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sult from this new and healthy impulse imparted to the national life. We repeat it then-More than any particular measures of national economy, more than anything else beside, do we now want the moral power of honest, honorable, highminded, conscientious menmen of open, frank, and manly characters-men elevated far above all that

petty fraud, intrigue, and meanness, which has so long characterized the famous, or rather infamous, school, whose whole political creed was "party usages and regular nominations," and whose sole governing principle was the ineffably abominable doctrine of "the spoils."

THE ENCHANTED CITY.

In a fair and verdant valley by the borders of the sea,
Stands a love-enchanted city, none of all so fair to me;
Memories of love and beauty haunt its every street and square,
As the never-ceasing music of its river haunts the air.

When discordant bells were tolling at the summer sunset-hour,
I beheld the day departing from the city's loftiest tower;
Silently the night ascended o'er the landscape of the town,
And with raven wings extended threw its mighty shadow down.
Soon beyond the level meadows, fragrant with the dews of June,
Clad in chaste and queenly splendor rose the melancholy moon;
And above the pine-clad mountains in the northern skies afar,
O'er the snows of endless winter shone the steadfast polar star.
One by one the stars ascended. Ever shifting with the hours,
Many-numbered on the pavements fell the shadows of the towers.
At my feet the river glided, tremulous with the light of stars,
And above me, red with slaughter, hung the fiery shield of Mars.
From the market-place beneath me, from the populous streets afar,
I could hear an angry murmur like the sullen voice of war:
And behold a throng, like phantoms, in the misty shades of night
Pass alarmedly beneath me like an army in its flight.

Then the midnight chimes proceeded from the gray, gigantic tower,
And the watchmen, through the city, told the tidings of the hour.
Listening I heard no longer voices in the city's mart,

Nor the sound of nightly labor like the beating of its heart.
I beheld within the city gardens filled with flowers in bloom,
And beyond its beauteous borders many a grave-encircled tomb,
From the waterfall and fountain, from the star-illumined stream,
Strains of soft incessant music lulled the city in its dream.
I forgot the household legends-how along the valley here
Once in undisturbed dominion roamed the hunters of the deer;
Here in rude fantastic dances, chorus of the chase they sung,
And the fierce and fearful war-whoop in the awakened valley rung.
Where beside the winding river rise the city's gilded spires,
Oft those rude and tawny sachems burned, of old, their council-fires;
Now their memories have departed, and their numbers are no more,
Like the foliage of the forest, like the sand upon the shore.

History was all forgotten-only memories of love

Seemed to haunt the winds around me, waves below and skies above;
All the squares with fragrant lindens overshadowed evermore,
They were haunted and enchanted with thy memory, Isadore!

South Attleboro, Mass. 1845.

stant and steady decline of prices of stocks. Political causes have, undoubtedly, a large share in this decline, but the apprehension of the effect of the general money concerns of England, of the large investments in railroads, is not without its influence; and therefore we propose to say a few words upon this topic. The assumption that the millions upon millions subscribed to railroads must operate to the derangement of the circulating medium, and consequently to the embarassment of general business, seems to us unfounded. While, indeed, the preliminary deposits are locked up, and until active operations are commenced, there might be some little pressure occasioned, because the amount was very considerable; but even that pressure seems to us to have been overrated-for the Accountant-General, into whose hands these deposits are paid, invested them in the public stocks, and of course liberated therefrom an amount of capital to become disposable for general purposes, equal to that invested.

As to the capital of these enterprises, when once commenced it is paid out almost as fast as paid in, and returned to general circulation-so that no derangement is thereby occasioned; and then, as a matter of fact, the investments in English railroads having thus far proved so profitable as to yield, upon an average, considerably over 4 per cent. per annum-the usual rate of interest-they must be looked upon as adding to, rather than abstracting from, the active com. mercial capital of the country.

On another point misapprehension prevails, as to the proportion between the real wealth of the country, and what is usually considered its circulating medium. Let us take the example of England. It is estimated, by statistical writers, that the "fee simple of the resources of the British empire is worth six thousand millions sterling-while the circulation of the Bank of England amounts to only twenty millions; so that the real and personal property held by British subjects is to the amount of Bank of England notes, as three hundred to one. In other words, for every five pounds represented by a Bank of England note, there are fourteen hundred and ninety-five pounds not so represented of bona fide property, consisting of lands, houses, ships, agricultural produce, and manufacturing stock belonging to the people of that realm." In this view, the

panic which occasionally arises because of a few millions variation in the supply of gold, or the amount of Bank note issues, will seem remarkably disproportioned to the relation existing between such sums and the whole property of the kingdom.

