The Oregon question is indeed of a more complicate nature. The honor of the British crown is equally interested in the protection of the remotest territories of the empire. Yield only one inch, and there will be no end of Yankee blustering and bravado. No man of sense would recommend peaceful measures in presence of an arrogant adversary; for what says the Italian proverb? "Colui che si fa pecora, il lupo se la mangia;" and England has wolves enough around her ready to shew their teeth the moment she betrays the we-lick-the-Britishers," are unworthy of slightest symptom of sheepishness.

years ago. But it is not for diplomacy | more fickle and unsafe than that of Great alone to remove the causes of the evil, how- Britain-murderously inclement in the ever efficient it may prove in arresting or north, fatally unhealthy in the south. The averting its effects. English and Americans heat and drought of many a summer have must be brought to understand each other. Any book to that purpose, were it even a bare exposition of facts, as the one we mentioned by Mr. Putnam, if written in a fair, candid spirit, must be received with thankfulness, as the work of a well-meaning man, anxious to do away with prejudice, and to hold forth the olive-branch. Every line that is written in England is almost invariably read on the other side of the Atlantic. The English see little about America, except uncharitable caricatures or prosy rhapsodies.

Let us, for once, hear a Yankee pro domo sua, and whilst we take the briefest survey of the several topics started in Mr. Putnam's volume, we will add such remarks as our personal experience may occasionally suggest.

blasted a whole year's harvest in the Mississippi valley. Against this inconvenience, it is true, the renowned meteorologist, Mr. Espy, of Philadelphia, had provided when he presented his plans to Congress, offering to throw a spell on the storms, and sell rain by the bucket. Mr. Espy has, however, proved no prophet in his own country, and the evil endures in all its unmitigated severity.

All these adverse circumstances, however, are as yet bravely overcome, and will be so long as an active and enterprising population unites in its endeavors against them, so long as British hardihood counteracts the effects of an enervating climate (for the fact cannot be disguised that the natives of the Union, especially in the south, dwindle both in mind and body after a few generations, and contract habits of indolence and listlessness almost Asiatic). For years and ages to come, so long as man has only physical difficulties to contend with, he will have to apprehend no disappointment from the broad lands allotted to him by Providence. But if ever anarchy and division, civil wars, and all the evils of Pandora's box, are suffered to ravage the Union, it will soon be seen what the unbounded fertility of America really amounts to. The future "King of New England," the

The United States are as yet an essentially agricultural region a farm or plantation of gigantic dimensions. The aggregate amount of the crops of grain, corn, and potatoes, is equal to nearly 755,200,000 bushels, and as the population amounts to 17,062,666, it affords an average of 42 bushels to each inhabitant; allowing, therefore, ten bushels for each person-man, woman, and child-(which is double the usual allowance as estimated in Europe) they have a surplus which would amply supply the wants of the whole of Great" Emperor of New York," and the "SulBritain,

All this prodigious quantity of bread, with a corresponding abundance of cattle of every description, and cotton, hemp, tobacco, coals, and ice, and the fruit of all climates, must constitute a wealth unparalleled on earth, and easily account for the most important and consoling fact connected with America, that of being the first community in the world hardly exhibiting an instance of pauperism and mendicity.

All this state of blissful prosperity, however, is to be considered as merely transitory, and resulting from the disproportion between the extent of land and the number of its cultivators. America also is no Eden. The New England States, and nearly the whole of the Atlantic shore, are almost irreclaimably barren. The soil of Virginia did not prove inexhaustible; thousands of its old planters are daily shifting their homes to the west. The climate is even

tan of South Carolina," will be found in possession of states hardly equalling in territorial products those European states which the upstart colonies so widely surpass in extent.

