affected by the progress or results of any of the ephemeral struggles for place and power, that have divided and may hereafter divide the citizens. The duty of encouraging and protecting our own industry should, and will, we trust, be regarded by all the parties that may successively predominate as too high, too vitally important,—too sacred, we might almost say, to be overlooked in deference to any suggestions of immediate interest; and, what is perhaps a still better security for its future observance, its very importance and the consequent general popularity of all measures taken in fulfilment of it, will always render it the immediate interest of our statesmen, however divided on minor points, to unite in pursuing such a course. The protecting system has in fact become already the settled policy of the country. It was recommended and sanctioned at the outset of the government by the powerful mind of Hamilton, a name which stands higher, both abroad and at home, for skill in practical legislation, than almost any other that adorns our political history, and is nearly sufficient of itself to give authority to any opinion. It survived and flourished through all the various turns of the long contest for power, in which that statesman and his contemporaries were afterwards engaged. At the close of the war with Great Britain, which finally terminated these ancient feuds, the protecting policy was resumed with renovated interest and vigor by the united community, and has ever since been constantly gaining upon the general favor. During the late struggle for the Presidency it was professed with equal zeal, and probably with equal conviction, by a decided majority of the friends of all the candidates; and the great states, whose powerful influence contributed mainly to the elevation of the successful one, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio, have always been its warmest adherents and principal supporters. The President himself has given in print, both before and since his election, satisfactory indications of the concurrence of his sentiments on this subject with those of the people. We have a right to suppose therefore, that the influence of the administration will be exerted in future, as it has hitherto been ever since the foundation of the government, in favor of this policy. A strong disapprobation of it has no doubt been manifested by a considerable, and every way respectable portion of the planters of the Southern, and the navigators of the Northern states; but longer experience will convince even them, that it is not less

beneficial to their interests than to those of the rest of the community; and we confidently trust, that Congress, unmoved by any temporary burst of opposition, and especially unmoved by the declamations, the sophistry, or the sneers of interested foreigners, will exhibit, in their future proceedings on this subject, the uniformity, steadiness, and wisdom, which have characterized those of all their predecessors. We mean not to intimate an opinion, that they should make no alteration whatever in the details of the existing Tariff, which may be, and probable is, in some parts, susceptible of improvement. We only mean, that all the legislation on economical matters, however modified in particular points, should display throughout the grand and leading features of a real American System.

E. Everett.

ART. VII.-Lafayette en Amérique en 1824 et 1825 ; ou Journal d'un Voyage aux Etats-Unis. Par A. LEVASSEUR, Secrétaire du Général Lafayette pendant son Voyage. Orné de onze Gravures et d'une Carte. En deux Volumes. 8vo. Paris. 1829.

We have been agreeably disappointed in this work. We feared, that the general familiarity with its subject, at least on the part of its American readers, would take from it all the interest of novelty, and that, from the nature of the case, it must want that of variety. We have found, on trial, that, in both respects, our apprehension was ill-founded. Although we certainly watched the progress of the nation's guest through the country, with the most willing and unabated attention, yet we find, that the details of his progress, in the remote sections of the union, were not, as it was not to be expected they should be, transferred to the public journals in this quarter. A corresponding remark, no doubt, would hold true of any other district of the United States; and we are well persuaded, that wherever the work is taken up, a good portion of the contents will be substantially new to the reader. This will of course be strictly the case with all those parts of the two volumes which relate to matters of a character not to come before the public at the time, or not from any other source than the General himself, or some person directly connected with him;—

everything strictly personal in its nature. Then as to variety, it is not the least astonishing fact connected with this extraordinary visit, an event, taken in all its parts, unparalleled in the history of man, that its narrative exhibits an unbounded variety of incident, circumstance, and adventure. The arrival of this great and good person in the country, the reappearance of this friendly genius in the sphere of his youthful and beneficent visitations, seemed to call up the whole population of the country in array to welcome him; but not in the stiff uniform of a parade, not in the court dress of a heartless ceremony. Society presented itself before him in all its shades and gradations, of which more are to be found coëxisting in the United States than in any other country. The wealth and luxury of the sea-coast, the newborn abundance of the West; the fashion of the town, the cordiality of the country; the authorities, municipal, national, and state; the living relics of the revolution, honored in the honors paid to their comrade in arms; the scientific and learned bodies, the children at the schools, the members of the associations of active life and of charity; the exiles of Spain, France, and Switzerland; banished monarchs; patriots of whom Europe was not worthy; the African and the Indian ;-all took an active and an appropriate part in this auspicious drama of real life. Had the deputed representatives of these various interests and conditions been assembled at some grand ceremonial of reception, in honor of the illustrious stranger, it would have itself, even as the pageant of an hour, have constituted an august spectacle. It would then have borne a worthy and proud comparison with those illustrious triumphs of heroic Rome, where conquered nations and captive princes followed in the train, and which seemed, with reason, to lift the frail mortal, to whom they were conceded, above the earth over which he was borne. But when we consider, that this glorious and purer triumph. was coëxtensive with the Union; that it swept from state to state, and from section to section, one long, unbroken career of rapturous welcome,-banishing feuds, appeasing dissensions, and hushing all tumults but the acclamations of joy,-uniting in one great act of public salutation a fierce and free people, on the eve of a furious contest, with the aura epileptica of the canvass already rushing over the body politic; that it was continued near a twelvemonth, an annus mirabilis of rejoicing, auspiciously commenced, successfully pursued, and happily and VOL. XXX. No. 66.