From these and like considerations, it seems to us that the apprehension which did undoubtedly weigh over the London market at the last dates-though in a less degree than before-of the bad effects of the railroad investments, was unfounded, and soon will be ascertained so to be; and, as a consequence, we think any distrust here that money is to be any more scarce in London, is equally without foundation.

In our opinion, therefore, there is no reason to believe that difficulties in our money market are to be occasioned by scarcity or tightness of money in England; nor do we see-except in so far as uncertainty always operates unfavorably

anything in the present aspect of the political questions in agitation between the two countries, to cause sad difficulties. The recent message of the President in answer to a call of the Senate, does not vary our position, nor in any degree abate our confidence in an eventual peaceful arrangement. The utmost that can be made of that message is, that the President now avows openly what before was inculcated underhandedly and irresponsibly, but still publicly-that there is enough of doubt about our position, with respect both to England and Mexico, to authorize some precautionary measures of self-defence. If this had been as frankly said in the message at the commencement of the session, all would have approved it; as, indeed, all who knew anything of the defenceless state of the country, expected it. The ight of the thing is not altered by delay, nor is the expediency of the course recommended less obvious now than before-but yet the moment chosen is inopportune. Still we apprehend no evil from the message, and trust that the Committees of the Senate to which is intrusted the charge of military and naval affairs, will soon make a report, so that it may be seen what amount of appropriations, and what extent of armament, are contemplated. The revenues now accruing are insufficient for any considerable increase of expenditure, and if such increase is to be encountered, loans or direct taxes must at once be resorted to for the means. The latter

Their directors may resolutely shut their eyes and ears, and go on discounting the same as ever. But this cannot last. If prudence does not teach them, bankruptcy soon will. The power of banks in a convulsion is like that of ships in a storm; they can at best but avert and overcome its perils, but must not presume to still or even direct the warring elements. Should they do so, the rebuke of their temerity is speedy and signal. No vulgar error is more gross than the supposition that banks may combine to increase or diminish essentially the volume of the currency, and thus to raise or depress the money value of property. As well might the frailest bark undertake to reverse the tides.

The Sub-Treasury project is to pass, for we assume that the dominant party is not quite ready to enter a cognovit on all the hobbies which it rode in the canvass which gave it power. "The whole of Oregon" is virtually given up by the action of the present Congress, while Mr. Walker's thoroughly free-trade report, and partially corresponding bill, must stand back for the substitute of the House Committee of Ways and Means, giving a higher range of duties on Woolens, Cottons, &c., and diverging as plainly if not as widely from free-trade principles, as does the present tariff. On no grounds but those of Protection can this bill be sustained; it is in truth simply a weaker and worse, a more timid and diluted Protective Tariff than that of 1842. We cannot see how a well-informed and earnest free-trader can commit himself to the support of such a measure. And now if the Sub-Treasury were to be thrown overboard, either openly or by an obliteration of its essential features, the party which elected Mr. Polk might as well confess its positions and doctrines of 1844 a stupendous fabric of imposture, resign the seals, and go into liquidation. But this, pride, interest and ambition will not permit, and therefore we cannot doubt the passage of the Sub-Treasury, "in spite of lamentations here or elsewhere." And, since it is to pass, why not in the shape it is to wear to the end? That it is to produce contraction, convulsion, suffering, is conceded in every attempt to give it a modified, graduated operation. No sincere advocate of the measure could vote for such a glaring violation of its essential principle as is involved in the collection and retention of two-thirds of the Revenue in bank notes, if he did not

believe that the collection forthwith of the whole in specie would prove disastrous. But to make such a revolution as this bill proposes take effect by degrees, can never modify the essential character of that revolution, nor even its essential consequences; it can only serve to blind the less observing millions to the causes of their sufferings. And this is in truth the main object of the gradualists. They fear the public will not swallow the whole quart of their nostrum, so they present it in four half-pint doses. If they asked us but to take one as a sample, there would be some difference in favor of gradualism; but, since the same act binds us to take the whole, there really

is none.

