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THE CONSTITUTION.

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XXVIII.-THE CONSTITUTION.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

WE can give up everything but our Constitution, which is the sun of our system. As the natural sun dispels fogs, heats the air, and vivifies and illumines the world, even so does the Constitution, in days of adversity and gloom, come out for our rescue and our enlightening. If the luminary which now sheds its light upon us, and invigorates our sphere, should sink forever in his ocean bed, clouds, cold, and perpetual death would environ us: and if we suffer our other sun, the Constitution, to be turned from us; if we neglect or disregard its benefits; if its beams disappear but once in the West, anarchy and chaos will have come again, and we shall grope out in darkness and despair the remainder of a miserable existence. I confess that, when I think of the Constitution, I feel a burning zeal which prompts me to pour out my whole heart. What is the Constitution? It is the bond which binds together millions of brothers. What is its history? who made it? Monarchs, crowned heads, lords, or emperors? No, it was none of these. The Constitution of the United States, the nearest approach of mortal to perfect political wisdom, was the work of men who purchased liberty with their blood, but who found that, without organization, freedom was not a blessing. They formed it, and the people, in their intelligence, adopted it. And what has been its history? Has it trodden down any man's rights? Has it circumscribed the liberty of the press? Has it stopped the mouth of any man? Has it held us up as objects of disgrace abroad? How much the reverse! It has given us character abroad; and when, with Washington at its head, it went forth to the world, this young country at once became the most interesting and imposing in the circle of civilized nations. How is the Constitution of the United States regarded abroad? Why, as the last hope of liberty among men ! Wherever you go, you find the United States held up as an example by the advocates of freedom. The mariner no more looks to his compass or takes his departure by the sun, than does the lover of liberty abroad shape his course by reference to the Constitution of the United States.

XXIX.-THE PEACE CONGRESS.

ANONYMOUS.

If we fail, the disappointment is our own; the world can receive no detriment from our exertions, however unsuccessful. But if we succeed,—if our efforts for ameliorating the lot of humanity are triumphant,-what a fountain of the bitterest woes will be dried! what rivers of blood will cease to deluge and destroy the choicest of human bliss! how will the heart of philanthropy exult, and what a smile of unmingled delight will kindle over the face of a suffering and desponding world! That a foul stigma, which for so many ages has defaced the annals of humanity, should be wiped away -that man should cease to follow the fratricidal example of the first of sons and of murderers-that he should lay aside his cannibal ferocity, which, unlike that of the wild beast, is turned against his own race and kindred—that infancy, and age, and feminine helplessness should forever hereafter repose in safety-that our flocks should feed on the green fields in quiet, and the smoke of our cottages still curl on the peaceful breeze-that these sights should hereafter present themselves, instead of the butcheries, the havoc, and the conflagration of war, is an object well worthy the most devout and unwearied efforts of every friend of human honor and human happiness. Great God is such an expectation a chimera, the creature of a duped and sickly imagination? Are the efforts which aim thus at the exaltation and blessedness of the human race, inspired alone by folly? Is any sad and inevitable fatality thus brooding over the fate of mortals? Must reason guide, and success forever crown schemes of human wretchedness and human destruction; while disappointment is forever to be the bitter cup of those who thus signally endeavor to render the world better and happier? We are unwilling to believe it; we will not, at least, despair without an effort.

LITERATURE PERVERTED.

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XXX.-LITERATURE PERVERTED.

ANONYMOUS.

LITERATURE has been a most powerful agent in feeding the warlike propensity, and this is undergoing a vital and happy change. In former days it was altogether calculated to arouse and foster a martial feeling. The poems, the histories, the orations, which for centuries have delighted mankind, have been replete with the praises of heroes and conquerors. These pictures and descriptions have been seized upon, amplified and issued at second hand, or assumed as a species of model for every imitator, from that day to this. A magical illusion has been attempted, and in a great degree effected. The battle-field, with its promiscuous carnage of men and horses, covered with clotted gore, and the frozen fragments of bodies,—which else had now been warm with youth, and health, and happiness, blessing and being blessed, -is represented as the field of glory. The devastation of fruitful fields, the destruction of happy homes, the cleaving down of the liberties of a free, and prosperous, and happy people, appear under the guise of a splendid conquest. The tears and execrations of a nation of widows and orphans, and childless parents-the smothered groans of an enslaved people-these sound the trump of everlasting fame for the author of such accumulated miseries; more loud and more lovely, in proportion as they are mingled more deeply with the tones of despair! And men have listened, and admired, and have been made the dupes of their imaginations.

