Steele, in the last number of the Tattler, says that the general purpose of the whole has been to recommend truth, innocence and virtue, as the chief ornaments of life; this with equal justice may be applied to Hunt's writings. His purest and noblest effusions gush from a loving heart. He causes us to regard our fellow mortals with consideration and affection, as brother toilers on the earth, and heirs of a happy immortality. Nature has always worn the same unchanged face to him, for he has been true to himself, and, considering life a blessing, he has made it one. No writer has more strenuously inculcated a spirit of kindness and self-sacrifice, and he practices what he preaches. To use the affecting words of Jeannie Deans, "when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low, then it is na what we hae dune for oursels, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly." We are all in search of happiness-it is "our waking thought by day, our dream by night"-and yet, how find it? In truth, we become the slaves of others from want of independence of character. We are afraid to trust the throbbings of our own heart, we fear the world's dread laugh, and our lives are passed in a feverish dream, seeking to equal or outshine those whose wealth gives them means of making a greater display. Very few please themselves, even in their amusements-they must do as the world does. 'Tis not fashionable to have a mind of your own. The vain and the idle, "the trim, transient toys" that flutter in the gaudy blaze of society, forgive none that can live out of their circle-it is the greatest of treasons. Such persons are slandered, and their sanity called in question. Man should be happier than he is. We should cultivate simple tastes, and form ourselves after the true and beautiful. We would rather have been, for the real satisfaction of the thing-" for the sunshine of

the breast"-Izaak Walton, than Napoleon. The one enjoyed life in simplicity and thankfulness, which the other, in his purple career, never thought of. Life palls, we become sick at heart, and exclaim, "all is vanity. and vexation of spirit." This arises from selfishness, for no one can be happy unless he seeks to make those happy around him.

"The only amaranthine flower on earth Is virtue, the only lasting treasure truth."

Religion is the basis of every estimable quality, and contentment and selfishness cannot exist together. He is the most mistaken of human beings who hugs himself in the vain idea that he can live happily when he lives for himself alone. The Spirit of God within him allows it not. His life and his immortal soul wage a continual war.

We are arrayed into an infinite diver sity of parties, and represent many and opposite tendencies. Each battles with uncompromising energy for the prevalence of his peculiar views. All is activity, agitation. The man who can raise himself above the dust and excitement of the arena, and divest himself of prejudice for either party, will not wish the contest hushed, though he may desire its violence to be somewhat subdued and tempered. He will not wish any particular element or tendency to become exclusively predominant or to be entirely crushed. Extremes meet; and the result would be either a transition from one to the other no less restless and violent than the present fermentation, or else a worse transition to the lethargic quiet of social and political death. The highest glory and the chief hope of safety for our civilization, lie in the fact that it gives free scope to the great leading tendencies of human nature and human society-that it embraces and, to some extent, harmonizes them all. Our political system, for example, combines, in a high degree, the two great antitheses the conservative and the progressive principles. On their preservation its salvation depends. The destruction of either would be the ruin of the other. And as, among us, unlike the case of the Europeans, the progressive is undoubtedly the strongest tendency, the reflecting friends of true freedom and progress are constantly called upon to lend their aid to the weaker side. But the natural consequence of the complete triumph of ultra-conservatism would be that the nation would at length burst with maddened fury from the strait-jacket imposed on it, and rush into the chaos of perfect anarchy. The cramped and tortured giant would prefer the cold, bare ground of savage lawlessness to the Procrustean bed of antiquity. On the other hand, the complete triumph of the ultra-progressive principle would probably result in a speedy transition to monarchy; and that monarchy would be despotism, as all past history teaches. We should thus be thrown from all our high and peculiar advantages into the same broad and downward road which others have trodden before us. Institutions essentially

democratic have ever proved the most favorable soil for the rapid progress of civilization, and, with a due limitation and intermixture of the conservative principle and spirit, they would be equally favorable for its mature and permanent growth. And perhaps the ideal of a monarchy-a monarchy in which all right liberty should have free scope, vigor and development-might accomplish the same purposes.