But mark the difference against it. The currency is now mainly sound and yet sufficient; the banks solvent, yet actively benefiting their customers and the public. But pass the Sub-Treasury in the graduated form, and the power of the banks to facilitate business will be diminished, while they will be forced to the unpleasant and unpopular resort of curtailment and collection. In the agony of contraction, some of the weaker institutions will go to the wall, creating a panic and a run upon the whole. Soon the inevitable stringency and occasional ruin of a bank will be appealed to as reasons for an entire divorce from banks and paper money, because of their fluctuations and insecurity; and thus the consequences of the Loco-foco nostrum will be brazenly adduced as its causes. The Government will be held by its advocates to have cut loose from banks because they were unsafe and useless, when in fact it has made them so by its predetermination to do this very thing. Every consideration of justice, business, policy, combines to urge that the measure should take the shape at first that it is to wear to the end; and we cannot believe that Whigs will lend their aid to any scheme of which the design is to mystify and delude.

That the practical evil of the Sub-Treasury, honestly and faithfully enforced, will be far greater than many even of its adversaries anticipate, we have long considered inevitable. The real point of danger is rarely touched in the popular discussions on this subject. Whether the Government shall see fit to keep its deposits with banks or elsewhere, and to make its transfers of funds by means of drafts or guarded wagon-loads of specie,

is a question which derives far greater importance from considerations which do not strike the general mind. That the Government should see fit to keep its own funds, and to that end should withdraw them from banks, even though it were to hoard them inflexibly in specie, is not enough in itself to convulse the business and paralyze the industry of a nation so energetic and so prosperous as ours. The use of the five to ten millions per annum which constitute the aggregate balance in the Treasury might be lost either to business or banks, and hardly be felt. But when the Government openly, ostentatiously determines to withdraw its deposites from and cease all dealings with or trust in banks, the moral influence of such a resolve cannot fail to be great, and to be felt in every corner of the Union. The example appeals forcibly to the ignorant and the timid, especially among those who justify and sustain it, for imitation, and imitated it will be. We know that already individuals who had hoarded sums in bank notes, have, since the Sub-Treasury passed the House, taken them to the banks and drawn the specie thereon, in order to be secure against apprehended danger, who would not have thought of so doing but for the action in Congress. This process must go on and become general when the act goes into operation. Guardians, trustees, treasurers and individual depositors, will be impelled to convert their funds into coin, and place them beyond the reach of whatever consequences may result from so vital a change of national policy. The banks will thus be driven, by a perpetual drain of specie, to contractions far beyond their present anticipations.

But when to this moral influence of the Sub-Treasury is added the practical, inevitable effect of the Government's denying avowedly, uniformly, inflexibly, to all bank notes the character of money, or its legitimate and honest representative, no apprehension can magnify the reality of the desolation which must ensue. Bank issues now form nearly the entire circulating medium of the country; they are universally accepted without hesitation or doubt as money, and pass from hand to hand with a celerity which defies calculation. The six hundred millions of dollars of specie in France do not, and could not, perform the service which is here done by less than one hundred millions of coin and a

bank circulation resting thereon averaging something like one hundred and fifty millions. A tiny slip of paper, prepared in five minutes and sent by mail at an expense of ten cents, effects a transfer of a million or more from New York or Boston to St. Louis or New Orleans, without agitation or remark, when that same transfer, if made in coin, as of old, would have cost thousands, and required the labor of several persons for weeks. A contraction of even fifty millions in the bank note circulation of the country necessarily involves a contraction of credits, of operations and of money values, to ten times that amount.

Now let us suppose the Sub-Treasury established as the law of the land, in that shape which all agree that it must ultimately assume if it is to be a reality, and not a pestilent, profligate sham, and that its requisitions are faithfully enforced. Does any man, can any man, believe that the present system of bank credits and circulation will not be violently affected? When the Government has written glaringly over the doors of all its customhouses, land-offices, post-offices, &c., "No Bank Notes taken-nothing receiv ed or known here as money but the hard coin itself," can any one think that everybody else but the Government is to go on receiving and regarding bank notes as heretofore? Will not the citizen who has twice or thrice been repulsed from the post office, where important advices awaited him, because he happened to have nothing but good bank notes in his pocket, be careful to have something else another time, and to that end convert his notes into specie? Will not the prudent merchant, daily required to make payments at the Custom-House, take care to have a supply of the only money there recognized, stowed away against the possible event of a suspension caused by this very exaction? Will not the emigrant going westward, the land speculator, the capitalist seeking profitable investment,&c., all take with them that medium which will alone pay for lands, instead of that which is most convenient? The notes or certificates of a New York or Boston bank will no longer be worth more in the West than the specie they promise, because no longer accepted at the land-office, or used by it in remitting its funds. In short, bank notes, no longer answering all the purposes of money, must cease to be regarded as the equivalent of coin, because no longer

