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perils of warfare, amidst the noise, and fire, and smoke, and carnage of the battle, whether on the ocean or on the land, the American squadrons do by no means yield the palm of deliberate valour, accomplished skill, and heroic patriotism, to the embodied legions of ancient Greece and Rome, nor to the well-appointed hosts of the greatest nations of modern Europe. There must be much of intrinsic, radical excellence in the political institutions of a country, which have lent their efficient aid to form the physical, intellectual, and moral character of such a people as are now spreading themselves over the vast and various territory of the United States, and daily and hourly reclaiming the waste and wilderness from the dominion of nature to the cultivation of man. And while these general causes continue to operate, the people of the United States will continue to average a physical, intellectual, and moral superiority over those of every other nation; and so long may they well continue to cherish their present form of government as admirably adapted to their feelings, their affections, their habits, and their interests.

It is, however, quite another and a distinct consideration, how far a government, based altogether in democracy, where the people, either immediately or mediately; that is to say, immediately in their own persons, or mediately through the medium of electors chosen by themselves, elect all their rulers, executive, senatorial, and representative; how far such a government would be able to sustain the pressure of an overgrown population, elbowing each other for a morsel of bread, and greatly deteriorated in their physical, intellectual, and moral qualities, as in the old and fully peopled countries of Europe. At this hour, the United States do not average five persons to a square mile; the state of New-York gives only twenty to every square mile, and the most populous state, Connecticut, not more than fifty; whereas, in England, Ireland, France, and the United Netherlands, the average is two hundred souls to each square mile. And it becomes a serious question for the American statesman to ponder whether or not

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the present form and system of government will be able to restrain and keep in order such a populace as now presses upon the respective rulers in Paris, London, and Dublin; and whether or not the many myriads, who must then be scantily fed, clothed, lodged, and taught, will be apt, by dint of universal suffrage, to pass an Agrarian law; or, by the more summary mode of sudden violence, scatter the property of the comparatively few who might then be in easy circumstances?

At all events, such a state of things opens a wide field of active enterprise to ambitious and unprincipled demagogues, inviting them to put into riotous motion the great mass of the people; and what such a mass, so put in motion, can do, has been fully shown by revolution ary France; the effects of whose anarchial movements are seen all over Europe at this moment, and will never cease to be felt, in every nerve and artery of man's social state, as long as the world itself endures. Whatever other political lessons the French revolution might have taught, it has rendered perfectly intelligible this truth; namely, that whenever the people of any country choose to move in mass, they can tear up from its foundations their existing government, and scatter its fragments to the winds of heaven; and there never are wanting, perhaps, in any country, (certainly not in any country whose political institutions are cast in a popular mould,) a sufficient number of daring and turbulent spirits, who eagerly desire so to stir up and incite the popu lace to violence, that they themselves may ride aloft in the whirlwind, and direct the storm. The Emperor Alexander seems to be so much alive to this sign of the times, that he actually appears to labour to play the part of a good democrat himself.

At the present hour, indeed, no such danger presses imminently upon the United States; nor will it, probably, so long as the western country opens such an immense extent of fertile soil, and favourable location, that those needy and desperate adventurers, whose pernicious habits of idleness and vice render them alike

unable and unfit to live in a state of orderly and wellregulated society, can flock thither, and evaporate, in reclaiming the wilderness, that factious violence, and discontented disposition, which would be much more destructively employed in plundering the property and cutting the throats of their more sober-minded fellowcitizens. M. Talleyrand was greatly surprised to find that in the United States, some few years after the close of the revolutionary war, the ordinary effects of a revolution were not visible in the condition of the community; and he philosophizes on it thus: every change lays the foundation for another, says Machiavelli; and, in fact, without speaking of the hatreds which they perpetuate, and of the motives for vengeance which they leave in the minds of men, revolutions that have shaken every thing, and in which the whole community has taken part, create a general restlessness of mind, a craving after change, an indefinite eagerness for hazardous enterprises, a vague and turbulent ambition, whose tendencies are unceasingly to alter and destroy every thing that is.