There is always a vast difference between the ideal and the caricature of a thing. Partisans and controversialists look at the ideal of their own side and a caricature of their opponents'—hence their zeal and violence; while, if they could exchange the points of view, they would exchange characters also. Monarchists can see only a caricature of democracy-they cannot distinguish it from mobocracy; in like manner, we are apt to look at nothing but a caricature of monarchy, which is undistinguishable from despotism. But to the ideal of a monarchy, if it could be permanently realized, the democrat could have little objection; while to the ideal of a democracy, if that also could be permanently realized, the monarchist could have as little. Indeed, the two ideals will not substantially differ-only each, in its progress towards realization, regards a peculiar set of dangers. The one would guard against licentiousness on the part of the governed, the other against corruption and selfish misrule on the part of the governors-and unquestionably both dangers exist. The great question is, which of the two theories is the most practicable? Monarchy has been tried on a large scale in connection with modern civilization, and has undoubtedly accomplished many valuable purposes; but it seems incapable of securing, thoroughly and permanently, the highest purposes of civil society. It has been tried and found wanting. There is in the civilized world a very general yearning after a change. The most philosophical observers of Europe see and acknowledge that the democratical tendency is the tendency of the age. It remains to be seen whether democracy can perform the purposes in which monarchy has failed. The experiment never has

been and never could be tried, under so favorable circumstances as in our own case; if it fails with us, it fails for many ages, if not forever.

Self-government is not, as has been acutely but sophistically maintained by a late writer in the Democratic Review, a self-contradiction: Rather it is, morally and politically speaking, the highest problem of civilization-for it is, in these respects, the proper self-development of man. It by no means implies the rejection of an external rule, a law and an authority emanating from a source above us, and revealed to us as well as in usit only rejects such a rule and authority as emanating from a source which is not above us. Self-government begins with a reverential recognition of a supreme law its process is a constant endeavor to render that law objective, real, operative to externalize it, if we may use the term. It evolves the law not as derived from itself, but through itself and to itself from a supreme power. Does not every man who has struggled with temptation and sin know that self-government is no absurdity? And the case of the intemperate man who has by himself resolved and re-resolved on reformation in vain, but who, after signing a public pledge, finds himself enabled to persevere, is an instance and an illustration of the nature and importance of that process by which the rule of conduct is conceived of and realized as exterior to ourselves. In the case of the nation that would govern itself, it is no less essential it should recognize this supreme law as paramount to its own will, and the objective rule of its conduct, than in the case of the individual. It is not, indeed, necessary that, according to the philosophy of monarchy, this supreme law should be visibly embodied in some particular person. This is a sort of political idolatry or Grand-Lamaism. But the law must be recognized, realized, submitted to as somewhat independent of the people's will and sovereign over it. The effort of a free people must ever be to render more dim the consciousness of governing, and more distinct that of being governed. They must think less and less of their right, and more and more of their duties; otherwise, instead of governing themselves, they will end, at best, in governing one another. A prevailing tendency to declaim against, decry and resist authority is of itself sufficient proof, that, where it exists,

self-government does not or will not long exist. It is the part of a slave to contend against the government of another; it is the part of a freeman to submit to his own. Not only is the posture of resistance to external authority not self-government, but, more than anything else, long continuance in such a posture unfits for its exercise. It is notorious that slaves just emancipated are most unfit to exercise their freedom, i. e., they have no use and no power of self-government; the whole tendency and habit of their minds have been resistance-resistanceresistance to all that ever was presented to them in the shape of government.

If such be the character and such the conditions of self-government, it will be seen that it is not yet thoroughly established among us. Let us not deceive ourselves; for many of the perils to our civilization are connected with the likelihood of a mistake on this point. We must remember that self-government is a thing not only most noble, but also most difficult.

We proceed to call attention, therefore, to some of the disadvantages, dangers and defects of our civilization. They may be grouped under two general heads- -our extravagant radical, and our equally extravagant utilitarian, tendencies. Let us begin with our radical tendencies, as being in immediate connection with the business of self-government.

We hesitate not to say, there is among us too strong a tendency to reduce all the elements of society to a common level. In calling it "too strong," we mean to admit and imply that it is a tendency not dangerous in kind-for it is a proper and necessary correction of other and opposite tendencies--but we mean also to assert that it may exist, and we believe it does exist, in an exorbitant and dangerous degree. It is a very prevalent notion among us that each individual has a full right to an equal voice and influence in the government and social institutions of the country, without any regard to his progress in intellectual and moral culture. Thus intelligence and ignorance, virtue and vice, are mixed up in one general average. This is a notion which the ignorant and vicious, of course, most greedily embrace and cherish, and its abettors are therefore sure of their support and suffrages. But does the self-government of the individual imply that all his faculties and propensities should have an equal voice in the