House divided, and resolved, by a vote of three hundred and thirty-seven against two hundred and forty, to go into committee on the Customs and Corn Importation Act at once, rather than postpone its consideration for six months, as proposed by the rejected amendment of Mr. Miles. This vote settles the question, so far as the Commons are concerned, and will not be without its influence on the House of Lords. The truth is, the time has come, when the abolition of protective duties on articles of food, which the people of Great Britain require for their sustenance, must be abolished. In the course he has pursued, the Premier has only obeyed the dictates of that substantial and sovereign public sentiment which no statesman, in a country which has in its constitution so many popular elements as England, can safely disregard. Had he not preferred to lead it, he must inevitably have been crushed by it. The policy he has pursued will almost certainly be adopted by Parliament, and approved by the people. At a subsequent setting, a motion of Mr. Villiers, to make the abolition of duties immediate, instead of gradual, was rejected by a still larger majority-the vote standing, Ayes 78, Noes 265.

The most stirring news comes from INDIA. The British arms, in their career of indefinite Asiatic conquest, apparently as limitless as Alexander's ambition, have achieved a victory over the Seikhs, the inhabitants of the Punjaub, remarkable at once for its brilliancy, importance, and the blood which it cost. For several months a very large British force has been concentrated upon the frontier of the territory of the Seikhs, for the alleged purpose of checking any anarchy, by which the peace of the British dominions might be threatened. The army of the Seikhs likewise moved toward the Sutlej, and from the 11th to the 14th of December last, made the passage of that river, and threatened the advanced posts of the British army, with some 80,000 fighting-men and about one hundred and fifty pieces of artillery, "of the largest calibre movable in the field, and exquisitely finished-an artillery immeasurably more powerful than was ever brought into the field by Wellington or Napoleon." Sir Henry Hardinge, the Governor-General, and Sir Hugh Gough, Commander-in-chief, immediately hastened to repel them. By forced marches, a part of their force came up in time, and the men, parched with thirst and sinking with fatigue, were led, at once, against the foe. A doubtful success on the 18th, was followed by a suspension of hostilities until the 21st and 22d, when was waged a most severe and remarkable contest. The force of the Seikhs is stated at 60,000, with a hundred guns, and strongly intrenched.

The British had about one-third that number, with few guns, and those light. They attacked the enemy, forced them from their guns, with immense carnage, and finally, after a protracted and most bloody struggle, drove them entirely from the field. Even according to the British official reports, they lost about 4,000 of their soldiers in this engagement, and many of their ablest and most gallant officers, of whom Sir Robert Sale was one.

This is undoubtedly but the opening of the campaign; and if the British troops meet so firm and so fatal a resistance at each step of their progress as that which marked the commencement of the war, the conquest of the Punjaub, and its annexation to the British dominions, will not be speedily or cheaply accomplished. That it has been resolved upon, is officially declared, in a proclamation recently issued by the Governor-General.

No action or debate has been had in Parliament on American affairs, nor do the public journals contain anything of especial interest to this country. The proposition, to which we have before alluded, of transmuting the Republic of Mexico into a Monarchy, and seating upon the throne a Bourbon prince, of the Spanish branch, is actively canvassed by the semi-official papers of London, Paris and Madrid. All agree upon the feasibility of the scheme, and upon its importance, as affording the only means of checking the rapid and threatening aggrandizement of the American Union. Whether the Governments of England, France and Spain are in any way connected with this intrigue, can, of course, only be a matter of conjecture. But the favor with which the project is received, the zeal with which it is urged, and the peculiar motive which is avowed by its leading advocates, are well calculated to attract the attention, and excite the curiosity of the people of this country. The first step towards its accomplishment must, of course, be to secure the acquiescence of the Mexicans themselves, as without that nothing can be done; and in connection with this point, the fact is not unimportant, that a new paper has been recently established in Mexico, for the express purpose of advocating such a change. Thus far, however, it has not been received with any indications of public favor.

In the literary world we hear of no startling novelties. Publishers are enforced to suspend operations until the intense political excitement shall have passed away, and the public shall be again at liberty to read. A very good collection of the Miscellanies of SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH has been made by one of his sons, and is issued in three octavo volumes. The first part of Bell's Life of CANNING has been published. Without being a biography of any extraor

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