great increase of consumption that cannot fail to take place, manufacturers of small capital will be enabled to obtain their share of prosperity.

One of the most dangerous features of this system of manufacturing protection, is the horrible tyranny to which it gives rise. This exhibits itself on all sides, in the desperate attempts to resist the course of law, and to produce a panic by oppressing the workpeople. No sooner had the law passed than manufacturers and master workmen, who had for years been reaping inordinate profits through the great monopolies granted them than they turn fiercely upon the work-people, and cut down their wages or discharge them from employ. This is done, not that there is any diminution of ability to employ them, or that their labor yields any less profit than before, but simply to pun ish the operative, because a portion of the large profits of the owners are cut down. It appears to be the case that in many instances the workmen understand the movement, and lay the blame at the right door. They appreciate the motive that would sacrifice them by seeking to make them the instruments of revenge on the government. The mere fact, however, that the manufacturing employers have exercised this power of throwing thousands of artizans out of employ at their will, in order, by creating popular distress, to act upon the government, is, of itself, the very strongest reason that can be offered against the system. The operative has, indeed, become the bondsman of the capitalist. If Congress, in its wisdom, chooses to take from the latter privileges that he has too long enjoyed, he coolly shuts up the mill, discharges his men, and leaves them to alarm the government by their cries of distress; while he reposes on his wealth, and awaits the result. This is the process now attempted to be carried out, and the safety of the government, as well as of the working classes, requires that a counter policy should be promptly pursued. We have seen that protection from the incident has been distorted into the principle, and that an advance of duties, from 5 to 40 per cent. average, has produced no other result than to give strength to the manu

facturers in seeking to enforce farther special legislation for their benefit. The evil has become so great as to lead to the consideration, whether it should not be counteracted by an entire abandonment of indirect taxes, and an abolition of the custom-house. By such a course, a patronage of some 11.000 offices will be taken out of the hands of the federal government, and a source of vast corruption dried up. The wants of the federal government may be 22 millions per annum, besides the land revenues. This could easily be raised by a tax apportioned among the states. As, for instance, the mill tax of NewYork yielded $655,067, a two mill tax would give at least $1,200,000, which would be collected without any increase of machinery by the comptroller of New-York, with the state taxes, and placed to the credit of the federal treasury. The collection would not cost a dollar, and the support of the federal government would fall upon property instead of upon labor. The economy and feasibility of such a system is superior to that of customs. By the removal of the latter, many evils would be remedied, particularly that of every few years arraying the manufacturers against the government, and making the distress of work-people the means of warfare. The experience of Great Britain in the protective policy, has been, that wealth under it gradually accumulated in the hands of the few; and the means of the many to consume goods, charged with indirect taxes, had become so far impaired as to affect permanently the revenue. Indirect taxes had reached a point at which they diminished the revenue. The new government of 1842 reversed the whole system, by imposing direct taxes upon the property of the country, and removing the indirect taxes which fell mostly on labor. In this country experience has already developed the fact, that protection is a source of most baneful instability in legislation; that it arrays continually those who seek special privileges against the government; and that the great desideratum of uniform and permanent laws cannot be attained, as long as indirect taxes open the door to the award of bounties.

POLITICS is a serious study,-serious as our lives and liberties. He who invests it with the charm of fiction, awakens our suspicion, and weakens his power to convince. But, strange as it may seem, some of the best thinkers whom the world has ever seen, have encircled political abstractions with the zone of beauty, and clothed sober experience with the manycolored robings of romance. Every age has been enriched by some figment of a commonwealth. Far back in the depths of antiquity, the poets feigned a happy land, where, amid perfumed airs, leafy groves, silver streams, and perennial pleasures, men communed with the gods, inhaled the breath of the blessed, and grew into the image of goodness, and into likeness, and love, and harmony, with the beauty of truth. Greece was the favored retreat of these dreamers. The delightful land of the south filled the Greek with lovely conceptions. The superstition of fear brooded over the dark forests of the North. The rapture of hope lit up the eye of the Greek, and he saw in the trembling of the orange-tree, and in the glory of its bloom, an airy embodiment of beauty; and in the spray of the cascade, and in the prism which spanned it, a living presence of grace. Not only did a divine harmony pervade the unrivalled drama of the Greek, arousing the hidden soul of the hearer and beholder; not only did it give precision in delineation, which vanished imperceptibly into proportion, flinging a radiance around the rival easels of a Protogenes and an Appelles; not only did it beat in the marble forms of the Parthenon, giving them an ease and vitality which seemed the offspring of spontaneous inspiration; not only did it pervade the philosophy, and sway, in its fiercest tumults, the democracy which met around the agora, and the very mob which collected in the Pireus,

