most part, an agricultural people, sparse, not crowded into towns and cities, with plenty of new and fertile lands, easy to be obtained, and yielding a rich and immediate reward to the cultivator. Our wants were few, our manners and tastes were simple, and life with us was uniform and little exposed to vicious temptations. Government had little to do, for all moved on harmoniously, as it were, of itself. It must have been a bad government, indeed, that could, at once, have corrupted us, and hindered our growth and prosperity. So were we in the outset; but so are we no longer. Our population has become comparatively dense; our new lands are exhausted, or have receded so far in the distance as to be no longer of easy access, or attainable at all by the inhabitants of the older States, who have not some little capital in advance. We have become a populous and a wealthy country, a great manufacturing and trading people, as well as a great agricultural people; we are separating, more and more, capital and labor, and have the beginnings of a constantly increasing operative class, unknown to our fathers, doomed always to be dependent on employment by the class who represent the capital of the country, for the means of subsistence, and therefore to die of hunger and nakedness, when employment fails them; we are brought, by improvements in steam navigation, alongside of the Old World, into immediate contact with its vicious and corrupt civilization; we are no longer isolated, no longer a simple, primitive people; our old manners have passed, or are rapidly passing, away; our increasing wealth brings in with it luxury, poverty, and distress, as well as refinement, and a more general culture.

test.

Here is what we have become. It is now, under these altered circumstances both of the country and the people, that the virtues of our institutions are put to the These institutions have as yet had no severe trial. The peculiar advantages of our position are sufficient to account for all the superiority, under a moral and social point of view, we have hitherto exhibited. But, if, with these advantages, our institutions have suffered

us so to deteriorate, will they suffice to restore us to our former elevation? Nay, if, with these advantages, we have, under these institutions, fallen nearly to a level with the Old World, and shown a rapid decline in the stern and rigid virtues, the high-toned and manly qualities we are accustomed to boast in our ancestors, unparalleled in other Christian nations, not excepting even England, to what can we attribute so lamentable a fact, but to our peculiar institutions themselves? The result, to which we have come, is attributable to no slight or accidental cause, but to a deep-seated and constantly operating cause, and this cause can be found nowhere, but in our peculiar form of government.

In speaking of the decline we have experienced in the stern, rigid, high-toned virtues of our population, we are far from implying, or wishing to imply, that we have fallen below even the more advanced nations of the Old World; and, in assuming, that our political institutions, taken independently of the accidental advantages of our position, have not produced such unmixed. good as our noisy politicians pretend, we are equally far from implying, or wishing to imply, that we are not even yet in a moral and social condition much superior to that of any other people. What we mean to assert is, that, under a moral and social point of view, we have not maintained our former relative superiority. We are still in advance of the Old World; but by no means so far in advance as we were in the outset; and, considering the many obstacles the several nations of the Old World have had to encounter, and the much we have had in our peculiar position in our favor, we have, relatively speaking, fallen behind them, and show a deterioration, of which they set us no example. France, Germany, England, even Spain, have, during the period of our national existence, made no inconsiderable efforts at national regeneration, and each and all of them have, we believe, commenced the upward movement, while we alone have actually deteriorated.

Assuming this to be a fact, there must be, in the nature of our peculiar institutions, some inherent and

permanent cause of this deterioration.

And this we

solemnly believe to be the case. In this world, good and evil grow together, and often spring from the same root. The matter of vice and virtue, as Milton has remarked, is not unfrequently the same. As you recede from one evil, you strike upon another; and as you secure a new advantage, you expose yourself to a new danger. This has been our experience as a people. We have escaped many, perhaps the heaviest, of the political evils of the Old World; but, in return, have exposed ourselves to evils, from which the Old World is comparatively free. These evils, to which we have. exposed ourselves, are by no means so great, or so difficult to guard against, or to counteract, as to induce us, for a moment, to balance our institutions with those of any other people; or to ask ourselves, if we have done wisely in adopting, or shall do wisely in sustaining them. With all the evils to which they expose us, they are the best, at least, for us, that the world has ever seen, or that we can even conceive of. All we insist on is, that they do expose us to evils, which demand our sleepless vigilance, and all our wisdom and energy, to counteract. They will not, as it were, go of themselves, of themselves create all the virtue essential to their wise and just administration.

