old school, whose genius was inflamed by the heroic verse, the terse satire, and the playful wit of antiquity? Who, that meditates over the strains of Milton, does not feel that he drank deep at

"Siloa's brook, that flowed

Fast by the oracle of God"

that the fires of his magnificent mind were lighted by coals from ancient altars?

It is no exaggeration to declare, that he who proposes to abolish classical studies proposes to render, in a great measure, inert and unedifying the mass of English literature for three centuries; to rob us of the glory of the past, and much of the instruction of future ages; to blind us to excellences which few may hope to equal, and none to surpass; to annihilate associations which are interwoven with our best sentiments, and give to distant times and countries a presence and reality as if they were in fact his own.

THE FREEDOM OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. G. C. Verplanck.

THE quick and keen sense of self-interest, that gives such sagacity and energy to the business operations of this country, is equally propitious to the success of every art, every discovery, invention, undertaking, and science, that involves in it any amount of practical improvement or power. Hence, whatever of theoretical science, inventive skill, ingenious speculation, or reasoning eloquence, can be made to tell upon any of the multitudinous affairs making up the business of life, or to minister in any way to the increased power or enjoyment of man, will soon find ready attention for their claims. Here no prejudices in favor of time-honored usages are strong enough long to resist the advance of scientific improvement or wise innovation. Society is not divided into castes, each one of them watching with jealous vigilance against any encroachment of their several exclusive walks by any rude intruder from another class, themselves clinging to the settled usages and old forms of their own clan, with the steady pertinacity

of men whose unexamined prejudices are interwoven with their earliest habits and their most valuable personal interests. If Science, descending from her starry throne in the heavens, light the student to any discovery or invention in any manner applicable to the wants of his fellow-creatures, if Genius prompt the lofty thought, — if love of God or of man inspire the generous design, no matter how the novelty may astonish for the moment, no matter what prejudices may be shocked, no matter what interests may be alarmed and band themselves against the innovator, let him go. on undismayed, he advances to certain victory.

WAR WITH FRANCE.-J. C. Calhoun.

THE first thing that strikes me, sir, in casting my eyes to the future, is the utter impossibility that war, should there unfortunately be one, can have an honorable termination. The capacity of France to inflict injury upon us is ten times greater than ours to inflict injuries on her; while the cost of the war, in proportion to her means, would be in nearly the same proportion less than ours to our means. She has relatively a small commerce to be destroyed, while we have the largest in the world, in proportion to our capital and population. She may threaten and harass our coast, while her own is safe from assault. I do not hesitate to pronounce that a war with France will be among the greatest calamities, greater than a war with England herself. The power of the latter to annoy us may be greater than that of the former; but so is ours, in turn, greater to annoy England than France. Nothing can be more destructive to our commerce and navigation than for England to be neutral while we are belligerent in a contest with such a country as France. The whole of our commercial marine, with our entire shipping, would pass almost instantly into the hands of England. With the exception of our public armed vessels, there would be scarcely a flag of ours afloat on the ocean. We grew rich by being neutral while England was belligerent. It was that which so suddenly built up the mighty fabric of our prosperity and

greatness. Reverse the position: let England be neutral while we are belligerent, and the sources of our wealth and prosperity would be speedily exhausted.

In a just and necessary war, all these consequences ought to be fearlessly met. Though a friend to peace, when a proper occasion occurs I would be among the last to dread the consequences of war. I think the wealth and blood of a country are well poured out in maintaining a just, honorable, and necessary war; but, in such a war as that with which the country is now threatened,

a

mere war of etiquette, a war turning on a question so trivial as whether an explanation shall or shall not be given, — no, whether it has or has not been given (for that is the real point on which the controversy turns), to put in jeopardy the lives and property of our citizens, and the liberty and institutions of our country, is worse than folly,—is madness. I say the liberty and institutions of the country. I hold them to be in imminent danger. Such has been the grasp of executive power, that we have not been able to resist its usurpations, even in a period of peace; and how much less shall we be able, with the vast increase of power and patronage which a war must confer on that department? In a sound condition of the country, with our institutions in their full vigor, and every department confined to its proper sphere, we would have nothing to fear from a war with France, or any other power; but our system is deeply diseased, and we may fear the worst in being involved in a war at such a juncture.

