nations have thought and felt, why should we not take the path of other nations, and stride on through luxury, and what is called glory, to ruin and oblivion? Every thing depends, under Providence, on the education and intellectual and moral habits of our people. Where each man has, as here, a voice and a vote, the fate of the whole hangs on the disposition and character of the majority. If the majority, the great mass of the nation, are brought up to entertain sober views, to regard consequences, to suspect their passions and respect their reason, to divest themselves of sectional prejudices, to study the things that make for peace, to know and to feel the difference between the holy and profane, and to value virtue more than fame or eloquence or any thing else that can be named, then there can be no fear for our liberty, our prosperity, our union, or stability; no fear of enemies without or factions within, no fear of bad rulers, or misguided mobs, or any permanently evil influence, for power will be righteous, and righteousness will be all powerful; there will be a natural junction of right and might which nothing human can overcome and disturb. But if the majority are to grow up uninformed, undisciplined, discerning nothing but the present, and that but partially and passionately, overflowing with local and petty antipathies, south against north, and east against west, easily inflamed, easily led, and always most easily by the most interested guides, then fear may augur the worst. These remarks are made without any reference to the present promises or prospects of the country, which we are willing to believe are of a favorable description. We have merely been drawing inferences from the nature of our government. We, the people, govern ourselves. The main object of our solicitude, therefore, an object of far more importance than any temporary question of party politics, should be, to know how to govern ourselves, or, which with us amounts to the same thing, how we ought to be governed. In other words, our first political duty is a moral self-education, as thorough as possible, and as widely diffused. If we faithfully attend to this duty, it requires little sagacity to predict that our destiny is a truly glorious one, the most glorious that has yet been achieved on earth. If we neglect it, it requires as little to foresee, that if our fortune is not to be more melancholy than that of other nations has been, it will differ but little from the common course; we shall follow in the beaten track, and pursue the accustomed trade, 'A wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile, But we will pass from this topic, which may be thought to be of too general a nature, and touch upon one or two others which are more special and definite. Let us speak of the influence of a moral education in suppressing or checking a vice which has been said, but we hope not truly, to be more common in this country than in any other. Whether more common or not, it is fearfully prevalent, and comparison is altogether unnecessary to impress us with a vivid sense of its magnitude. We mean the vice of intemperance. We need not describe it, its nature, character, or consequences. We need not tell how odious and degrading it is in itself, and how often it becomes the parent of other vices, as bad or worse. Its ravages have been so extensive and terrible, that within a few years the public attention has been most seriously directed to it, and various measures have been proposed and tried with the design of arresting its progress. For this purpose, societies have been formed, sermons have been preached, tracts have been distributed, newspapers have been established. These means have in some degree, perhaps we should say, in a great degree, effected their end. Let them not be sneered at because they have not effected every thing. There was never a society formed yet, by sensible men, with a moral object in view, which did not accomplish something toward that object. United thoughts suggest expedients, and united efforts arrest public attention. Thus much has been done, if no more, by the societies which have been formed for the suppression of intemperance. From the nature of the case, this is about all which they can do, or ought to be expected to do. Much remains to be done by education, by moral education, which nothing but a moral education can do. The lessons of moderation must be particularly enforced on the young. They must be made to see the sure connection between intemperance and shame and misery. They must be made to consider a spectacle of intoxication in the street, as a subject, not of mirth, but of pity and dread. They must be taught that there are other and better social pleasures than that of drinking; that there are other and more effectual consolations in sorrow than that of drinking; and those pleasures and those consolations must be placed before them, and within their reach. They must be taught to feel that they have a nature too high and heavenly in its origin and capacities, to be enslaved to an indulgence lower than brutal. They must respect it, and fear to wrong and insult and debase it. They must be led to exercise self-government; to know their own strength, and to rejoice in it; to feel themselves superior to a poor temptation of appetite; to feel it to be impossible that they could ever sacrifice their respectability, their substance, their health, their talents, the feelings of their friends, and the favor of their God, to the vile solicitations of intemper ance. These are lessons which can and must be taught, more assiduously than they ever yet have been. These lessons of wisdom, prudence, and duty, begin at the beginning, and by preventing the vice, do better than cure it. They may be inculcated by various instructers, and in ten thousand different ways. They may be taught to the poor, as well as to the rich. There is nothing chimerical in the idea of such instruction. If there is, the