bly touched with her charms. Such men, therefore, though necessary to a state, are no more parts of it than food, though necessary to an animal, is part of an animal, or than tools are part of the work they are employed to make. The productive labor of peasants and artizans, how necessary soever to the purposes of outward accommodation and comfortable subsistence, is not to be confounded and classed with the political functions of soldiers, priests and magistrates." Here we have the whole platform. The artizan may not participate in the happiness which the commonwealth promises to its citizens, because his labors do not qualify him for any of the great departments of the state service. It will be perceived that Aristotle is not looking for strong and courageous men, but soldiers; not men of judgment, familiar with and respectful of the laws, but magistrates; not devout men, fearing the Gods, but priests; not a man, but an instrument; and whoso was not being qualified to serve the state in one of these capacities was not worthy of the state. Hence the disrepute, nay, the disgrace which attached to all the industrial professions. Hence their mechanics, their miners, their sailors, their merchants, and even the instructors of their younger children, were almost all slaves. And hence, and this is the most calamitous feature of their condition-all that infinite variety of facts, which a free, intelligent and prosperous people engaged as with us in the countless departments of industrial labor, are hourly accumulating for the study of the philosopher, and for the practical education of every reflecting citizen, was comparatively lost to the ancient world. Those frequent lessons which the processes of the machine-shop and of the laboratory, teach to every intelligent and enterprising observer, fell in that old society upon the stricken senses of slaves who were usually too ignorant to observe-who cared for nothing less than the improvement of their craft, and who hated nothing more than to benefit their tyrannical masters. 碗 It is of course to be conceded, that certain departments of intellectual and æsthetical culture were pursued by many of the elder nations, and particu larly by the Greeks, with unrivalled diligence and success. In the fine arts their genius has probably never been equalled. Their geometry we read in our schools. Their metaphysical and ethical philosophy is most profound and acute, and much of it is still respected as truth, while to the throne of poetry they still challenge the pretensions of all posterity. Their prodigious success in all these divers orders of culture would at first appear inconsistent with the alleged subordination of all their energies to the service of the state. But upon a little farther examination, it will appear rather a confirmation of, than an exception to the proposition, that the state claimed the individual service of the citizen. Their poetical literature was almost the sole repository of their religious creed, as it was certainly its most important ally. Their philosophy and history, were encouraged chiefly for the benefit the statesman derived from their studynor did the philosopher or the historian dream of giving to his labors a loftier or a more comprehensive influence. History has preserved for us a letter written by Alexander the Great, from the East, immediately after the battle of Guagemala, which presents this fact in a striking attitude. "Alexander wishing all happiness to Aristotle. You have not done right in publishing your select lectures. Wherein shall important things we have been taught, be we be distinguished above others if the communicated to the public? I would rather surpass other men in the best kind of knowledge than in power. Farewell." And what was Aristotle's reply?— Did he reprove the selfishness of his haughty pupil? Did he tell him that philosophers were sent into the world to improve the condition of men, and not to indulge the pride of princes?That our talents are given us by the same good gods who cause the dews of heaven to descend; and that, like them, they should be dispensed upon all mankind-as well upon the just as upon the unjust? Did he lift himself above the humiliating philosophy of his time, and, in language like that with which Fenelon rebuked his royal pupil, the headstrong Duke of Burgundy—a prince no * A law prevailed in Thebes, says Aristotle in his Politics, which forbad any shop-keeper holding office, who had been engaged in such business within ten years. 111 less ambitious, no less proud, and scarcely less talented than the illustrious son of Philip? Did he say to him Young man, know that all men were not made for one; that the one was made for all, and to work for the happiness of all?" Alas! the world was not old enough either to heed or to utter sentiments like these. Even in the time of Fenelon they were not tolerable to the tender ears of kings. This was Aristotle's reply: "You wrote to me concerning my Select Lectures-that they ought not to have been published. Know that, in one sense, they are still unpublished, as their meaning will be fully apprehended by those only who heard them." Can it be believed that this is the letter of one of the most comprehensive observers, and probably the most acute thinker of antiquity-of Aristotle, the great philosopher of Stagyra, who was destined to exercise an unlimited authority over the intellect of mankind for nearly two thousand