mankind are brethren; and if, therefore, any one portion of them withdraws itself from the commerce of the rest, it is as unjust as if it committed robbery to the amount of what is lost by its seclusion. Not to understand this is to be ignorant of the first principles of society; and therefore, in the face of the whole civilised world, Great Britain would be fully justified were it to employ the ultima ratio regum to compel the Japanese back into the great circle of human brotherhood.

We have thus cast a rapid glance over the Archipelago and its external relations, doubtless leaving much unsaid that might easily have been brought forward did our limits permit, but still touching, we hope, however briefly, on all the important parts of the subject. To satisfy the reader, however, with such a sketch would be impossible. Discovery, though it has not been very actively at work in that part of the world, has still laid open innumerable sources of interest which it would require whole volumes to describe. The utmost we have attempted is to awaken the reader's curiosity, after which the materials of knowledge will be easily discoverable on all sides. There exists, indeed, no proper history of the Indian Archipelago, the publications once circulated under that name possessing nothing to justify such a title. Recent events, however, have attracted and rivetted public attention on that part of the East, so that we may confidently look for a series of works in connexion with it, based on conscientious research, which will enable the nations of the West to sympa thise with the populations of insular Asia, which may at present be said to be wrapped in darkness, since no one has hitherto penetrated into their mental constitution, or drawn aside the veil which conceals their thoughts, their opinions, and feelings, from the scrutiny of the civilised world.

WASHINGTON AND HIS COTEMPORARIES.

HE nature of the series of events which forced the British dwellers in

THE matrice of the series ofmed resistance to the aggressive measures of

the ministers of the English crown, and the characters and motives of the distinguished men who conducted that resistance to a successful issue, are still strangely misrepresented, alike by persons who maintain the divine right of the colonial office to administer the affairs of Englishmen-provided they live a great way off-after its own good pleasure, and by those who regard the issue of the memorable struggle as a great blow struck for the common liberties of mankind. The example of its chief hero, Washington, is to this hour absurdly pleaded by every man who fancies that the violent subversion of existing governments is the sole means of establishing improved and lasting ones. To the heroes of such convulsions-and the remark ought now to strike the ear as the expression of a mere truism— the illustrious American bears not the faintest resemblance, any more than he does to Mahomet or to Napoleon Bonaparte. Neither he nor his great associates, Hamilton, Adams, Franklin, Knox-not even excepting Thomas Jefferson, subsequently the idol of the ultra-democracy of the States-were in any fair sense revolutionists; nor were they republicans, in our idea of the term. Though native-born Americans, they were, by breeding and tastes, English gentlemen: nothing at first was more distressful to their feelings than a repudiation of monarchical principles, nor did they finally resign these principles till after all chance of accommodation with the British crown had passed away. Republican institutions, in the essential meaning of the phrase, they had indeed lived under for upwards of a century-Rhode Island, for instance, perhaps the most democratic state in the Union, though the differences between the constitutions of the various states are unimportant, is still governed by Charles's charter of 1663-and those institutions they were thoroughly resolved to defend; but, provided they practically enjoyed self-government, they, and the people whom they represented, were anything but anxious that the apex of the political column should be surmounted by an elective president in place of the hereditary monarch. Their position was throughout purely a defensive one: they stood upon the ancient legal ways of the constitution; but being firmly resolved to resist, at whatever cost or sacrifice, the unlawful violence with which they were menaced, and having accepted the appeal to arms forced upon them by the madness of successive British ministries with profound regret, if without

