know any more of the heavens above, or the earth beneath, it may in a great measure be traced to the mechanic who constructed them.

Indeed, there seems very little new in European science, except Craniology, Homœopathy, Mesmerism, and the Water-Cure. All these come abroad under the respectable name of science, which has lately usurped the prerogatives of what in the dark ages was called magic, and subjected its professors to be burnt alive. All are alike infallible, like quack medicines; scholars perspiring under a load of academic honors, gravely sit in judg ment on these modern miracles; Doctors of Divinity and Doctors of Physic, learned Thebans, and learned Professors, testify to what ignorant blockheads believe to be impossible; credulity is no longer the characteristic of vulgar minds; and if we except religion, the organ of faith has been gloriously developed among the learned of Europe. In short, the advances made in useful practical science are, in a great measure, confined to experiments in chemistry and improvements in mechanics. They have lately discovered nothing but new planets, and this is entirely owing to their having better telescopes than old Galileo and Copernicus. The Americans, too, have, we believe, discovered at least one planet, and some of them are adepts in Craniology, Mesmerism, and Spiritual Knockings, in the latter of which they are in advance of all other people; so that on the whole, they are not greatly behindhand with Europe.

But without instituting a labored and minute comparison between the great masses of Europe and the United States, we shall content ourselves with observing, that from the first moment the New World was sought by the inhabitants of the Old, it became a theatre for the exercise of daring enterprise and hardy endurance. All those high heroic qualities that constitute the aristocracy of nature were called into perpetual requisition. The utmost exertion of the mental and physical powers was necessary to meet and overcome the obstacles and dangers which everywhere presented themselves, in the cultivation of the soil; while courage, fortitude, presence of mind, discernment of spirit and energy of purpose, became at all times indispensable in their most ordinary occupations. They had both nature and man to contend with; and from first to last, down to the present time, could not take a step beyond their accustomed bounds without encountering a succession of hardships and dangers. At all times there has existed a great body of citizens, sufficient to give tone to the habits and cha

racter of the nation, marching in the van of civilization, equally daring, adventurous and intelligent. We speak of the people of the "Great West," who, according to the European scribes, are a sort of semi-barbarians. It may be so; but they are precisely such barbarians as are accustomed to triumph over the enervated races that affect to despise them.

There is perhaps no example in the history of the expansion. of the human race, of such a long-continued series of dangers, hardships, and privations, or greater fortitude in enduring them, as may be found in the details of the progress of the early emigrants to America. Even now they cannot expand in any direction without encountering similar obstacles which call for the exercise of similar qualities. There is no fabulous period in the history of the United States; no giants, dragons, or monsters; no supernatural creations looming in the obscurity of distance and time. Our birth is too recent for prodigies; not one of our founders was suckled by a wolf; and the only monsters our ancestors overcame were the wild beasts and wild men of the woods. These plain, homespun men may have known little of Craniology, Mesmerism, and still less of silver forks, petit fois gras, and Perigord pies; but they exhibited the possession of those qualities, physical, moral, and intellectual, which, when harmoniously combined in due proportion, constitute the best claim to the highest dignity of manhood. They subdued a world, and planted civilization in the desert. Their posterity still retain much of these characteristics, as may be seen by their migrations across the vast regions stretching between the two extremes of this continent, exposed to starvation on one hand, the tomahawk and scalping knife on the other, their trapping expeditions among the Rocky Mountains, and by their fearlessly settling themselves down in the very teeth of hostile savages. They are deeply imbued with the spirit of their forefathers. The period is, perhaps, not far distant when they will be tried. Our ancestors brought with them Christianity, civilization, and liberty across the Atlantic. Their posterity now look Asia in the face, and who knows but their mission may be gradually extended to that quarter? With respect to facilities and inducements for the cultivation of the intellectual faculties, there is most assuredly no country under the sun where opportunities are so much within the reach of all, or where such powerful stimulants present themselves for their exercise. Nowhere else is there that general diffusion of competency, which enables the parent to dispense with the labor of young children for the purpose of sending them to school;

and nowhere is there such liberal provision for their education. Thus possessing a boundless field for enterprise, affording ample room for the exercise of body and mind; animated by the certainties of the present, and the hopes of the future; encouraged by every glorious anticipation that can awaken the energies of man; and blessed with a free government that places no artificial obstacles in the way of his career, it would be belying the nature of man and the experience of ages to doubt for a moment that the descendants of Europeans in the United States do not at least equal their ancestors. For our part, we neither doubt nor fear. The future fortunes of the United States are prefigured in their past career, and the spectacle they now exhibit is sufficient indication of what they will one day become. Their destinies will not be decided by the policy of England or France, or both combined, nor by a Congress of European sovereigns affecting to settle the balance of power in the New World, but by the people of the United States themselves, who, under God, are the arbiters of their own future;. That depends on their own virtue, intellect, enterprise and energy; and whether their foreign affairs are directed by a sot or a simpleton, they will continue to grow and expand by a law of nature and a decree of Providence.