Long before Socrates taught, an architect of Miletus, disdaining the precision of square and compass, left his employment of building temples and laying out streets, passed the pillars of Hercules, beyond which the ships of his native place had never ventured, and drifted in a fairy shell-boat of fancy across the western main, to the realms of the blessed. There he constructed his commonwealth. We are indebted to Aristotle for an account of its structure. That severe critic passes his strictures upon its mechanism; and the fine workmanship of the artizan almost vanishes before the touch of the "Seraphic Doctor"-the enchanter of Stagi

ra.

The architect, with more earnestness, and with less irony than a modern satirist,* seems profoundly enamored of the number THREE. His commonwealth is divided into three classes: artificers, husbandmen, and soldiers. His territory is divided into three portions: sacred, common, and private. There are three fountains in the mind, whence spring three kinds of injuries, to be remedied by three kinds of punishmentinsults, damages, and death. In order to bring the whole government within the compass of his mystic_number, he ordained three functions for the rulers, the

concerns of the state-the affairs of strangers-and the management of orphans.

It is unnecessary to comment on this model of a republic. It is important only as a forerunner of Plato's, and as an illustration of the tendency of Hellenic genius.

But a more extraordinary piece of fanciful mechanism was the commonwealth of Theopompos of Chios. It

rivals an Eastern tale in extravagance. It is prolific of giants; and magical illusions dance through it in mazy confusion. It may, however, be allegorical. It has its place of war, its peaceful city, its rivers of pleasure, its tearcompelling fruits, and renovating, Medean magic. It is wanting in that easy transition and naturalness of narrative which graces the ideals which we shall presently notice. There is wanting in this, as well as in the Panchaia of Euhemeros, that attention to great principles which only can give to political fiction its charm for the philosopher, and its dignity for the statesman. Still in these we may see the germinal inclination of the Grecian mind, which afterwards bloomed and bore fruit in the splendid conceptions of Plato. His Republic overshadows all the other ideals of his countrymen. It stands alone, and incomparable. Plato holds the balance of power in the visionary universe; nay, he is paramount. His was the model which Campanella copied in his “ City of the Sun;" the antitype of the fragment which Bacon has left us, in his New Atlantis," a work which gives little satisfaction to the reader of his "advancement of learning," and which is unworthy of the genius which planned the Novum Organon; it doubtless led Sir Thomas More abroad in search of his Utopia, and animated his namesake, Dr. More, the most enthusiastic of modern Platonists, while he constructed his "Theory of the Ideal world ;" it furnishes a pattern for Berkley, to whom is attributed the singular Adventures of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca ;" and finally, it furnished an example for Harrington, when, under the cover of fiction, he set forth his ideas of a commonwealth for his own isle-the "Oceana" of the northern seas, which work called forth the Holy Commonwealth of Baxter, and the "Idea" of Hume. Plato-the divine Plato, not only leads the choir of classic antiquity, in composing and hymning the harmony of divine philosophy, but in striking that sublime strain, in which all may join who aspire after a happier and holier state of existence upon earth.

We can scarcely, in the brief space of a review, give a glance at the general features of these several works. We select three (at the risk of an ad

hominem from the shade of the old architect) of the more prominent and familiar, to illustrate the uses and abuses of this creative faculty.

We

The Republic of Plato is the synonymn for every beautiful vision, and the Utopia of More is the epithet for every wild chimera that can visit the mind. The latter has become an English word, expressing impracticability. Its philological sense is a little ambiguous. Some suppose that More wished to throw a delightful uncertainty around the geographical position of his republic; that, therefore, he uses the word as derived from the Greek negative, sv, and réros, a place, no place; others derive the word from ev, and roos, the happy place; but this is not essential: for to most, the supremely happy somewhere, is nowhere, at least upon the earth. The "Oceana" is not so well known as the other works, because, perhaps, it is less romantic; yet Hume, in reviving speculation upon this subject, in his succinct, quiet, cold and characteristic "Idea of à perfect Commonwealth," gives the meed to Harrington's Oceana, as the only valuable model that has yet been offered. From David Hume we would have been surprised at any other decision. would as soon have expected that his eye of universal scepticism should look upon human nature with the warm and confiding enthusiasm of Plato, or with the quiet humor and hearty satisfaction of Sir Thomas More, as that a Wallstreet broker should glow with the poetic furor over the sun-set that gilds the tower of Trinity. Read his own "Idea." How nude, shivering, marrowless, skeleton-like! No warmth, no ornament, no elasticity, no animation; it seems the offspring of despairthe image of death, beside Plato's bounding hopefulness, and More's breathing picturesqueness. The Oceana is more matter-of-fact. Its aim is more direct. It was called into being under circumstances very different from those which gave birth to the Republic and Utopia. They are all, however, in one point of view, eminently practical. They should not be condemned as the splendors of dreamers; they should be tested by the character of their authors-by the circumstances under which they were written,-by the spirit in which they were undertaken,

