious and political, the people will differ; but, in the sense and rights of personal responsibility, they tend rapidly to unity. Immense as is the influx of population, we affirm the deliberate conviction, that the process of homogeneous Americanization follows it so closely as to avert the most imminent perils to our free institutions, and furnish strong ground for the belief that God himself controls the mixing-up of nations. here, for the grand purpose of making one, immensely stronger and nobler than either of them could possibly be.

Conventional arrangements of foreign origin which relate to exclusive education, religion, and government, are very tenacious, and not unfrequently rise to menacing proportions, as antagonists to the system of free schools, free churches, and a free Republic; but while the history of the contest furnishes ample reasons for eternal vigilance, and firm, manly independence, it does in no way indicate the ultimate triumph of European despotism on this continent, or the fundamental perversion of our great providential scheme of self-government.

Free schools, tending to universal education, bear with them their own vindication, make their own proselytes, and produce the intelligence which must render them superior to the assaults of ignorance and bigotry; and even coerced sectarian education with an anti-republican animus, by the mere force of contiguous free thinking and free acting, and the permeating vital forces of a free government, imperceptibly assimilates the common faith of Christian liberty.

It, moreover, appertains to unrestricted truth to show its superiority to prescriptive error. An open field and a fair fight is all it demands, all it will allow. The wrong has no chance of ultimate triumph in such a contest. God will not permit it. The inherent weakness of bigotry and injustice becomes evident in such a country as this. When they rise

up and bluster and threaten, before alarmists have ceased to utter their warnings of impending destruction to freedom and the right, they have gone down under the heavy blows which men, women, and children are so free to wield against them here.

The press, untrammelled, arrays itself on one side and the other in this Titanic war; but how evidently and rapidly, if it be vile, does its vileness destroy its power to rule against the educated, Christianized freedom of the land! and how soon must it tell the tale of its disgrace by extinction, or falling back upon the patronage of the openly vicious! On the other hand, when was it ever known that a free, truthful, fearless, Christianized press finally lost caste in America by standing up boldly for private and public virtue, and advocating the true republican rights of man? It may have passed through fiery trials, and fallen, for a time, under the ban of infidel vice and party corruption; but short indeed must be the life that has not been long enough to see schools of infidelity, and parties becoming corrupt from prosperity or vile leadership, disappear before the triumphant power of an enlightened public opinion, led on by a free press and an unfettered church. Thus forming, moulding, assimilating all to itself, the Great Republic of America goes on with the process of constructing a race of its own, strangely and even miraculously adjusted to its providential purposes, and the accomplishment of its grand mission among the governments of the earth.

If, now, it be asked how has all this become possible, and what is the vitalizing force which is thus transforming peoples of various and antagonistic governments into one, we affirm, without hesitancy, it is the Sovereign of nations, God Omnipotent, who "maketh the wrath of man to praise him," unfolding the plans of the Christian dispensation, purging the people by the fires of law and of justice; it is the gospel, the potent, at length the nearly omni-potent, spread of truth from heaven; a free, open Bible; the bap