BRITISH POLITICAL ECONOMY.

[CONCLUDED.]

THE Condition of England is a very peculiar one, and affords the most fruitful field for paradox ever presented to political economists. The traveller passing through that country, and observing its verdant lawns, fruitful fields, splendid mansions, and tidy cottages, fancies himself in a blooming Eden of innocence and happiness. But the serpent has crawled into this paradise. The country smiles, but the hearts of those that made it smile are sad, weary, and hopeless. The product of their labors is shared, between the church, the king and the landlord, and the ox that treadeth out the corn is muzzled. The lion gets his share, but the hound that runs down the game receives only the offals. Uneasiness and discontent pervade the great masses of the people, and England is "Merry England" no more. Incessant toil and pinching privation

have robbed them of all opportunity or inclination for any recreations but those of the gin-shop. Rural sports and rural songs are heard and seen no more, and England is now only a great workshop and money market, where one portion of the people are laboring to accumulate millions, the other, consisting of the mighty masses, toiling incessantly for bread.

Money is the life-blood of England, the sole prop of her existence, and the sole object of pursuit, from the great landed proprietor and rich banker, to the pauper peasant and palefaced operative. The nobleman of twenty or fifty thousand sterling a year, begins to feel the pressure of the public burdens, most especially the income tax, and seeks to make up for them by speculating in railroads, or taking up his residence on the continent, the better to practise that economy which Mr. McCulloch thinks one of the great blessings derived from the national debt, and fifty millions of taxes. The merchants, impelled by the like necessity, extend their business beyond their capital, and enter into speculations, which, in the various vicissitudes, reactions and revulsions of trade, sooner or later end in bankruptcy; the retail trader is, as it were, compelled by the like necessity to adulterate almost every article he sells, and poison his neighbors to keep himself alive; the mechanic practises all sorts of deceptions; and the poor laborer, having no resource, no expedient for "raising the wind," resorts to the poor rates and marries, or takes a wife without benefit of clergy, in order that he may breed more paupers, and share with them the crumbs of extorted charity. Beyond all doubt, there is no people now in existence that worship the golden calf with such exemplary devotion as the English, nor any government on earth so dexterous in devising expedients for raising the wind.

All the increasing exertions of industry, economy and invention, consequent on the public debt and public burdens, go to increase the wealth and power of the government, not the comfort and happiness of the people. So far from it, they double the price of almost every necessary of life the laboring man consumes. Before the great Avater of Political Economy, it would have been considered a serious calamity for a nation to owe more than it could ever pay, and be burdened with taxes that absorbed a considerable portion of the means necessary to the comfortable subsistence of great masses of people. Such a state of things would, in the days of ignorance, have

* See a late number of Blackwood's Magazine.

been deemed deplorable, and wise statesmen-at least those who passed for wise in those dark ages-have set about remedying it as soon as possible. Ignorant people would doubtless have taken it for granted that a nation, like an individual who was perpetually borrowing, and never paying, and whose extravagance increased with the amount of his debts and the pressure of his wants, was on the high road to ruin. But this old-established dogma of common sense and experience, it scems, has no application to England. That country is an exception to all others, and with the aid of political economy, will assuredly be able to triumph over those causes which have ruined other nations. Though more than once on the eve of bankruptcy,* and once actually bankrupt for twenty years, she has survived the shock, and will therefore never die. She has grown and expanded under the pressure of additional weight, yet the economists should recollect that the frog in the fable burst at last. But let us now proceed to an examination of McCulloch's theory of taxation, which is equally calculated, we think, to produce injurious consequences whereever it exercises any influence.

"That portion of our national revenue," he says, "drawn from the public by means of taxes and appropriations to the use of government amounts, at present, to about £50,000,000 sterling annually, and far exceeds in magnitude the public revenue of any other country. But it must not, therefore, be inferred that taxation is here comparatively heavy. Its pressure is not to be estimated by the actual amount of the sum taken from the people, and lodged in the coffers of the treasury, but by the mode in which taxes are imposed, and the capacity of the people to bear them. In some countries, taxes are imposed on certain classes only; and even where this gross inequality does not prevail, they are often imposed on erroneous principles, and in a way that makes their assessment and collection peculiarly difficult and injurious. But in the United Kingdom, taxation presses equally, or nearly so, on all classes; and without pretending to say that it might not be materially improved, it appears, generally speaking, to be founded on sound principles, and is practically as little injurious as it could be rendered. It is not to the influstyle of living which

ence of taxation, but to the expensive

*It was asserted, some years ago, in the British House of Commons, and not contradicted, that England was saved from bankruptcy by the accidental discovery of a great box of one pound notes in the vaults of the Bank of England.