has commerce as its handmaid. The best have, on the other hand, been those that had open heads and hearts to its many wants. Good sense has, let us be thankful, stolen a march on the nonsense (never shared by Washington, or Franklin, or Hamilton) that wanted Washington City to stagnate in rustic seclusion. It is growing into a metropolis in spite of the many stupidities and villanies which existed in consequence of defective municipal organizations. A similar correcting process has also been going on as to the capitals of the states, and soon they will all either have created commercial enlightenments within and around them, or they will be removed to places in which the business of the country has made its homes. Who does not see that Harrisburg, Annapolis, Raleigh, Columbia, Milledgeville, and Frankfort were mislocations for state capitals? They are being changed, or have been already, because it is now seen that corruption is nowhere so gigantic as where it can fleece commerce at a safe distance. Trade is powerless against the machinations of uncommercial, illiterate, low and narrow-minded upstarts, who rob and plunder states and cities, because they use their vulgarities as covers for their dishonesty. Washington has never yet been all it might have been to the Union; and thus it has come that canal, road, and railroad policies, that should have been national works, have been city undertakings. The hearts of commerce have thereby become cramped for means and enfeebled by abuses of their public credit. Had Washington City been correctly in the public mind, it would have been the pivot and radiating point of all such enterprises. Then America would have had a capital commensurate to its greatness.

Evidently, then, the country is enforcing its constitution and slowly fixing up its own map! It will, so far as we can see, change very little as an entirety, but it will in time be much altered internally. The map made by political theorists, with its straight lines, its Mason and Dixon line, or thirty-fifth parallel, or its thirty-six-forty range, will be broken into by policies which the country's nature, its lakes, rivers, mountains, sea inlets, valleys, productions and trade, will dictate. The foundation and development of society will absorb far more the public mind than the creation of political states and peoples. Cities free from rustic oppressions and brakes, put on by legislatures that are jealous and envious of the good and well-to-do men of our cities, but servile accessories of those who manipulate parties for personal ends, will yet arise in America and act upon it as the Hanseatic cities of continental Europe did in the Middle Ages. It may have been, yea, we may say it was,

impolitic and wrong in Europe to allow cities to grow up that tyrannized over adjacent territories, but it is worse still to allow country neighbourhoods or inland populations to wield absolute power over cities. The first was a spoliation of agriculture for trade and commerce as well as luxurious rulers; the second is in many parts of the United States a quartering of country politicians upon the business of cities. We would have neither; but both country and cities free, and yet co-operative for the common good.

In this view of the case it becomes an exceedingly interesting question, whether the federative organism of the United States is favorable to or obstructive of free commerce? The history of the writer's native land teaches him, that the independence of cities from the subjection of the sovereign princes, that held the territories within which the cities were situated, was the main lever that lifted mediæval Europe out of its feudal wrongs. It instructs him however, also, that subsequently these cities, having no government over them than the (mostly distant) emperor and the procrastinating federal diet, fell under the rule of local tyrannies, which were either the city nobilities or the guilds of mechanics and traders; and that as such they became obstacles to the general development, so that their entire autonomy had to be suppressed.

With this in our minds we inquire naturally; What position. do cities occupy in the United States? And to ask the question brings out at once the fact that the question has really never occupied the minds of the people of the United States, and that the cities are subjects of state sovereignty or, in plainer language, of state absolutism. This cannot be their right relation in the long run, because large cities are more national or, if you please, cosmopolitan than local in their nature. Congress should therefore have a supervisory jurisdiction over them, or what would answer as well, a veto upon state legislation when imposed on cities of a certain class. That done and we would not hesitate to hold that federal organisms are in America as elsewhere the most favorable to the liberties of municipalities.

In this view of the case the thought naturally arises, how queerly the cities are placed upon the map of the country! Not a single city that is not hampered in her natural development by some sovereign jurisdiction other than that to which she is herself subject; and what is worse, this very sovereignty that rules over her has often inland or country interests that are inimical to her, and are in a majority in the respective legislature. The fact that large cities are in their very nature national, indeed cosmopolitan, and that their con

cerns are never of mere local interest to the nation, should long ago have induced inquiries into the proper relations which they ought to have to and in our federal organism. But we look in vain for such provisions in the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Ordinance of 1787, or the United States Constitution. In fact, so far as we know, there is not a single state constitution, except Ohio, that speaks of them at all. The neglect dates, indeed, back to our colonial existence, for there also cities were the mere appendages of the colonies, just as they are now of our states. Can this thing go on for ever? Or will some American statesman take hold of this subject and free our cities from rules of action that are borrowed from feudal law? We can here only say generally, that the sooner the national bearing of our larger cities is recognized in some national act the better will be the general development of the country. We do not advocate the independence of cities of the states in which they lie similar to Novgorod used to be in Russia, or to Hamburg in Germany, or Florence in Italy, but we think that Congress should have some protective and regulative jurisdiction, so as to guard them against their being crippled in their national capacities and general usefulness. Now, as we look upon the map and notice the political subdivisions by states, counties, cities, &c., they appear all to be misplaced towards each other; the cities are nearly all in the wrong states, or the states have the wrong cities.