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gracefully accomplished, we have in it the elements and substance of a great chapter in the fate of nations, nowhere else to be found; and which, to be realized and relished, must have been witnessed. The fate of nations, we say, for it was nothing less. In addition to what was peculiar and personal in Lafayette, and of this there was enough to furnish out a liberal assignment of merit to a dozen great men of the common sort,-it was necessary that numerous high associations should have linked his name with all the great political convulsions of the day. Having performed an arduous, dangerous, honorable, and successful part in that crisis in the fate of our own country, which is of itself unexampled in human things, it was necessary, that, pursuing the path of inmortal renown, on which his feet had laid hold in America, he should have engaged among the foremost in that stupendous revolution of his own country, where he stood serene amidst the madness of an empire; wielding, without abusing, a military force as far greater than that of the Emperor Napoleon, as the spontaneous rush of a whole race of men is more formidable than the march of a class of the conscription. It was necessary to the feeling with which Lafayette was received in America, that he should have nobly washed his hands of the blood of that revolution, and that the emperors of the earth, in mockery of the long-suffering of Providence, should have immured him in their dungeons for having protected their crowned daughters from the midnight assassin. It was necessary, when another stupendous reaction of things had seated the man of destiny on the throne of France, and, as it seemed, of Europe, that Lafayette alone, not by a convulsive effort of fanatical hardihood, but in the calm consciousness of a weight of character that would bear him out in the step, should deliberately, and in writing, refuse to acknowledge the power, before which the whole contemporary generation quailed. When again the wheel of empire had turned, and when this dreadful colossus had been crushed beneath the weight of Europe (mustered against him more in desperation than in self-assured power), and in falling had dragged down to the dust the honor and the strength of France, it was necessary, when the dust and smoke of the contest had blown off, that the faithful sentinel of liberty should have been seen at his post, ready again to stake his life and his reputation, in another of those fearful and critical junctures, when the stoutest hearts are apt to re

treat, and leave the field to desperate men,-the forlorn hope of affairs,-whom some inevitable necessity crowds up to the breach. To refute every imputation of a selfish policy, of a wish to restore himself in the good graces of restored royalty, it was necessary that he, the only individual of continental Europe, who, within the reach of Napoleon's sceptre, had refused to acknowledge his title, should be coldly viewed by the reappearing dynasty, and that he should be seen and heard, not in the court or the cabinet, but at the tribune, the calm, rational, ever consistent champion of freedom, a representative of the people in constitutional France. These were the titles of Lafayette to the respect, the love, the passionate admiration of the people, to whom he had consecrated the bloom of his youth, for whom he had lavished his treasure and his blood.

We might have added, that, in order to give even to common minds a topic of delightful and mysterious admiration, when strong minds were tasked to do justice to the theme,-in order to make a character, in which even the ingredients of romance were mingled up with the purest, loftiest, and sternest virtues, these just and authentic titles to respect were united in an individual who had been placed by birth, education, and fortune, in the foremost circle of the gay chivalry of France; who sacrificed all that a false ambition could covet, before he aspired to all that a pure and noble ambition could reach; and thus began life, by trampling under foot the glittering baubles, which Chatham accepted, and Burke did not refuse, and for which the mass of eminent men in Europe barter health, comfort, and conscience. Such was the man whom the Congress of the United States invited to our shores, and who came to gather in the rich harvest of a people's love. Well might he do it. He had sown it in weakness; should he not reap it in power? He had come to us, a poor and struggling colony, and periled his life in our cause; was he not entitled to the gratitude of the flourishing state? When he embarked in our cause, it was the utmost he could have promised himself, in the ordinary calculation of human things, and in the almost desperate event of a successful issue to the struggle, that some far distant posterity would illustrate, by the growth and prosperity of the country, the value of those services which he had contributed to her freedom. It was just, that he should himself come to witness and enjoy its rapid, its miraculous growth and elevation. We pity the hearts, quite as much as