mistrust, they determined, to use the words of their great chief, 'never to sheathe the sword they had been compelled reluctantly to draw in defence of their country and its liberties till that object had been accomplished, but to prefer falling with it in their hands to the relinquishment thereof.' And so little of wild theory mingled with the practical and sober aspirations of those thoughtful and earnest men, that when the contest was terminated, and they were free to choose any form of constitution they pleased, they decided on changing as little as possible-well knowing that for the present to firmly and permanently influence the future, it must itself remain connected with, and lean upon, the past. The difference between the British and American forms of government-allowance being made for the disturbing effects of certain social influences-is, after all, much more nominal than real. Trial by jury, Habeas Corpus, inviolability of domicile, the independence of the courts, the subjection of every act of the executive to the ordinary operation and restraints of the law-a point so fatally overlooked by our continental neighbours-the distribution of power, by confiding local self-government to popular bodies thoroughly independent of the central authority-these, and other safeguards which constitute the essence of British freedom, were, and are, jealously preserved by our transatlantic brethren. The defenders of the liberties of America erected a noble, and regard being had to the requirements of their geographical and social position-possibly in some respects an improved, political edifice, compared with that beneath which they had been reared to the moral height and dignity of freemen; but that their work will endure when other, and, in appearance, more symmetrical structures shall have crumbled into dust, is chiefly because they were modest enough and wise enough to build upon the old and tried foundations.

It may be doubted, too, whether the term 'hero,' which has slipped from our pen, ought to be applied to George Washington-a man plain of speech and purpose, of gentlest affections, and quiet, domestic tastes; having neither the start, the swagger, the curt pomposity, nor the varnished mask and glittering plumes of the historic hero, who, ever preceded by flourishes of innumerable brazen instruments, is industriously paraded on the world's stage, till, the remorseless hand of Time having stripped him, bit by bit, of his tinsel glories, the blindest worshipper perceives what a poor humanity it was, after all, that had been audaciously tricked out for the admiration and observance of mankind. Neither had he, though impetuously brave and daring, as was abundantly provednot only at the fatal massacre at Monongahela, but on numerous other occasions that love and admiration of war and fighting which distinguish the conventional hero. His sword, with him only a means, and a sad one, to a righteous and otherwise unattainable end, was much more joyfully sheathed than drawn; and with war, he fervently desired that all its glorious and hateful memories might expire. Washington, too, appears to have had a deep sense of the responsibility he was under to his Creator for the right use of the faculties and opportunities confided to him. Upon the arrival of the intelligence in Virginia that all hope of inducing the English ministry to abandon the illegal and tyrannous course upon which they had entered was at an end, and that war was consequently inevitable, he, we find from his diary, 'went to church, and fasted all day.' Finally, having obtained supreme

power, triumphed alike over foreign aggression and domestic faction, he quietly put off the glittering burthen, and ascended-for surely we must call it so-to the dignity of private life, feeling only surprised, in the noble simplicity and unconscious greatness of his nature, that men should admire as a sacrifice that which he esteemed not only an imperative duty, but an unspeakable relief. Whether, with these qualities and deficiencies, Washington is fairly entitled to the appellation of 'hero,' either in the genuine or conventional sense of the term, we must leave the reader to decide. It must be, we suppose, a matter, after all, of feeling and of taste-precisely as may be the comparative splendour of the brilliant fire-wonders of our pleasure-gardens, and that of the calm and silent stars, upon which perhaps a Vauxhall audience, and others who might be named, would differ in opinion. Still, as the word 'hero' is down, it may remain.

Thus much premised, we may, without danger of misconception, proceed to mete out equal justice to the assailants and the defenders of the British states of America during the revolutionary war. A retrospective glance at the chief incidents of that great event must be at all times interesting, especially to Englishmen, the present generation of whom may possibly be called upon to meet and decide a question akin to that of which the barbarous and sanguinary solution cost their country, between seventy and eighty years ago, so terrible a sacrifice of blood and treasure. The question of colonial connection and independence is fortunately no longer exclusively viewed through the blinding mists of a vainglorious and spurious patriotism. Experience has effectually disposed of some of the grosser fallacies proclaimed in those days by the wisdom of our ancestors. It would scarcely be possible now, one would hope, to call down the applauding shouts of the Commons by Lord North's declaration, so loudly cheered in 1775— 'that absolute sovereignty over our colonies is a question virtually interwoven with not the increase, but the maintenance, of commerce with them.' Neither, we imagine, are there many persons in this age and country, however nervous and impressionable, that would feel greatly alarmed at the repetition, by any tongue however sonorous and eloquent, of the Earl of Chatham's oracular counsel to his admiring peers-When the power of this country ceases to be sovereign and supreme over America, I would advise every gentleman to sell his lands, and embark for that country.' As we have unquestionably outgrown such puerilities as these, we may reasonably hope that others of less transparent, but not less real, absurdity will in time pass away from the national mind; and that, warned by the errors of the blundering past, a more honourable, a more rational determination of the vexed question of colonial dependence and imperial dominion may in future be arrived at; and that, should the necessity arise, the last grasp of the hand exchanged by this country with any of its giant children, in token of merely political separation, will be a pledge of goodwill and hearty sympathy-the precursor and sign of a true and real alliance of interests, purposes, affections, cemented by community of origin, of language, of literature, and of religion.