These our premises point, in our opinion, unerringly to certain marked features in the topography of the country as the initial lines in its national politics. They consist of its large sea frontage with its fine harbors and inlets at Naraganset Bay, at the mouth of the Hudson, at Chesapeake Bay, Port Royal entrance, Pensacola Bay, the Mississippi, San Diego, San Francisco, the mouth of the Columbia River, and the Straits of San Juan de Fuca. All these protest against an illiberal, mere inland policy. The spinal cord of the Union consists of the mountain ranges rising near the Upper Delaware in Pennsylvania, and running south-westward into Georgia and Alabama. The cohesive tendencies lie in the Mississippi valley, for no section of the Union will be willing to be without it. The rivers flowing into and with this axis are the ligaments that bind us together. Even the great lakes in the north, centrifugal as their direction is, have not affected the main centripetal tendencies. We have long believed that all our states outside of New England have been too large, and that they were improperly constructed by arbitrary north and south and east and west lines. A rectification will have to come, the sooner the

better, and then we shall have a firmer Union, because a vast amount of tyranny, that has hitherto been perpetrated under cover of state sovereignty and state jealousy, will be done away with. Both rest on artificial territorial lines, so that it needs only the drawing of a map by natural lines to see the absurdity of the pretensions for which the artificial ones furnished the opportunities.

And if we now ask, Have we a country? we may freely answer in the affirmative. Yea, we may be emphatic and say: We have a great country! It is flattering to us and to our statesmen as a whole, but not in political detail. We understand its natural laws far too little for our good, and are not only careless but actually disobedient children. In one sense we are, however, like the country; our little virtues make up a very fair total when summed up together. Our love of country is still an all-embracing operation, but not at all like that of the Greeks, with whom the land and the people melted together into an indigenous character. It is more like that of the Roman who loved Rome for its power; but it is again unlike his, because ours is not at all a city love or a local attachment that expanded into a national devotion. Beneath it, and strangely enough not excluded by it, we have sectional dislikes. Sumner could write to a foreign-born professor, Francis Lieber, "I wonder that your free spirit can endure the bondage to which opinion in the south must subject you." And a representative from South Carolina could strike down Sumner on the floor of the senate for his speech on "the barbarism of slavery." Reflect now that the Professor would have had to lie to have admitted that he was subject to any bondage, just as the assailant of Sumner saw no barbarism in slavery. The letter and the blow only proved that there was within the bosom of both Sumner and Keith an inner hate that vitiated their love of country. Neither had ever digested what a great task it is to love so great a country and people, as that of the United States, in all singleness of heart.

The country itself-mark it!-has always been more liberal to all its inhabitants than they have been to each other. Nowhere is its climate deathly to any of them, and in nine-tenths thereof actually salubrious. Most of the diseases, the yellow fever excepted, are far more caused by false living, than by climatic causes, and it generally requires but a very moderate attention to these to mitigate their ill effects, if not to overcome them entirely. The sparseness of the original Indian population was far more caused by their false ways of living and their wars upon each other than by malaria and other inherent

B

causes of sickness in the country itself. The most serious evil lies in the extremes of weather, which seem inseparable from continental configurations such as that of America. They exist, however, elsewhere, as the Scotch proverb proves of Scotland. They say of it

"One day is wun' an' weet,

The second is thaw and sleet;

The third of them is a peel a bane,

And freezes the wee bird's neb tae stanes."

The openness of the country north along the lakes; its mountain ranges so far as they shut off the warm winds from Texas, the Carolinas, Georgia, &c., and the moisture of the Pacific, will keep producing climatic conditions to which these stanzas may apply; but they are not often of long duration, and at other seasons are compensated by beautiful weather. We know ourselves of many localities that were unhealthy for every newcomer, but which are now healthy for all who adapt their modes of life to the hygienic rules pointed out by science. And in this connection we may anticipate a point that belongs, perhaps, more properly to the chapters that treat of questions of population, namely, the immense wearing-out of brain and muscle which is going on in America in consequence of the peculiar character of all pursuit of wealth therein. It is a scramble for riches, not competence. Of such folks, as quoted already, Lessing says: "A people so eager for gain care but little whether it is got rightfully or wrongfully, or whether by cunning or by force." We have no doubt that the chief stimulus to this intense zest for riches arises out of the opportunities for large landed possessions and the easy production they afford to settlers, so that slow, meagre, and laborious as well as skilful working for a moderate but steady increase in wealth, looks like out of place in America. Hot haste to be rich has its effects in peculiar economic moral and political dispositions, which centre in desires to have a big country and to be a big nation. And these things carry with them much individual subjection. They crush out many local prejudices by widening man's sphere of action, but they put also a heavy foot on numerous personal aspirations and individual free-will. Not only our land is massive, but our people and our society too! And there is in our populations, as in our storms and physical phenomena of all kinds, an impatience, a hurry, and a push that frequently puts its rough heel on folks that have "ventured in a sea of glory far beyond their depth," being tempted thereunto by the seemingly inexhaustible resources that lie around everywhere