years? Mark his defence! He begins by admitting, impliedly, that all his faculties of body and mind of right belonged unto and were the exclusive property of this imperious boy. He next admits that the people have nothing to do with education, and avows that he never contemplated dispelling any portion of their ignorance by his publications; and finally, he deliberately rests the fame of his king for the future, and the burden of his own defence, upon the prospect that the ignorance of the masses would be perpetuated forever. Such was Aristotle's view of the philosopher's mission among men. From one learn all. Even in the fine arts, which, with their poetry, from the peculiar and perpetual glory of the ancients-in their painting, in their sculpture, in their architecture, we observe the same engrossing spindle winding in upon itself every product which their genius and their taste could devise. Renowned as the architecture of the Greeks has ever been, yet, even in Athens, the stranger would not have dreamed, until he approached the public squares and the Acropolis, that he was surrounded by the very noblest specimens of that noble art. All the architectural genius-not only of the Greek, but of the Asiatic and African nations was exhausted upon the earthly tabernacles of their gods, or upon other public edifices appropriated to the state's service, while the abodes of their most distinguished men were notoriously mean. A large private establishment was looked upon as an insult to the state, and an affectation in the proprietor. Demosthenes publicly reproached the wealthy Midias for his large house at Eleusis, as if it were an outrage upon public decorum. Indeed and this is the crucial fact-domestic architecture was not looked upon as one of the fine arts. The same obser 66 vation may be made of the plastic art, and of painting. "I know of no instance," says Heeren, in his Politics of Ancient Greece, " of a statue that belonged to a private man; and no trace is to be found of celebrated private pictures in those times." These illustrations, we conceive, will abundantly suffice to show the uniform tendency of the political institutions of the world before the Christian era, to absorb all the vitality and best energies of the people to their own uses and support. We shall not pursue this tendency through the middle ages; nor shall we attempt to show how far the absence of individual freedom, and of more liberal views of the functions of government during that period, are accountable for the utter stagnation of natural science which we found to exist there. There is great difficulty in discriminating this from the multitude of other influences that were operating unfavorably upon the intellects of individual society; such as the continual agitations of war, the consequent insecurity of property, the servitude of opinion, and the want of a universal language, each one of which causes was adequate to produce all the effects we have attributed to the want of a liberal social system. We do not conceive, moreover, that any nation's history, or any series of events can be found, to exhibit with more distinctness the dependence of the physical sciences, and of their corresponding arts upon the political importance of the individual man, than those to which we have alluded. If we have been at all successful in carrying with our own convictions the convictions of our readers, we have shown that it is because the an cient states and the old theocracies did not deem man's personal happiness a sufficient motive for invoking to its promotion the studies of the philosopher and the countenance of rulers; that the contributions they have made to the humane sciences and arts are comparatively so unimportant, and that so few of those material comforts which, in our day, smooth man's path along the journey of life, can trace their genealogy beyond the last two or three centuries of his history. We have thus far labored to present a negative statement of the law, according to which a degraded estimate of man's individual destiny acts upon those arts and sciences which most directly concern his personal happiness. We have shown what, in the absence of a proper social theory, the ancients did not achieve in the physical sciences. We now propose to state this law in a positive form, and from the facts which it is the boast of modern civilization to have supplied, to show how far the modern doctrine of political science, as it finds its expression under constitutional governments, is directly instrumental in encouraging industrial pursuits, and in directing the attention of men of science to the study of material nature. It is now about three hundred years since the decisive blow was struck which was to emancipate the human mind from the fatal dominion of the past-since the principle was irrevocably established, that man was not intended by Providence merely as an appendage of some principality or power, -a new member, an additional sense. a kind of supplementary instinct, provided to gratify the caprices or to work out the small ambitions of the few who, as accidents of accidents, were charged with the office of his government. It was not until after the fifteenth century that the modern doctrine of individual independence began to exhibit method, and to take impulse. Not that this class of opinions has been entirely the growth of the subsequent period which is not the case-on the contrary, we may