ney-changers, whose aggregate power is so tremendous, that it is yet an unsolved problem of fearful interest, whether, in the great struggle now waging, that or the democratic principle will finally prevail. This is the mode in which we have complicated the functions of government; and hence the maddening elements which give such violence and acrimony to party strife. We have perverted legislation from its high and holy office of equal protection, and debased it into an almoner of special advantages and immunities to a few. We have made our elections a contest for these favors--a vile scramble for crumbs cast from the tables of those whom we have lifted on our own shoulders into place. Can any truth in morals be more self-evident than the pernicious influence of special legislation? It degrades politics from its dignity as the most important branch of morals, to a system of trickery, artifice, and corruption. It changes the generous and ennobling rivalry of men for such improvements in government as should most effectually promote the happiness of their kind, into a low strife for doles and rewards, obtained by trampling on the equal rights of the people. It quenches the sentiment of patriotism; excites a feverish thirst for sudden wealth; provokes a spirit of wild and dishonest speculation; allures industry from its accustomed field of useful occupation; pampers the harmful appetites of luxury, and introduces intemperance and profligacy in a thousand hateful forms. The remedy for these vast and continually increasing evils cannot be doubted, if the cause has been correctly assigned. It is to simplify government. It is to reduce it to its proper sphere. If it were restricted to the few plain and necessary purposes contemplated in the democratic theory, the mere protection of person, life, and property; if the guardianship of the equal rights of men were made its sole duty, and its action were directed, in all cases, not by the capricious suggestions of temporary expediency, but the eternal and unalterable principles of justice; if it should seek to preserve the harmony and equilibrium of society by general, not by partial laws; by a system founded on the plain precepts of universal equity, not by a complex contrivance of artificial checks and balances, in which interest should be set against interest, and fraud made to countervail fraud; who can doubt that the salutary influence of such a change would soon manifest itself in an improved tone of public morals, and a wide diffusion of individual happiness and prosperity? Confine government within the narrowest circle of necessary duties; annul the fatal union between Bank and State; and give unbounded freedom to trade, leaving enterprise, competition, and commercial usage and morality, to impose its only restraints; and you at once place this people on a height of glory which would far out-top "old Pelion, and the skyish head of blue Olympus." The history of the world, through all the ages of the past, demonstrates what hideous evils inevitably result from blending the affairs of Religion and State; and the history of our own country beautifully illustrates the beneficent consequences which flow from their separation. In no other nation of the earth are the institutions of religion so generally respected, and in none do so large a portion of the people bend in worship before the altars of the Chistian Church. Twenty thousand churches are scattered over our land, and the number of their communicants probably exceeds two millions. Here then we see the happy fruits of applying to religion the principles of freedom; and what ground is there to doubt that equally happy would be the result of applying the same principles to trade? Why should trade, any more than religion, have its hierarchs, holding their powers from a political source? And why should tithes be imposed on the people, for the support of commercial, any more than ecclesiastical high priests and pontiffs? It is no answer to these questions to call those who propose them agrarians, levellers, and visionaries. Abuse is not argument; and though it may retard, it cannot arrest, the progress of sound opinion. Well for mankind that this is so; since it has ever been the doom of reason to be assailed with scoff and clamor by ignorance and prejudice. But she has kept on her way rejoicing, and onward, onward, will still pass, in her unfaltering course, to the accomplishment, at last, of a grander reformation than they who draw their augury from the present clouded phases of society would venture to predict. In the meanwhile, let intolerance storm and folly jeer. We profess ourselves followers of truth, not to be turned aside from the career by terms of ridicule, nor irritated to retaliate with such paltry weapons of intellectual warfare. They who, in this age of the world, when mind has made, and is continually making, such prodigious advances in every department of knowledge, would attempt to obstruct the course of free, calm, fearless discussion by derisive epithets and paltry catch-words for folly to play upon, if they had lived three centuries ago, would have been incited by the same temper, under the circumstances which then prevailed, to break their opponents on the wheel or burn them at the stake. Intolerance shows itself in many guises; but all impatience of the free, dispassionate exercise of reason-all hindrances to the utmost liberty of inquiry, whether consisting in physical resistance, or in the terrors of denunciation, and the arts of ridicule, are but various forms in which that bad spirit manifests itself. Discussion is the great means of eliciting truth. Truth is an etherial light kindled by the attrition of opposite opinions. They who would quench it, if through fear of its effects, are despicable, if through any other motive, they are base. THE DEATH OF SCHILLER. BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. "Tis said, when Schiller's death drew nigh, To wander forth, wherever lie The haunts and homes of human kind. Then strayed the poet, in his dreams, Walked with the Pawnee fierce and stark, How could he rest?—even then he trod A ray upon his garments shone Shone, and awoke that strong desire For love and knowledge reached not here ;— Till Death set free his soul of fire, To plunge into its fitter sphere. Then-who shall tell, how deep, how bright, August 6, 1838. |