American industry, however, will not be found unprepared against all contingencies of agricultural distress. With 4000 miles of railroad in actual operation, with fifty different lines of canals, with coal-fields 700 miles in extent, with above 1,000,000 of people employed in manufactures or trade, with a coinmerce "second to that of no other nation, Great Britain excepted," the United States can be at no loss for sources of uninterrupted prosperity, were even the agricultural reports to present a less cheerful prospect. To say nothing of their construction and management of merchant ships, of their exhibitions of art and trade, where they evince an ingenuity and inventiveness to which European machinery will, ere long, be made tributary; the

people who can send us a yearly supply of sume afterwards his duties as a teacher, till 60,000 wooden clocks; who in four or five he was elected member of Congress, govyears turn the scales in that humble but ex-ernor of his native state of Massachusetts, tensive branch of industry against its origi- and at last appointed American minister nal German importers; a people who spec- at the court of St. James. ulate on the very waters of their ponds, and send ice northward,-need stand in no dread of competition, and bid fair to grapple with, and eventually beat their masters at their own weapons.

To these and other important facts relating to the superiority of the American system of education, we must briefly add the following observations.

We are thus naturally led to the other great corner-stone on which, together with the vastness of unoccupied territory, reposes the fair edifice of American prosperity; we mean cheap and universal eduBut there is one feature connected with cation. Every one is conversant with the American trade which is even more inter- fact that "before the earliest settlers of esting to us than its brilliant success. The Massachusetts had a roof to their huts they horrors of the mill, the squalor and wretch- built a school." Ever since the school has edness of the British manufacturer, are un- been an object of main necessity in Amerknown on the other side of the waters. ican life. The United States have now Public prosperity is not there necessarily one hundred and eight colleges in operabased on the mental and bodily sufferings tion. They have 3248 academies and of millions of degraded beings. The wealth grammar-schools, with 164,270 scholars, of the nation is not promoted at the ex- and 47,207 primary schools, with 1,845,113 pense of outraged humanity. (These re- scholars, of these 468,323 at the public marks would not equally apply to the slave- charge, and only half a million of white holding states.) The mill-owner is a man people unable to read or write: two-thirds in America, and he never forgets that the of these "foreigners," that is English, workers in his employment are, like him, Irish, or German emigrants. created in God's image. Lowell, and its "three miles of factory girls, their silk stockings, their parasols, their lyceums, reading-rooms, their piano, and literary magazines," constitute a realized Utopia That with the exception of three colleges, of a manufacturing district; they are, how- Harvard, Yale, and the University of Virever, in a great measure, the result of that ginia, but few of the institutions dignified material well-being which we have seen with the title of University are even such as arising in America out of unboundedness of might be expected of an incipient state of space. As long as the inhabitants are six society; that most of them have been esor seven to the square mile, as long as a tablished with narrow-minded, sectarian fine estate is to be bought at the rate of five views; that, owing to this same bigoted ilshillings an acre, the Lowell manufacturer liberality, even the three old colleges abovehas no chance of enlisting workmen, unless mentioned are far from proving as benefiit be upon the handsomest terms, or of cial to the country as their ample means keeping them to their looms except by the and endowments would enable them to do. most humane treatment; and this independ- That Harvard college for instance, which ence of the operative in the north aggra- is well calculated to educate 1000 students vates by contrast the wretchedness of his with thirty professors, and an excellent fellow-laborer, the bondman of the south. law school, has only 250. Yale college, No one, except the slave, is immovably with thirty-five professors, among them men wedded to his trade in America. No one of high distinction, only numbers 383 stuwho has reason to be dissatisfied with his dents, and Virginia University only musposition need look far for the means of bet ters 170; and this not indeed from any untering himself. There is scarcely a man generous exclusiveness on the part of the in the Union who has not tried his hand at colleges themselves (for the two former aldifferent employments. John Pierpont, though originally built for peculiar sects who is now an eminent divine, and no are now open to all denominations; and mean poet and scholar, in Boston, has been the latter, like London University, was exby turns a merchant, a physician, and law- pressly founded on neutral and independent yer. His Excellency Edward Everett set grounds) but from the intolerant bigotry of up at first as a Unitarian preacher, then as the people of all sects, who will rather a Greek professor; hence he made his ap- waste their money for the erection of inefpearance as a student in Germany, to re-ficient and perishable institutions without

number, than trust their children to professors belonging to a different religious persuasion. The number of colleges and universities is no more a fair test of the spread of education than a multitude of churches is of the prevalence of a true religious spirit; and it is vain to urge the comparative youth" of the country as a plea for the imperfect state of its collegiate establishments.