find the germ of the representative system, and of constitutional guaranties, one or both, more or less frequently exhibited in the monarchies, the feudalities, and, above all, in the ecclesiastical corporations of the middle ages at no time, however, before the reformation, were they established—at no previous period were they beyond the reach of accidents which might have proved fatal to, or at least have procrastinated the day of their supremacy. But the waters of European society were about to be troubled again to new and unwonted issues. The spirit which moved over that vast abyss of elemental strife into which the Roman civilization had dissolved, had said, let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons, for days and for years-and it was so. That Providence, which never designs what it does not provide means to execute, had already selected the agents who were to carry out its purposes. The fullness of time had arrived, when they were to go forth upon their mission, both to destroy and to fulfil. Society had been preparing for centuries the material wherewith the work of reconstruction was to go on; and all the nations of Europe-nay, of the whole civilized world, were called from their short-sighted ambitions, and from their enterprises of a day, to engage in or to observe the progress and the processes of this new creation. The church and the schools were the two sanctuaries in which, at this period, all the venerable absurdities of ancient, social, and political philosophy that had survived the mutations of time, and the convulsions of nations, still found a refuge. But when Luther erected against the frowning towers and high places of the Italian Church the tremendous enginery of his passions, qualified, as they were, for their work of destruction and reform, by his impregnable honesty, and almost insane zealand when Bacon lifted up his voice against the organized absurdities of the schools, in the spirit of prophecy to which he had been inspired in the visions of his deep and comprehensive intellect-from that time forth, commences a new era in the history of humanity. Religion awoke from her enchantment of a thousand years, and the strong holds of superstition and idolatry, as if instinct with shame, fell confounded before her advancing footsteps. The temples and the altars, which still stood open to the worshippers of Aristotle, and which had reeked with the sacri fice of every new opinion, and of every original conception of the human mind, for nearly two thousand years, were now to be closed in dishonor. The rites by which their unhallowed worship had been solemnized, were soon to cease, and the hollow image of their perverse idolatry-Aristotle himself like Dagon of old-as commemorated by Milton's indignant muse, was destined for ever after to lie prostrate, "With heads and hands lopped off In his own temple, on the grunsel edge, When he fell flat and shamed his worshippers." Freedom of conscience, and freedom of thought, were from thenceforth established. Imperfectly, it is true. Their supremacies were not universal nor undisputed, neither are they now, even among the wisest and the best of nations; but yet they were then, and for the first time, placed upon a foundation from which neither social convulsion, nor the accidents of time, nor the caprice of men, can ever again cast them down. But it is not often given to any generation to witness both the beginning and the end of a great revolution of opinion. Luther and Bacon, like Moses, to whose destiny theirs has been more than once felicitously compared, were summoned from the work which they had so auspiciously begun, to the fulfilment of a more inexorable destinybefore the tribes whom they had led forth from the house of bondage, had entered into the land which had been promised them for a possession; but they had lived long enough to behold, from the summits of their own intellectual eminence, and to point out to their followers, the distant territory to which they were journeying. They had already marked out the route which led to it, and had promulgated with suitable solemnity the laws which would aid them in its acquisition, and secure them in its possession. Their work was now done, but not so the work which they had prepared. They left behind them a vast estate of influences, to be directed, of duties to be discharged, and a golden harvest of promised rewards to be gathered. But unlike Moses, they left their final trust to no single Joshua or selected judge. The true successors From Luther sprang Puritanism, pregnant with every species of ecclesiastical insubordination, from the most uncompromising Calvanism to the wildest Transcendentalism. It broke up the oppressive dominion of authority in the church, and enthroned the individual conscience. It their spiritual advisers by the light of taught men to question, and to judge their own reason-for it taught them, that before their God all men were equal. From doubting the infallibility of the human mind, in matters of religion, men were tempted to question the divine right of their temporal sovereigns. Hence from Puritanism sprang the religious wars of England-the great rebellion, and the revolutionand to what end? that hearts might be strengthened, and minds be disciplined, to receive the new dispensation of human rights, which was in store for those who could survive its fiery trials. Upon the devoted victims of these civil wars were