But the scales of delusion are falling from the eyes of nations, and the literature of the age is turned, and is flowing with the general current. At the present day, he is more applauded who crowns a country with peace and plenty, than he who covers it with bones and putrefaction—he who builds, than he who burns, a city-he who has founded a wise system of laws, than he who has overturned it—he, in short, whose fame is associated with the happiness of his race, than he who has wantonly hurled the firebrand of destruction into the home of that happiness, though the smoke and glare of its conflagration should reach the heavens, and the crash of its ruins shake the earth to its centre. When

we reflect upon the influence exerted by a ballad, or a tale, shall we hesitate to hope the most blessed results from this change in the literature of the present age?

XXXI-CIVILIZATION OF AFRICA.

EDWARD EVERETT.

I KNOW it is said that it is impossible to civilize Africa. Why? Why is it impossible to civilize men in one part of the earth more than in another? Consult history. Was Italy, was Greece, the cradle of civilization? No. As far back as the lights of tradition reach, Africa was the cradle of science, while Syria, and Greece, and Italy were yet covered with darkness. As far back as we can trace the first rudiments of improvement, they come from the very head waters of the Nile, far in the interior of Africa; and there are yet to be found, in shapeless ruins, the monuments of this primeval civilization. To come down to a much later period, while the West and South of Europe were yet barbarous, the Mediterranean coast of Africa was filled with cities, academies, museums, churches, and a highly cultivated population. What has raised the Gaul, the Belgium, the Germany, the Scandinavia, the Britain of ancient geography to their present improved and improving condition? Africa is not now sunk lower than most of those countries were eighteen centuries ago; and the engines of social influence are increased a thousand-fold in numbers and efficacy. It is not eighteen hundred years since Scotland, whose metropolis has been called the Athens of modern Europe, the country of Hume, of Smith, of Robertson, of Blair, of Stewart, of Brown, of Jeffrey, of Chalmers, of Scott, of Brougham, was a wilderness, infested by painted savages. It is not a thousand years since the north of Germany, now filled with beautiful cities, learned universities, and the best educated population in the world, was a dreary, pathless forest. Am I told that the work we have in hand is too great to be done? great, I ask, to be done when? too great to be done by whom? Too great, I admit, to be done at once; too great to be done by this society; too great to be done by this generation, perhaps; but not too great to be done. Nothing is too great to be done, which is founded on truth and justice, and which is pursued with the meek and gentle spirit of Christian love.

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A CORRUPT public sentiment produces dishonesty. A public sentiment in which dishonesty is not disgraceful; in which bad men are respectable, are trusted, are honored, are exalted, is a curse to the young. The fever of speculation, the universal derangement of business, the growing laxness of morals, is, to an alarming extent, introducing such a state of things.

If the shocking stupidity of the public mind to atrocious dishonesties is not aroused; if good men do not bestir themselves to drag the young from this foul sorcery; if the relaxed bands of honesty are not tightened, and conscience tutored to a severer morality, our night is at hand,-our midnight Lot far off. Woe to that guilty people who sit down upon broken laws, and wealth saved by injustice! Woe to a generation fed by the bread of fraud, whose children's inheritance shall be a perpetual memento of their father's unrighteousness; to whom dishonesty shall be made pleasant by association with the revered memories of father, brother, and friend!

But when a whole people, united by a common disregard of justice, conspire to defraud public creditors; and States vie with States in an infamous repudiation of just debts, by open or sinister methods; and nations exert their sovereignty to protect and dignify the knavery of the Commonwealth; then the confusion of domestic affairs has bred a fiend, before whose flight honor fades away, and under whose feet the sanctity of truth and the religion of solemn compacts are stamped down and ground into the dirt. Need we ask the cause of growing dishonesty among the young, the increasing untrustworthiness of all agents, when States are seen clothed with the panoply of dishonesty, and nations put on fraud for their garments?

Absconding agents, swindling schemes, and defalcations, occurring in such melancholy abundance, have at length. ceased to be wonders, and rank with the common accidents of fire and flood. The budget of each week is incomplete without its mob and run-away cashier-its duel and defaulter; and as waves which roll to the shore are lost in those which follow on, so the villanies of each week obliterate the record of the last.

Men of notorious immorality, whose dishonesty is flagrant, whose private habits would disgrace the ditch, are powerful

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