ples they advocated. But these very circumstances may have given the motive, and their amelioration may have been the aim. The prudential politics of Aristotle were composed during the time of Alexander. Livy wrote in favor of a commonwealth, in the reign of Augustus; but the golden chains of the court did not trammel his discursive pen. Machiavelli penned his "Prince," when Italy had no prince whose ear was open to anything but the soft accents of the courtier, and the tuneful measures of classic elegance. When the Republic of Piato was written, the Athenian demus were yet dazzled by the metaphysics of the Sophists. Virtue and vice were regarded as mere il lusions of the mind. The eternal distinctions between truth and falsehood were well nigh obliterated. But the instructions of Socrates had evidently formed a large party in Athens, favorable to reform, to progress, and to the metamorphose of its civil and religious institutions. Their master had been judicially murdered, and their plans frustrated. After the subsidence of popular feeling, those who had absented themselves, returned, and by way of avenging the resistance before offered to their projects, exalted the name of their leader, and prepared and embellished their schemes of reform. Such probably were the circumstances under which Plato wrote the Republic. It was published about the close of the 96th Olympiad, since the Ekkλnciálovca of Aristophanes, performed in the 97th, evidently glances at it, and holds up its eccentricities to public laughter. But the Grecian people had degenerated. Athens, the eye of Greece," had been dimmed by bloated passion and lawlessness. Although she could still appreciate the music of her tongue, as it rose from the grove of the Academy, like an anthem, her integrity had been broken, and every Cleon or Alcibiades, whose genius surmounted the level of the mass, swayed her at will. Plato retired into his leafy retreat, where he could enjoy the spiritual inheritance bequeathed to him by Socrates; where he could recall those pure ideas of justice which formerly fell from his master's lips; lay them as the foundation of individual happiness and social harmony; purify and illumine them with that fire. which, Prometheus-like, he stole

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from heaven; blend with them his own exquisite ideas of truth and unity; embody them in the glancing splendor of his divine diction, and give them a local habitation, far from the sound of the demagogue's voice, and the answering people's hurrah-far beyond the setting sun-in our own western world, in which, even then, they may have been half realised in Aztec and Peruvian glory!

In the time of More, Christendom was made the spell of the Popish enchanter. The charm was beginning to break. The refined casuistry of the church had paved the path to heaven with pearls and gold. Immunity for future vice had been given under the smile of the Virgin; sensuality had been concealed beneath the cowl; ambition beneath the surplice; Venus had worn the veil of the nun, and Bacchus the hood of the friar, and all had sung hymns with pealing organs, in dim Cathedrals, to Him that taketh away the sin of the world! This was the age of Christian sophistry. It differed from Heathen sophistry, as the calm quaffing of the hemlock differed from the infernal enginery of the Inquisition. There was then, as now, the difference which D'Aubigne points out, between Catholicism and Popery. More, and his friend Erasmus, were honest and pious Catholic Christians. The shade of suspicion never darkened their motives. Whatever we may think of Sir Thomas' alleged intolerance; and there are, notwithstanding a late Edinburgh Reviewer, conclusive evidences to be urged in its defence; (for a candid statement of which we refer to Professor Smythe's Lectures on History,) his religious opinions, in the early part of his life, were latitudinarian. The Reformation, and its excesses, alarmed and shocked his mild nature, and he afterwards became convinced of the present expediency of uniformity of faith. "It is," says Erasmus, “a sufficient proof of his clemency, that while he was Chancellor, no man was put to death for these pestilent dogmas, while so many at the same period suffered for them in France, Germany, and the Netherlands; and Lord Campbell, in his "Lives of the Chancellors," (which work deserves a separate review,) remarks, that it was not until More retired from office, and was succeeded by

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