short period of three years' schooling. Batches of new-fangled priests, doctors, attorneys, and schoolmasters, are almost daily packed off to the West, scarcely five or six terms after they entered college, with a vague understanding that they will at some future period revisit Alma Mater and complete their education, if a few years of professional success enable them to defray fur"Fifteen millions of free-ther academical expenses. men" ought to afford something better With all these faults, however, nothing than 108 petty, starving, wrangling divinity can compare with the activity, ubiquity, schools. and universality of American education. What with its 50,563 schools, academies, and colleges, with its permanent fund of 2,000,0007. invested in the support of elementary instruction in New York, and above 500,0007. in the small state of Connecticut; with its 900,000 volumes scattered in small but select public collections all over the country; with lyceums, mechanic institutes, and literary associations, even in the most insignificant villages-the lecture every where superseding the play and the opera as a popular amusement; with 1640 newspapers, with cheap publications, helping families even in the narrowest circumstances to the luxury of a private library; with classical universities for ladies (at Troy and Albany), numbering from 200 to 300 pupils, it must go hard, indeed, with America if it does not realize the wildest expectations of the promoters of the cause of useful knowledge.

Nor is it less important to observe that, however great the respect we owe the names of Silliman, Story, Longfellow, and a few others, chiefly employed in the three above-named colleges, the instructors in those American institutions are men of less than middling capacity; in America, as well as elsewhere, and more than any where else, no man who can do better will be a schoolmaster. The trade is neither well paid nor respected; and in a country presenting such a variety of resources in every branch of industry, in a country where the clergyman is a ruler, the lawyer a potentate, the merchant a prince, who but the mean-spirited and pusillanimous would content to limit his faculties to the plodding drudgery of the school-room? A few highminded philanthropists like the Hon. Horace Mann, and a few pedagogical amateurs like Dr. Alcott, will, theoretically, in a magniloquent lecture, or in a neat article How far these intellectual advantages in the "Annals of Education," descant on may contribute to the moral improvement the "sublimity of the teacher's mission," and to the well-being and contentment of but in sober reality, in the country villages the mass of the people, would be a very difin the new settlements, where the slave- ferent, and indeed an extremely arduous driver, the pork-butcher, the house-car- question to answer. It would be to little penter, are better fed and lodged, and enjoy purpose, we believe, to refer to the statismore social consideration and political im-tics of crime. It is no great argument, we portance than the keeper of a school, the think, to assert with Mr. Putnam, that teacher's desk must be but too often occu-"crime, poverty, and disorder, and the pied by men unfitted for their sacred duty, causes of bad faith," belong to the class of no less from mental incapacity than from" uneducated foreigners." Reading and actual worthlessness of character. Except writing alone make no man better; not at the cases, happily not unfrequent, in which least whilst the most worthless newspapers, the parson and schoolmaster's offices are and most corrupting pamphlets, are sure of vested in the same person, our own experi- the widest circulation; not whilst the ence afforded but too ample a confirmation fraudulent bankrupt and notorious adulterof our melancholy assertion. er of one country, are hailed as the most

It is no less to be regretted that academ-popular teachers and lecturers in another! ical studies in the United States are pursued The unfrequency of crime may be owing with that indecent hurry which, from the to a hundred causes besides the propagation notorious storming of a table-d'hôte to the of useful knowledge;-to a long prevalence proceedings of Congress, characterizes of peace and order, to a vigilant police, to every phasis of American life. Lawyers the amplitude of the means of subsistence, and surgeons are allowed to practise after a to a hypocritical construction put upon that

ambiguous saying so rife among Yan- for a downfall as a rise, and we have witkee utilitarians, that "honesty is the best nessed not a few instances of Boston or policy," making the basest rogue deal in Philadelphia merchants, accustomed to all virtue, as the safest and easiest line of busi-the splendor and luxuries of life in their Atlantic cities, driven by "hard times" to

ness.