THE SURVIVORS OF THE REVOLUTION.-E. Everett.

LET us not forget the men who, when the conflict of counsel was over, stood forward in that of arms; yet let me not, by faintly endeavoring to sketch, do deep injustice to the story of their exploits. The efforts of a life would scarce suffice to paint out this picture in all its astonishing incidents, in all its mingled colors. of sublimity and woe, of agony and triumph.

But the age of commemoration is at hand. The voice of our

fathers' blood begins to cry to us from beneath the soil which it moistened. Time is bringing forward, in their proper relief, the men and the deeds of that high-souled day. The generation of contemporary worthies is gone; the crowd of the unsignalized great and good disappears; and the leaders in war as well as council are seen, in Fancy's eye, to take their stations on the mount of remembrance.

They come from the embattled cliffs of Abraham; they start from the heaving sods of Bunker's Hill; they gather from the blazing lines of Saratoga and Yorktown, from the blood-dyed waters of the Brandywine, from the dreary snows of Valley Forge, and all the hard-fought fields of the war. With all their wounds and all their honors, they rise and plead with us for their brethren who survive, and bid us, if indeed we cherish the memory of those who bled in our cause, to show our gratitude, not by sounding words, but by stretching out the strong arm of the country's prosperity to help the veteran survivors gently down to their graves.

AGRICULTURE AND COMMERCE.-J. S. Buckminster.

No situation in life is so favorable to established habits of virtue, and to powerful sentiments of devotion, as a residence in the country, and rural occupations. I am not speaking of a condition of peasantry, of which in this country we know little, who are mere vassals of an absent lord, or the hired laborers of an intendant, and who are, therefore, interested in nothing but the regular receipt of their daily wages; but I refer to the honorable character of an owner of the soil, whose comforts, whose weight in the community, and whose very existence depend upon his personal labors, and the regular returns of abundance from the soil which he cultivates. No man, one would think, would feel so sensibly his immediate dependence upon God, as the husbandman. For all his peculiar blessings, he is invited to look immediately to the bounty of Heaven. No secondary cause stands between him and his Maker. To him are essential the regular succession of the seasons, and the

timely fall of the rain, the genial warmth of the sun, the sure productiveness of the soil, and the certain operations of those laws of nature which must appear to him nothing less than the varied exertions of omnipresent energy. In the country, we seem to stand in the midst of the great theatre of God's power, and we feel an unusual proximity to our Creator. His blue and tranquil sky spreads itself over our heads, and we acknowledge the intrusion of no secondary agent in unfolding this vast expanse. Nothing but Omnipotence can work up the dark horrors of the tempest, dart the flashes of the lightning, and roll the long-resounding rumor of the thunder. The breeze wafts to his senses the odors of God's beneficence; the voice of God's power is heard in the rustling of the forest; and the varied forms of life, activity and pleasure, which he observes at every step in the fields, lead him irresistibly, one would think, to the source of being and beauty and joy. How auspicious such a life to the noble sentiments of devotion! Besides, the situation of the husbandman is peculiarly favorable, it should seem, to purity and simplicity of moral sentiment. He is brought acquainted, chiefly, with the real and native wants of mankind. Employed solely in bringing food out of the earth, he is not liable to be fascinated with the fictitious pleasures, the unnatural wants, the fashionable follies and tyrannical vices of more busy and splendid life.

Still more favorable to the religious character of the husbandman is the circumstance, that, from the nature of agricultural pursuits, they do not so completely engross the attention as other occupations. They leave much time for contemplation, for reading, and intellectual pleasures; and these are peculiarly grateful to the resident in the country. Especially does the institution of the Sabbath discover all its value to the tiller of the earth, whose fatigue it solaces, whose hard labors it interrupts, and who feels on that day the worth of his moral nature, which cannot be understood by the busy man, who considers the repose of this day as interfering with his hopes of gain, or professional employments. If, then, this institution is of any moral and religious value, it is to the country we must look for the continuance of that respect and