If you aim to erect a high commercial structure, you must lay your foundations broadly in agriculture, in mining, and manufacture; and all these within your own domain; and use the resources which God and nature have given to you, and not those which Providence has bestowed upon your neighbors. And you want, for the same reason, a passage across the continent, of your own, not shared with any foreign domain. If you will be the carriers of Europe and of Asia, if you will be the carriers in even your own interoceanic commerce, you must receive, you must convey, you must deliver merchandise, within your own temperate zone, not within that torrid zone whose heats are noxious to animal and vegetable productions, and, while so deleterious to the articles most abundant and most essential to the subsistence of man, pestilential also to human life itself. This is the communication across this continent which you want -Speech in U. S. Senate, Feb. 8, 1853.

MISCELLANEOUS.

The American People - Their Moral and Entellectual Development.

A KIND of reverence is paid by all nations to antiquity. There is no one that does not trace its lineage from the gods, or from those who were especially favored by the gods. Every people has had its age of gold, or Augustan age, or heroic age—an age, alas! for ever passed. These prejudices are not altogether unwholesome. Although they produce a conviction of declining virtue, which is unfavorable to generous emulation, yet a people at once ignorant and irreverential would necessarily become licentious. Nevertheless, such prejudices ought to be modified. It is untrue, that in the period of a nation's rise from disorder to refinement, it is not able to continually surpass itself. We see the present plainly, distinctly, with all its coarse outlines, its rough inequalities, its dark blots, and its glaring deformities. We hear all its tumultuous sounds and jarring discords. We see and hear the past, through a distance which reduces all its inequalities to a plane, mellows all its shades into a pleasing hue, and subdues even its hoarsest voices into harmony. In our own case, the prejudice is less erroneous than in most others. The revolutionary age was truly a heroic one. Its exigencies called forth the genius and the talents and the virtues of society, and they ripened amid the hardships of a long and severe trial. But there were selfishness, and vice, and factions, then, as now, although comparatively subdued and repressed. You have only to consult impartial history, to learn that neither public faith, nor public loyalty, nor private virtue, culminated at that period

in our own country,* while a mere glance at the literature, or at the stage, or at the politics, of any European country, in any previous age, reveals the fact that it was marked, more distinctly than the present, by licentious morals and mean ambition.

Reasoning à priori again, as we did in another case, it is only just to infer in favor of the United States an improvement of morals from their established progress in knowledge and power; otherwise, the philosophy of society is misunderstood, and we must change all our courses, and henceforth seek safety in imbecility, and virtue in superstition and ignorance.

What shall be the test of the national morals? Shall it be the eccentricity of crimes? Certainly not; for then we must compare the criminal eccentricity of to-day with that of yesterday. The result of the comparison would be only this, that the crimes of society change with changing circumstances.

Loyalty to the state is a public virtue. Was it ever deepertoned or more universal than it is now? I know there are ebullitions of passion and discontent, sometimes breaking out into disorder and violence; but was faction ever more effectually disarmed and harmless than it is now? There is a loyalty that springs from the affection that we bear to our native soil. This we have as strong as any people. But it is not the soil alone, nor yet the soil beneath our feet and the skies over our heads, that constitute our country. It is its freedom, equality, justice, greatness, and glory. Who among us is so low as to be insensible of an interest in them? Four hundred thousand natives of other lands every year voluntarily renounce their own sovereigns, and swear fealty to our own. Who has ever known an American to transfer his allegiance permanently to a foreign power?

The spirit of the laws, in any country, is a true index to the morals of a people, just in proportion to the power they exercise

*“I ought not to object to your reverence for your fathers, as you call them, meaning, I presume, the government, and those concerned in the di rection of public affairs; much less could I be displeased at your numbering me among them. But, to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the merits of different periods, I have no reason to believe that we were better than you are. We had as many poor creatures and selfish beings in proportion, among us, as you have among you; nor were there then more enlightened men, or in greater number in proportion, than there are now."-John Adams's Letter to Josiah Quincy, Feb. 9, 1811.

in making them. Who complains, here or elsewhere, that crime or immorality blots our statute-books with licentious enactments?

The character of a country's magistrates, legislators, and captains, chosen by a people, reflect their own. It is true that in the earnest canvassing which so frequently recurring elections require, suspicion often follows. the magistrate, and scandal follows in the footsteps of the statesman. Yet, when his course has been finished, what magistrate has left a name tarnished by corruption, or what statesman has left an act or an opinion so erroneous that decent charity can not excuse, though it may disapprove? What chieftain ever tempered military triumph with so much moderation as he who, when he had placed our standard on the battlements of the capital of Mexico, not only received an offer of supreme authority from the conquered nation, but declined it?

The manners of a nation are the outward form of its inner life. Where is woman held in so chivalrous respect, and where does she deserve that eminence better? Where is property more safe, commercial honor better sustained, or human life more sacred?

Moderation is a virtue in private and in public life. Has not the great increase of private wealth manifested itself chiefly in widening the circle of education and elevating the standard of popular intelligence? With forces which, if combined and directed by ambition, would subjugate this continent at once, we have made only two very short warsthe one confessedly a war of defence, and the other ended by paying for a peace and for a domain already fully conquered.

Where lies the secret of the increase of virtue which has thus been established? I think it will be found in the entire emancipation of the consciences of men from either direct or indirect control by established ecclesiastical or political systems. Religious classes, like political parties, have been left to compete in the great work of moral education, and to entitle themselves to the confidence and affection of society, by the purity of their faith and of their morals.

I am well aware that some, who may be willing to adopt the general conclusions of this argument, will object that it is not altogether sustained by the action of the government itself, how

ever true it may be that it is sustained by the great action of society. I can not enter a field where truth is to be sought among the disputations of passion and prejudice. I may say, however, in reply first, that the governments of the United States, although more perfect than any other, and although they embrace the great ideas of the age more fully than any other, are, nevertheless, like all other governments, founded on compromises of some abstract truths and of some natural rights.

As government is impressed by its constitution, so it must necessarily act. This may suffice to explain the phenomenon complained of. But it is true, also, that no government ever did altogether act out, purely and for a long period, all the virtues of its original constitution. Hence it is that we are so well told by Bolingbroke, that every nation must perpetually renew its constitution or perish. Hence, moreover, it is a great excellence of our system, that sovereignty resides, not in Congress and the president, nor yet in the governments of the states, but in the people of the United States. If the sovereign be just and firm and uncorrupted, the governments can always be brought back from any aberrations, and even the constitutions themselves, if in any degree imperfect, can be amended. This great idea of the sovereignty of the people over their government glimmers in the British system, while it fills our own with a broad and glowing light.

"Let not your king and parliament in one,

Much less apart, mistake themselves for that
Which is most worthy to be thought upon,
Nor think they are essentially the STATE.
Let them not fancy that the authority
And privileges on them bestowed,
Conferred, are to set up a majesty,

Or a power or a glory of their own;

But let them know it was for a deeper life

Which they but represent;

That there's on earth a yet auguster thing,

Veil'd though it be, than parliament or king."

Gentlemen, you are devoted to the pursuit of knowledge in order that you may impart it to the state. What Fenelon was to France, you may be to your country. Before you teach, let me enjoin upon you to study well the capacity and the disposi