This is more emphatically true, when the revolution has been made in the name of liberty;-a free government, says Montesquieu; that is, one always agitated; and it being impossible to stop the agitation, it must be regulated so as to exercise itself, not at the expense, but for the promotion of the public happiness. After the crisis of revolutions, there are always many men worn out and made old under the impression of misfortune: such men are not apt to love their country, in which they have experienced nothing but misery; and their hatred must be guarded against, and, if possible, rendered impotent. Time and good laws, indeed, will do much; but establishments and outlets for such dangerous beings are necessary. In America, after a revolution, very dissimilar doubtless to that of France, there remained only slight traces of ancient animosities; but little agitation and inquietude; few, or none, of those symptoms which, in general, threaten every moment the

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tranquillity of states newly bursting into freedom. One great cause of this strange appearance deserves consideration.

No doubt the American, like other revolutions, had left in the minds of men dispositions to excite or receive new troubles; but this need of agitation had been able to find a different satisfaction in a vast and new country, where adventurous projects allure the mind; where immense tracts of uncultivated lands give men a facility of employing a fresh activity, far from the scene of their first dissensions; of placing their hopes and fears in fresh speculations; of plunging themselves at once into the midst of a crowd of new schemes; of amusing themselves by frequent change of place; and eventually extinguishing, within their bosoms, the flame of the revolutionary passions.

This very facility, however, of emigration into the western country, raises another very important question for the contemplation of the American statesman. The direct tendency of such emigration is to enable the western territory, in the course of a few years, to outnumber, both in the senate and in the House of Representatives, the Atlantic States; which being done, the Western States, as great inland nations, and erroneously considering that the commercial policy of the Atlantic seaboard is opposed to their agricultural interests, will be apt to sacrifice that commercial policy to their own mistaken views of territorial aggrandizement. Such an alteration in the system of government would be most pernicious to New-England, the cradle of the revolution, and the efficient founder of American independence. The soil of New-England does not raise a sufficient quantity of provisions to maintain a crowded population, but its long line of sea and river coast, its numerous harbours, and the habitual enterprise of its people, give it a commercial capability, certainly never surpassed, if ever equalled by any other nation. Hence Mr. Pickering, one of the most enlightened and intrepid of her statesmen, said, in reference to his New-England fellow citizens, that their farms were on the ocean.

Great as was once the weight of New-England in the American councils, her influence of late has been borne down by the preponderance of the west. New-England, including Massachusetts and Maine, New-Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode-Island, and Connecticut, covers only a surface of little more than sixty thousand square miles, and contains a population of about one million and a half; whereas, the western country already counts a greater number of states-as Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiani, and Louisiana, which give it a preponderance in the senate of the United States;-in addition to which there is an immense extent of surplus territory, out of which new states without number may be carved in the lapse of a few years. Its population already reaches between two and three millions, which enables it to vote down New-England in the House of Representatives; and it covers a surface of more than one million five hundred thousand square miles; that is to say, more than fifteen times as large as the British Isles, England, Ireland, and Scotland, put together, and averages a fertile soil, admirably adapted to sustain a very full and numerous population; a population abundantly sufficient to outvote not only the NewEngland, but all the other Atlantic States, all the states that composed the old Union which converted America from a British colony into an independent empire.

The commercial policy is necessary to the very existence of New-England, whose depopulation must follow as an inevitable result from its destruction or restriction, and its tide of emigration augments the numbers and resources of that western country, which is inclined to strike a deathblow to the prosperity of the Atlantic seaboard. There cannot well be a more erroneous political theory, than that the interests of agriculture are opposed to those of commerce, and conversely; for the facts and proofs that merely agricultural nations can never become either prosperous or powerful, and that commerce most materially forwards the improvement of agriculture itself, and of national wealth and civiliza