the peace of the world. Apart from the paramount considerations enforced by religion, civilization, and humanity, peace is the true policy of both. For ourselves, all that the heart of man can reasonably covet is within our possession or within our reach, to be enjoyed without the slightest necessity of giving annoyance to any other people. We want nothing but to be let alone. Time will take care of the rest; and, in the developement of our resources, our own growth and prosperity, so far from involving any damage elsewhere, will be proportionate to the large contributions we are in a condition to make to the wealth and welfare of friendly nations. The only object which we can be tempted to go to war for, is security. England, on her part, has the wounds of past ages of blood to heal, and their frightful wastes to repair; and she has a large discontented population to care for, which can ill live with heavier taxes to pay, and less employment to earn with. It would be a pity for her to leave off paying her vast debt, and begin again to increase it; and we, above most other nations, are good customers in her markets, and make it worth her while to live with us on good terms.

Still, the feeling of might is very apt to lead to a forgetfulness of right; and the love of fighting, and the lust of conquest, have scarcely been manifested by any other nation in all time to the same degree as by England since the accession of the present reigning house. England, without doubt, has a great deal of might to feel. If she means to drive us to a war, it would be folly to take up her challenge under any impressions to the contrary. She has great resources in numbers, valor, conduct, and wealth. If we have to go into this conflict, it will be with a nation, which, after coming triumphantly out of a twenty-five years' battle, in part of which she had defied, single-handed, the civilized world, has now been refreshed by twenty-five years of peace, interrupted only now and then, sufficiently to keep her military faculties in practice. Undoubtedly she can bear upon us hard enough to call for the exercise of all our virtue.

Still, if she will have it so, that virtue must be summoned. It is not safe, any more than it is right, that we should acquiesce in encroachments and affronts from any quarter, however formidable. It is not safe, because to yield to them is at once to invite their repetition, and to abandon our vantageground, by impairing the strength and spirit which will be

ultimately needful to repel them. We must insist, at all hazards, on having our boundaries recognised and respected; and we must refuse to be subject to have our villages entered at night by a party of desperate men, engaged to follow any future Captain Drew "to the devil." Security is only to be found in a cool vigilance and determination; and in them it is to be found; we are not a people needing, or likely, to distrust their efficacy in any troublesome posture of affairs.

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And, if this contest would be a serious thing for America, it is not to be supposed that it would prove mere play to her antagonist. "England," said her great captain of late, "will not make a little war. It is to be presumed he said it not more with pride, than with a sober and solicitous sense of the responsibleness incident to the possession of such power. "It is glorious to have a giant's strength, but it is pitiful to use it like a giant." At any rate, if England will not make a little war, no more, at this day, will America. As a nation, Heaven knows we have plenty of faults; but in the bull-dog virtues of the Anglo-Saxon breed, it is not said that we are any wise deficient. We managed to hold up our heads through the last war, with a population which has doubled, and an amount of wealth which has probably trebled, since that time. On the ocean, we even then knew how to conquer, from the first; and, after two years' hard buffeting, we learned how to do it upon the land; and what has been, may be again, and more. With an ordinary taxation of some twenty-five millions of dollars, we can better bear an increase of burdens upon our smaller means, than England with hers, of eight or ten times that sum. Though, when left to ourselves, we are careful to grow rich, or at least, what we call well to do, there is no people on earth, who can so well bear to be poor; it must go hard with us, indeed, when, from any unlucky chances of war, we shall not find enough to eat, drink, and wear. Our old Plymouth colony (and the blood is not exhausted) once carried on a war till it sunk every dollar of the personal property of its inhabitants, and then it conquered, and they recovered themselves, and went on presently as if nothing had happened. Our people, if they are forced into this contest, will go into it under an intense and unanimous sense of wrong, which will call forth all their energies and resources for its prosecution. They will undoubtedly go into it with a determination that this disturb

ing question of boundary, if it cannot be settled in one way, shall be put at rest in another, effectually and for ever; that the continuous strain of the martial airs of England, circling the earth," shall be abridged of that great arc that crosses North America, and her "morning drum cease to be beat henceforward within a northwestern Indian's hearing. We do not say that that purpose will be executed; such issues are in the womb of time; · we but say that it will be the purpose, and that it will be one hard to subdue. And let not England, above all, flatter herself that such scenes as some of those rehearsed, in the last war, along the Chesapeake and the frontier, are to be acted over again at as little cost. There is a way to her islands as well as from them, and it is not given to her for ever, while she does. such things herself,

"to sit at ease,

An island queen, amid her subject seas,

While the vext billows, in their distant roar,
But soothe her slumbers, and but kiss her shore."