A consummation this devoutly to be wished; and no means seem more likely to assure it than to place vividly before the public eye the consequences resulting from the adoption of a different policy. Sad task! For

there is no passage which an Englishman, jealous for the honour of his country, would more gladly tear out and efface from its heroic history than the story of the American struggle for independence. This feeling of regret is not caused by the failure of the attempt to subjugate the British people inhabiting America: far from it. The separation of England and the United States is now felt to have been one, sooner or later, of necessity. No one in the present day pretends that the restless, enterprising millions of North America could be safely or satisfactorily governed by any amount of wisdom which might happen to be enthroned in Downing Street; and assuredly no sane Englishman can regret the rapid growth in numbers and resources of a kindred people, who exchange, and, we venture to say, will continue to exchange, the rich surplus of their varied climate and fertile soil for the products of the skilled industry of Great Britain: nor is it caused by any emotion of wounded national pride or vanity; for if he have made himself master of the subject, he knows that at no period have the military qualities which distinguish the British race been more conspicuously and brilliantly displayed than throughout that disastrous conflict. His regret is, that the silly sophistries of pretended statesmen, aided by the illusions of a blind and narrow patriotism, should have induced the English people to lavish their blood and treasure in the vain hope and purpose of bending their distant countrymen to a yoke themselves had, after many fierce and sanguinary struggles, cast off and trampled beneath their feet. Yet not wholly without redeeming lights is that dark and troubled picture. The heart swells with mournful pride, and the moistened eye kindles with a subdued exultation, as we mark the development upon a distant soil of the old spirit which has placed an island, almost lost amidst the storms and tempests of the Northern Ocean, in the van of civilisation-the calm speech and the determined purpose, the resolution, at all hazards, to hold fast by the sacred rights bequeathed by a great ancestry. No spasmodic outburst there of passionate, unstable discontent-no ' straw on fire' of hot, inconstant passion. We have counted the cost,' they say, ' and find nothing so dreadful as slavery.' They had been else unworthy of their name and race; for were not the élite of these people the descendants, the immediate descendants, of the men who had left the British shores during the intervals of triumphant despotism which occurred during the long struggle terminated by the Revolution of 1688 ?-men amongst whom, but for an accident, would have been Hampden, Cromwell, Ireton; the stubborn old Puritan breed, in short, with all its virtues and all its prejudices; Solemn-League-and-Covenant hill-side folk-the very last people, one should suppose, with whom a wise minister would seek to play a high prerogative game? The old fire had frequently blazed forth, too, in the new States. The authorities of Massachusetts sheltered Goffe and Whalley, who had sat in judgment upon Charles I., from the vengeance of his son; and when compelled to proclaim the Restoration, strictly forbade all rejoicings, even to the drinking the king's health. This feeling was probably strengthened, if not chiefly excited, by the savage deaths inflicted by the restored government upon that sincere, enthusiastic fanatic Hugh Peters, and the celebrated Sir Harry Vane. Peters, a native of Massachusetts, had been for many years a favourite preacher at Salem. A few hours before he was hanged, he bade his only child, a daughter, 'go home to