The observer must not, however, rest satisfied with ascertaining the proportion of the means of education to the people who have to be educated. He must mark the objects for which learning is pursued. The two most strongly contrasted cases which can be found are probably those of Germany and (once more) the United States. In the United States, it is well known, a provision of university education is made as ample as that of schools for an earlier stage; yet no one pretends that a highly finished education is to be looked for in that country. The cause is obvious. In a young nation, the great common objects of life are entered upon earlier, and every preparatory process is gone through in a more superficial manner. Seats of learning are numerous and fully attended, both in Germany and America, and they testify in each to a pervading desire of knowledge. Here the agreement ends. The German student may, without being singular, remain within the walls of his college till time silvers his hairs; or he has even been known to pass eighteen years among his books, without once crossing the threshold of his study. The young American, meanwhile, satisfied at the end of three years that he knows as much as his neighbours, settles in a home, engages in farming or commerce, and plunges into what alone he considers the business of life. Each of these pursues his appropriate objects; each is right in his own way; but the difference of pursuit indicates a wider difference of sentiment between the two countries than the abundance of the means of learning in each indicates a resemblance. The observer must therefore mark, not only what and how many are the seats of learning, but who frequent them; whether there are many past the season of youth who make study the business of their lives, or whether all are of that class who regard study merely as a part of the preparation which they are ordained to make for the accomplishment of the commonest aims of life. He can scarcely take his evening walk in the precincts of a university without observing a difference so wide as this.

The great importance of the fact lies in this, that increase of knowledge is necessary to the secure enlargement of freedom. Germany may not, it is true, require learning in her youth for political purposes, but because learning has become the taste, the characteristic honour of the nation; but this knowledge will infallibly work out, sooner or later, her political regeneration. America requires knowledge in her sons because her political existence itself depends upon their mental competency. The two countries will probably approximate gradually towards a sympathy which is at present out of the question. As America becomes more fully peopled, a literature will grow up within her, and study will assume its place among the chief objects of life. The great ideas which are the employment of the best minds of Germany must work their way out into action; and new and immediately practical kinds of knowledge will mingle themselves, more and more largely, with those to which she has been, in times past, devoted. The two countries may thus fall into a sympathetic correspondence on the mighty subjects of human government and human learning, and the grand idea of liberty may be made more manifest in the one, and disciplined and enriched in the other.

One great subject of observation and speculation remains, the objects and form of Persecution for Opinion in each country. Persecution for opinion is always going on among a people enlightened enough to entertain any opinions at all. There must always be, in such a nation, some who have gone farther in research than others, and who, in making such an advance, have overstepped the boundaries of popular sympathy. The existence and sufferings of such are not to be denied because there are no fires at the stake, and no organized and authorized Inquisition, and be cause formal excommunication is gone out of fashion

Persecution puts on other forms as ages elapse, but it is not extinct. It can be inflicted out of the province of law as well as through it; by a neighbourhood as well as from the Vatican. A wise and honest man may be wounded through his social affections and in his domestic relations as effectually as by flames, fetters, and public ignominy. There are wise and good persons in every civilized country who are undergoing persecution in one form or another every day.

Is it for precocity in science? or for certain opinions in politics? or for a peculiar mode of belief in the Christian religion, or unbelief of it? or for championship of an oppressed class? or for new views in morals? or for fresh inventions in the arts, apparently interfering with old-established interests? or for bold philosophical speculation? Who suffers arbitrary infliction, in short, and how, for any mode of thinking, and of faithful action upon thought? An observer would reject whatever he might be told of the paternal government of a prince, if he saw upon a height a fortress in which men were suffering carcere duro for political opinions. In like manner, whatever a nation may tell him of its love of liberty should go for little if he sees a virtuous man's children taken from him on the ground of his holding an unusual religious belief; or citizens mobbed for asserting the rights of negroes; or moralists treated with public scorn for carrying out allowed principles to their ultimate issues; or scholars oppressed for throwing new light into the Sacred Text; or philosophers denounced for bringing fresh facts to the surface of human knowledge, whether they seem to agree or not with long-established suppositions.

The kind and degree of infliction for opinion which is possible, and is practised in the time and place, will indicate to the observer the degree of imperfection in the popular idea of liberty. This is a kind of fact easy to ascertain and worthy of all attention.

CHAPTER V.

PROGRESS.

""Tis the sublime of man,

Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves
Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole!
This fraternizes man, this constitutes
Our charities and bearings."

"Then let us pray that come it may,
As come it will for a' that,

COLERIDGE.

That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth,
May bear the gree, and a' that.

For a' that, and a' that,

It's coming yet, for a' that,

That man to man, the warld o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that."

BURNS.

HOWEVER widely men may differ as to the way to social perfection, all whose minds have turned in that direction agree as to the end. All agree that if the whole race could live as brethren, society would be in the most advanced state that can be conceived of. It is also agreed that the spirit of fraternity is to be attained, if at all, by men discerning their mutual relation, as parts and proportions of one wondrous whole." The disputes which arise are about how these proportions are to be arranged, and what those qualifications should be by which some shall have an ascendancy over others.

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This cluster of questions is not yet settled with regard to the inhabitants of any one country. The most advanced nations are now in a condition of internal conflict upon them. As for the larger idea that nations as well as individuals are "parts and proportions of one wondrous whole," it has hardly yet passed the lips or pen of any but religious men and poets. Its time will come when men have made greater progress, and

are more at ease about the domestic arrangements of nations. As long as there are, in every country of the world, multitudes who cannot, by any exertion of their own, redeem themselves from hardship and their children from ignorance, there is quite enough for justice and charity to do at home. While this is doing-while the English are striving to raise the indigent classes of their society, the French speculating to elevate the condition of woman, and to open the career of life to all rational beings, the Germans waiting to throw off the despotism of absolute rulers, and the Americans struggling to free the negroes-the fraternal sentiment will be growing, in preparation for yet higher results. The principle, acted upon at home, will be gaining strength for exercise abroad; and the more any society becomes like a band of brothers, the more powerful must be the sympathy which it will have to offer to other such bands.

Far off as may be the realization of such a prospect, it is a prospect. For many ages poets and philosophers have entertained the idea of a general spirit of fraternity among men. It is the one great principle of the greatest religion which has ever nourished the morals of mankind. It is the loftiest hope on which the wisest speculators have lived. Poets are the prophets, and philosophers the analyzers of the fate of men, and religion is the promise and pledge of unseen powers to those who believe in them. That cannot be unworthy of attention, of hope, of expectation, which the poets and the analyzers of the race have reposed upon, and on which the best religion of the world (and that which comprehends all others) is based. That which has never, for all its splendour, been deemed absurd by the wisest of the race, is now beginning to be realized. We have now something more to show for our hope than what was before enough for the highest minds. The fraternal spirit has begun to manifest itself by its workings in society. The helpless are now aided expressly on the ground of their helplessness; not from the emotions of compassion