A delusion had seized the world about the time of our national birth, that all the evils, the human race suffers, are owing to bad government; and that a wisely constituted government will, as it were, of itself cure them. Hence, we fell into the mistake of feeling, that our institutions would take care of themselves, and work out for us, without any special agency of our own, that higher social good towards which our minds and hearts were turned. But bad government itself must have a cause, and can have no cause but the ignorance, the vice, the selfishness, and the indolence, of the people; and the best of institutions will produce only mischievous results, if not wisely and virtuously administered; and wisdom and virtue, in our case, to secure the right sort of administration, must not only be

generally diffused among the people, but be brought to bear directly on the administration itself.

Another delusion, at the same epoch, seized the more advanced nations of Christendom; namely, that the people could make the constitution, and that nothing was wanting to secure its successful practical working, but to intrust it to the care of the people. The desideratum of the time was to get rid of bad governments, of tyrannical and oppressive rulers. It was felt, that the people, if admitted into the government, would have so deep an interest in good government, that they would never submit to bad government, or suffer the government to become bad; and that their own interest would lead them to resist all tyrannical and oppressive magistrates, and to invest none with power who would not exercise it for the common good. All this was plausible, and taking; but it obviously placed the dependence for good government, not on the virtue of the people, on their sense of duty, and power of sacrifice; but on their sense of interest. Their own sense of their own interest would lead them to institute good government, and to insist on wise and equitable administration. But, in throwing a people back upon their sense of their own interest, leaving them, nay, teaching them, to be governed by their own views of their own interest, do we not, necessarily, destroy the very virtues essential to the maintenance of wise and good government? do we not set up interest as the ruling motive? And, when interest becomes the ruling motive of a people, will not each individual struggle, not to administer the government for the good of all, but to make it a machine for promoting his own private ends?

The principle of the political order sought to be introduced, and on which the statesmen and politicians relied for securing the practical benefits to be expected from government, was to pit the selfishness of one against the equal selfishness of another; or, as we may express it, UNIVERSAL COMPETITION. The principle of competition is selfishness. Leave, then, free scope to the selfishness of all, and the selfishness of each will

neutralize the selfishness of each, and we shall have for result,Eternal Justice, wise and equitable government, shedding its blessings, like the dews of heaven, upon all, without distinction of rank or condition! Truly, this were putting vice to a noble use, and proposing a transmutation of the base metals into the precious, far surpassing that dreamed of by the old alchimists, in their insane pursuit of the philosopher's stone. But the success of the theory would not have given the result anticipated. From absolute negation how obtain an affirmative? Assuming the absolute equality of all, and that, in all cases, the selfishness of one will exactly balance the selfishness of another, the result will be zero, that is to say, absolutely nothing. But assuming the inequality of the social elements, and that the selfishness of one is not, in all cases, the exact measure of the selfishness of another, then they in whom selfishness is the strongest will gain the preponderance, and, having the power, must, being governed only by selfishness, wield the government for their own private ends. And this is precisely what has happened, and which a little reflection might have enabled any one to have foretold. The attempt to obtain wise and equitable government by means of universal competition, then, must always fail. But this is not the worst. It, being a direct appeal to selfishness, promotes the growth of selfishness, and, therefore, increases the very evil from which government is primarily needed to protect us.

Nor is this all. Alongside of this principle of universal competition, lay that of RESPONSIBILITY TO THE PEOPLE. Responsibility of the civil magistrate to the people was, no doubt, asserted with a good motive, for the purpose of establishing the right of the people to divest the agents of authority of all power, in case they abused it; and also as a restraint on these agents themselves, who, knowing that if they abused their trusts the people could dismiss them, would be induced, by all their love of power and place, to use their power for the common good. Here, again, the same attempt to convert the base metals into the precious, to make