idea of any improvement in this respect is chimerical. One thing appears to us very evident, which is, that nothing but lessons of morality and soberness, well taught and well learned, will make us a sober people; for nothing but a moral elevation will raise us above a moral reproach; and those who are low in their thoughts, sentiments, and principles, will be also low, and you cannot help it, in their pleasures and tastes. EXTRACTS From Remarks on the Character of Bonaparte. THERE has always existed, and still exists, a mournful obtuseness of moral feeling in regard to the crimes of military and political life. The wrong doing of public men on a large scale, has never drawn upon them that sincere, hearty abhorrence which visits private vice. Nations have seemed to court aggression and bondage, by their stupid, insane admiration of successful tyrants. The wrongs from which men have suffered most, in body and mind, are yet unpunished, True, Christianity has put into our lips censures on the aspiring and the usurping. But these reproaches are as yet little more than sounds, and unmeaning common places. They are repeated for form's sake. When we read or hear them, we feel that they want depth and strength. They are not inward, solemn, burning convictions, breaking from the indignant soul with a tone of reality, before which guilt would cower. The true moral feeling in regard to the crimes of public men is almost to be created. We are willing to grant that war, abhor it as we may, often developes and places in strong light, a force of intellect and purpose, which raises our conceptions of the human soul. There is, perhaps, no moment in life, in which the mind is brought into such intense action, in which the will is so strenuous, and in which irrepressible excitement is so tempered with self-possession, as in the hour of battle. Still the greatness of the warrior is poor and low, compared with the magnanimity of virtue. It vanishes before the greatness of principle. The martyr to humanity, to freedom, or religion; the unshrinking adherent of despised and deserted truth; who, alone, unsupported and scorned, with no crowd to infuse into him courage, no variety of objects to draw his thoughts from himself, no opportunity of effort or resistance to rouse and nourish energy, still yields himself calmly, resolutely, with invincible philanthropy, to bear prolonged and exquisite suffering, which one retracting word might remove, such a man is as superior to the warrior, as the tranquil and boundless heavens above us, to the low earth we tread beneath our feet. Military talent, even of the highest order, is far from holding the first place among intellectual endowments. It is one of the lower forms of genius; for it is not conversant with the highest and richest objects of thought. We grant that a mind which takes in a wide country at a glance, and understands almost by intuition the positions it affords for a successful campaign, is a comprehensive and vigorous one. The gene ral who disposes his forces so as to counteract a greater force; who supplies by skill, science and genius, the want of numbers; who dives into the counsels of his enemy, and who gives unity, energy, and success to a vast sphere of operations, in the midst of casualties and obstructions which no wisdom could foresee, manifests great power. But still, the chief work of a general is to apply physical force; to remove physi cal obstructions; to avail himself of physical aids and advantages; to act on matter; to overcome rivers, ramparts, mountains and human muscles; and these are not the highest objects of mind, nor do they demand intelligence of the highest order; and, accordingly, nothing is more common than to find men, eminent in this department, who are almost wholly wanting in the noblest energies of the soul; in imagination and taste, in the capacity of enjoying works of genius, in large views of human nature, in the moral sciences, in the application of analysis and generalization to the human mind and to society, and in original conceptions on the great subjects which have absorbed the most glorious understandings. The office of a great general does not differ widely from that of a great mechanician, whose business it is to frame new combinations of physical forces, to adapt them to new circumstances, and to remove new obstructions. Accordingly great generals, away from the camp, are commonly no greater men than the mechanician taken from his work shop. In conversation they are often dull. Works of profound thinking on general and great topics, they cannot comprehend. The conqueror of Napoleon, the hero of Waterloo, undoubtedly possesses great military talents; but we have never heard of his eloquence in the senate, or of his sagacity in the cabinet; and we venture to say, that he will leave the world, without adding one new thought on the great themes, on which the genius of philosophy and legislature has meditated for ages. We will not go down for illustration to such men as Nelson, a man great on the deck, but debased by gross vices, and who never pretended to enlargement of intellect. To institute a comparison in point of talent and genius between such men, and Milton, Bacon, and Shakspeare, is almost an insult on these illustrious names. Who can think of these truly great intelligences; of the range of their minds through heaven and earth; of their deep intuition into the soul; of their new and glowing combinations of thought; of the energy with which they grasped and subjected to their main purpose, the infinite materials of illustration which nature and life afford; who can think of the forms of transcendent beauty and grandeur which they created, or which were rather emanations of their own minds; of the calm wisdom and fervid impetuous imagination which they conjoined; of the dominion which they have exerted over so many generations, and which time only extends and makes sure; of the voice of power, in which, though dead, |