selected at regular periods by their neighbors, to make and execute laws for the general good. Can anything essential, anything more than mere ornament and decoration, be added to this by robes or diamonds? Can authority be more amiable or respectable when it descends from accidents or remote antiquity, than when it springs fresh from the hearts and judgments of an honest and enlightened people? It is the people that are represented. It is their power and majesty that is reflected, and only for their good, in every legitimate government, under whatever form it may appear.

The existence of such a government as ours, for any length of time, is a full proof of the general dissemination of knowledge and virtue throughout the whole body of the people. What object more pleasing than this can be presented to the human mind? If national pride is ever justifiable or excusable, it is when it springs, not from power or riches, grandeur or glory, but from a conviction of national innocence, information, and benevolence.

10. THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION NO

EXPERIMENT.

WE are told that our constitution is a mere experiment. I deny it, utterly. He that says so, shows that he has not studied it at all, or has studied to little purpose the history and genius of our institutions. The great cause of their prosperous results is precisely to the contrary. It is because our fathers made no experiments, and had no experiment to make, that their work has stood. They were forced, by a violation of their historical, hereditary rights under the old Common Law of their race, to dissolve their connection with the mother country; but the whole constitution of society in the States, the great

body and bulk of their public law with all its maxims and principles, — in short, all that is Republican in our institutions, remained after the Revolution, and remains now, with some very subordinate modifications, what it was from the beginning.

Our written constitutions do nothing but consecrate and fortify "the plain rules of ancient liberty," handed down with Magna Charta, from the earliest history of our race. It is not a piece of paper, it is not a few abstractions engrossed on parchment, that makes free governments. No! The law of Liberty must be inscribed on the heart of the citizen. The Word," if I may use the expression, without irreverence, " must become flesh." You must have a whole people trained, disciplined, bred, yea, born as our fathers were, to institutions like ours.

Before the Colonies existed, the Petition of Rights, that Magna Charta of a more enlightened age, had been presented by Lord Coke and his immortal compeers, in 1628. Our founders brought it with them, and we have not gone a step beyond them. They brought these maxims of civil liberty in their souls, not in their libraries, as rules of conduct, as a symbol of public duty and private. right, to be adhered to with religious fidelity. The very first pilgrim that set his foot upon the rock of Plymouth, stepped forth a living constitution, armed at all points to defend and to perpetuate the liberty to which he had devoted his whole being.

PART V.

WASHINGTON.

1. WASHINGTON'S TRAINING.

AMONG the mountain passes of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, a youth is seen employed in the manly and invigorating occupation of a surveyor, and awakening the admiration of the backwoodsmen and savage chieftains by the strength and endurance of his frame and the resolution and energy of his character. In his stature and conformation he is a noble specimen of a man. In the various exercises of muscular power, on foot or in the saddle, he excels all competitors. His admirable physical traits are in perfect accordance with the properties of his mind and heart; and over all, crowning all, is a beautiful and, in one so young, a strange dignity of manners, and of mien, a calm seriousness, a sublime selfcontrol, which at once compels the veneration, attracts the confidence, and secures the favor of all who behold him. That youth is the Leader whom Heaven is preparing to conduct America through her approaching trial.

As we see him voluntarily relinquishing the enjoyments, luxuries, and case of the opulent refinement in which he was born and bred, and choosing the perils and hardships of the wilderness; as we follow him fording swollen streams, climbing rugged mountains, breasting the forest storms, wading through snow-drifts, sleeping in

the open air, living upon the coarse food of hunters and of Indians, we trace with devout admiration the divinely appointed education he was receiving to enable him to meet and endure the fatigues, exposures, and privations, of the War of Independence.

Soon he was called to a more public sphere of action; and we again follow him in his romantic adventures as he travels the far-off wilderness, a special messenger to the French commander on the Ohio, and afterwards, when he led forth the troops of Virginia in the same direction, or accompanied the ill-starred Braddock to the bloodstained banks of the Monongahela. Everywhere we see the hand of God conducting him into danger, that he might extract from it the wisdom of an experience not otherwise to be attained, and develop those heroic qualities by which alone danger and difficulty can be surmounted; but all the while covering him with a shield.

When we think of him, at midnight and in mid-winter, thrown from a frail raft into the deep and angry waters of a wide and rushing western river, thus separated from his only companion through the wilderness, with no aid for miles and leagues about him, buffeting the rapid current and struggling through driving cakes of ice; when we behold the stealthy savage, whose aim against all other marks is unerring, pointing his rifle deliberately at him, and firing, over and over again; when we see him riding through showers of bullets on Braddock's fatal field, and reflect that never, during his whole life, was he ever wounded, or even touched by a hostile force, - do we not feel that he was guarded by an unseen hand, warding off every danger? No peril by flood or field was permitted to extinguish a life consecrated to the hopes of humanity, and to the purposes of Heaven.

For more than sixteen years he rested from his warfare, amid the shades of Mount Vernon, ripening his

mind by reading and reflection, increasing his knowledge of practical affairs, entering into the whole experience of a citizen, at home, and on his farm, and as a delegate to the Colonial Assembly. When, at last, the war broke out and the unanimous voice of the Continental Congress invested him, as the exigency required, with almost unbounded authority, as their Commander-in-chief, he blended, although still in the prime of his life, in the mature bloom of his manhood, the attributes of a sage with those of a hero. A more perfectly fitted and furnished character has never appeared on the theatre of human action, than when, reigning up his war-horse beneath the majestic and venerable elm, still standing at the entrance of the Watertown road to Cambridge, George Washington unsheathed his sword, and assumed the command of the gathered armies of American Liberty.

CHARLES WENTWORTH UPHAM.

2. THE UNSELFISHNESS OF

WASHINGTON.

To the pen of the historian must be resigned the more arduous and elaborate tribute of justice to those efforts of heroic and political virtue which conducted the American people to peace and liberty. The vanquished foe retired. from our shores, and left to the controlling genius who repelled them the gratitude of his own country, and the admiration of the world. The time had now arrived which was to apply the touchstone to his integrity, which was to assay the affinity of his principles to the standard of immutable right.

On the one hand, a realm to which he was endeared by his services almost invited him to empire; on the