It is, meanwhile, a fact to be numbered their western back-woods, and brought amongst the most immediate effects of the back to that hard, but wholesome farmer's wide-spreading education, that the Ameri-life from which they or their fathers had cans are the most discontented race in ex-sprung. True, mechanical industry and istence. "Nowhere," said an intelligent literary accomplishments are to be found Salem merchant-and he said it of the associated in such characters as the "Eruwealthiest, quietest, and comparatively hap-dite Blacksmith," or "Learned Leatherpiest place of its size, in the whole Ameri- Dresser," known as the LL.D of Harvard can Union-" Nowhere will you meet so University. Still no one will deny that the many vinegar faces as you do in our spread of useful information in America is streets." No American can sit comfortably attended with a morbid disquietude, which in his chair. Every man is perpetually must in the end prove injurious to the striving to better himself. There is a uni-tone of private and public morals. versal rush from the useful to what are Till men learn to love knowledge as called the liberal professions. With an in-well as virtue, for its own sake, for its ward conviction, analogous to Sancho soothing, cheering, humanizing influence Panza's, that," being born a man he is fit-till a truly religious education tempers to be a president," every citizen in the and modifies the ambitious tendencies of Union is a martyr to a vague covetousness and ambition; and that plausible but unsound system of general education has hitherto had no better effect than to bring up a restless, anxious generation, maddened by the rare examples of individual, exceptional success; fretting, wrestling, elbowing each other, with a wrathful emulation, most apt, no doubt, to give the social order a rapid onward impulse, but no less tending to drive all peace of mind from the face of the earth.

men's minds, by teaching that our efforts should be turned, not so much to overstep the barriers that divide us from the upper classes as to fill with credit and dignity our own station in life,-till, in one word, the world adopts as a social device the precept of the poet,

"Act well your part, there all the honor lies,"

the institution of schools can have no better effects than to add a thousand artificial wants to the real miseries human nature is

already heir to.

This same state of feverish excitement, which would reduce all human felicity to Meanwhile the boasted American equalithe ascent of a few steps in that scale ty, like Lacedemonian freedom, is grounded which rises as we climb, is equally prevaon the most inhuman systems of helotism. lent in all civilized countries, but in old We do not merely allude to negro slavery, Europe it is to a great extent kept in check for that is a deep-rooted and complicated by the force of habit, and by the mere law evil to which the Americans seem alof necessity. But in America, without ready hopelessly resigned. The question three millions of blacks (whether slaves or of abolitionism is adjourned until the dissonominally freemen matters little), and with-lution of the union. The north-eastern out a periodical supply of "uneducated states forsook the cause of honesty as soon foreigners," all manual labor would be as they deemed it inconsistent with the best brought to a stand, the native American policy. Their feelings of humanity were being too refined and instructed-too much not proof against their commercial and poalive to the dignity of a "free and enlight-litical interests; and, with the exception ened citizen"-to condescend to the duties of a few "ranting fanatics," the anti-slaveof a domestic "help," far less to the worky outcry has been hushed up and the subof a hewer of stone and water-carrier, ject dropped as dangerous and disorganizwhich "bring a rational being to a level ing. But we would rather allude to the with the beast of burden." We tremble at

a system of education which would lead us to rely for menial services either on slavery or the affluence of degraded strangers.

True, the American is almost as ready

"uneducated foreigners" to whom the American citizens show so little gratitude, and from any identity with whom they seem to shrink so sensitively. Who is a * Few of our readers can be unacquainted with