If the question be of sacking and burning towns, — it is a horrible one, but if she insists on again presenting it, — Baltimore, with its considerable wealth and insufficient defences, is not nearer to the salt water than Brighton, with its perhaps equal wealth, and no defences at all; and Liverpool, taking the chances of the weather, is only two-thirds as far from New York, as New York is from Liverpool. They are apt to remind us, that we have three thousand miles of unprotected seacoast; and how far, we would ask, from twothirds of this extent of seacoast, have the two British islands; and how vast is the disproportion, on the other hand, of assailable and valuable substance scattered along that beach; and what are the coast fortifications of England good for, anywhere except at her naval depots? For the most part, her old works elsewhere, where they have been kept up, are out of date, and of small worth in the present state of the science of war, her reliance having been placed on her wooden walls; substantially a good defence, no doubt, but not a sufficient one against a sudden descent. Ships have to pay respect to wind and weather, and cannot be at every moment at every place that may need their succour; and, with the favor of circumstances and a sufficient motive, Yankee contrivance has done more improbable things

before now, than would be "marching three miles on English land," and doing in a night what would be remembered through a century. We are not speaking of any permanent lodgment upon the soil; that of course is out of the question, though no more on the one side, than on the other; - but of sudden raids, which, between running into a harbour and being out of it again beyond pursuit, would take no more time than did Paul Jones's visit to Selkirk Castle, or the conflagration of Havre de Grace or of Buffalo. And the improbability of such adventures being undertaken and being successful, is lessened with every improvement in the use of steam power in naval operations.

But why so much as allude to such undesirable possibilities? Why, except to show that it would be unreasonable for the great power of England to harden itself in wrong through an excessive confidence in its security? We hope, and we believe, that two nations by whose continued good fellowship humanity has profited so much, and may look for so much more, will find some other way of composing their unhappy differences besides that, which, while it has been so falsely called the "last resort of kings," ought to be the last, -the grievously reluctant, even where it seems to be the indispensable resort, of free and righteous men. Certainly we think that England has gone far in committing herself to a course of insufferable injustice. But she has taken no irrevocable step,-none which cannot be retraced without dishonor. We hope much from her returning sense of justice. We hope much from that respect, which becomes her, great as she is, for the judgment of the world, and of history, which will not excuse her for pertinacity in oppressive pretensions. We hope something from the influence of her numerous good and wise men in private life, who will be tender of her fair fame, and distressed to see her great power put forth in sanguinary attempts to execute a wrong. We hope something from her sober regard to her own well-being. England is above being threatened; but she is also above being provoked to the commission of crime by a decent warning of its consequences. In her sober mind she knows, however imperfectly her practice may correspond to the conviction,- that the end of a feast is much better than the beginning of a fray, fair as the prospects of the latter may be; and, when she thinks of her power to annoy us, she ought to know that we

are too true children of her own loins to be excited by adversity to any other feeling except a determination to resist and

overcome.

The recent change of ministry we are inclined to regard as an event of happy augury for us. The Conservatives come into office so strong, that they can better afford to give to all their due. Not obliged to bespeak the most sweet voice of this declaiming radical on the one side, nor to cotton to that church-and-king borough-owner on the other, they are in a condition to look for the upright, in distinction, if need be, from the profitable and popular. We will not despair of their finding themselves able to say to the people of England; "You would not yourselves be pleased to have Louis Philippe come, looking for Louis Napoleon, into Dover harbour, lay about him with sword and musket upon its pier, shoot an Englishman, and cut out an English ship to be burned; then, like frank, honest people, as we are, and not afraid to own ourselves in the wrong, let us tell these Americans that we are sorry, that, in a flurry, we burned the Caroline and killed Amos Durfee. It is provoking, no doubt, to see our good intentions baffled by a machinery of fraud, converting a Spanish vessel, which we have a right to search and send home, into an American, which we must not touch; yet you would not yourselves easily consent to have your own fair traders molested, your own red-cross insulted, by hotheaded foreign subalterns on the high seas; and it is but doing as we would be done by, to charge our own cruisers to respect other sailors' rights. You would not yourselves like to hear, that a great piece of Canada was first roved over by herds. of lawless Yankee trappers, and then claimed at the point of Yankee bayonets; let them have then their worthless tract along the Oregon, which they think so much of, and much good may it do them. The negotiations, it is true, have a little obscured a simple matter, yet, after all, it must be owned that water will not run up hill, and that whatever those lands are, which pour down rivers in different directions from their opposite sides, the same are highlands' in the common sense of men and in the contemplation of treaties; let us give up the point magnanimously, and wish the snuffling barbarians joy of each other's company about those precious frozen springs of the St. John's. We shall then have put ourselves in the right, and, having satisfied our own consciences, we shall not