concentrated all that is most horrible and appalling, both in political and ecclesiastical oppression. And to what end? that they might be qualified by their experience-by their agonies to found new and wiser institutions in a distant land, where the principles which had cost them so much to defend and happiness, and to the oppressed of were in turn to give to them prosperity every nation, refuge and protection. To Bacon, on the other hand, it was given to unseal the everlasting fountains of the inductive philosophy-to hold the light by which Newton was to unmask the mystery of the stars-to give to the useful arts, new dignity and new impulse, by furnishing new motives and new facilities for their prosecution. He established a community of interest, and a friendly alliance between science and the useful arts, by demonstrating their common destiny. He discharged the artizan from the bonds of his Gibeonitish slavery, and made him one of the largest of the three estates of society, by awakening in him new hopes, and by giving activity to the higher sentiments of his nature. He thus multiplied indefinitely new centres of industry—from new of his industry-a science which was production came new modes of distri- to multiply indefinitely, both his suscepbution-from surplus production came tibilities and his means of happinessexpanded commerce, and every new a science which is destined to connect commercial relation was another pledge in a bond of friendly relationship, the for the peace of the world and harmo- industry of all the nations in every ny among nations. quarter of our globe. But more than all are we indebted to Bacon for the confident exhortations to self-reliance, which are given us in every page of his philosophy-and to his vigorous protest against the authority of the past. Luther had defended the freedom of conscience from the oppression of the Church. Bacon vindicated the freedom of the mind from the oppression of the schools. Luther taught all men to inquire for themselves in matters of religion. Bacon taught all men to inquire for themselves into the laws of nature, and if need be, to put her to the torture for truth's sake, but never to trust to any authority, save that of their own senses, and their own judgment. In 1776, we find the stars of Luther and Bacon in conjunction. They constellated the destiny of America. Freedom of conscience, and freedom of inquiry had, at this time, in our country, first discovered their mutual dependence, their common power, and their common destiny, and now sat down together to write out the formulas of the new science of government, and of industry, which they had called into being. They declared all mankind to be by nature, free and equal, before God and the law. They asserted man's capacity, and they established his right to govern himself. They discouraged all distinctions among men, save those which virtue and talent confer. They declared the happiness of each individual to be the interest of all; that the state existed only for man, not man for the state, and that laws should exist only to secure these results. Upon the basis of these new principles of social polity, the American people declared themselves a sovereign state. But their whole inheritance was not yet made up. Accompanying this charter of human rights, which defined and settled his proper relations with the state, man received a new science to conduct and to assist him in the new career which was opened before hima science which was to enable him more completely to realize all the fruits This was the science of Political Economy. In the same year that America declared her independence, and therein her sense of the dignity and the importance of the individual man, Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations, a work which, more than any other that has ever been written, deserves to be considered the novum organum of political economy. In the same year that we attained our political majority among the nations, endowed with a new system of polity, which made the happiness of mankind the sole business and end of government, the light of a new science was added to our inheritance, to complete the beneficent purpose of our fathers, and to light our footsteps-it is our privilege already to speak the language of history-to light our footsteps through a career of unexampled prosperity and honor. At the great creation, the favorite and most exalted work of the divine energy, was reserved for the last. In the generations of the heavens, and the earth, man was made on the sixth day, and of all the works of God's hands, man alone was formed in his image. So in the generations of the nationsin the generations of society, man, the individual, was the last and greatest creation. No longer a supplementary being-a soldier-a priest-an implement-a craft-a complete man, himself the centre and the circumference of a system knowing no interest higher than his own, except that God's, in whose image he is created, and putting faith in no laws which do not recognize in man's happiness, the great end of their existence. This we conceive to be the great result of modern history-its new theory of manhood, whereby each individual is made a law unto himself-a theory, which was enacted into a permanent tendency of our institutions, by the unanimous declaration of the thirteen United States of America in 1776. From which we are permitted to conclude, that whereas, in the ancient |