shall a man pay no respect to the boundaries of his coun try's rights? How dared he cross that river! Oh, but he paused upon the brink! He should have perished upon the brink ere he had crossed it! Why did he pause? Why does a man's heart palpitate when he is on the point of committing an unlawful deed? Why does the very murderer, his victim sleeping before him, and his glaring eye taking the measure of the blow, strike wide of the mortal part? Because of conscience! 'Twas that made Cæsar pause upon the brink of the Rubicon. Compassion! What compassion? The compassion of an assassin, that feels a momentary shudder as his weapon begins to cut!

2. Cæsar paused upon the brink of the Rubicon! What was the Rubicon? The boundary of Cæsar's province. From what did it separate his province? From his country. Was that country a desert? No; it was cultivated and fertile, rich and populous! Its sons were men of genius, spirit, and generosity! Its daughters were lovely, susceptible, and chaste! Friendship was its inhabitant! Love was its inhabitant! Domestic affection was its inhabitant! Liberty was its inhabitant! All bounded by the stream of the Rubicon! What was Cæsar, that stood upon the bank of that stream? A traitor, bringing war and pestilence into the heart of that country. No wonder that he paused--no wonder if, his imagination wrought upon by his conscience, he had beheld blood instead of water, and heard groans instead of murmurs! No wonder, if some gorgon horror had turned him into stone upon the spot! But, no!-he cried, "The die is cast!" He plunged!--he crossed!—and Rome was free no more!

KNOWLES.

CXXV.-NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

1. IF Napoleon's fortune was great, his genius was transcendent; decision flashed upon his counsels; and it was the same to decide and to perform. To inferior intellects, his combinations appeared perfectly impossible, his plans perfectly impracticable; but, in his hands, simplicity marked their development, and success vindicated their adoption.

2. His person partook the character of his mind—if the one never yielded in the cabinet, the other never bent in the field. Nature had no obstacles that he did not surmount -space no opposition that he did not spurn; and whether amid Alpine rocks, Arabian sands, or polar snows, he seemed proof against peril, and empowered with ubiquity! The whole continent of Europe trembled at beholding the audacity of his designs, and the miracle of their execution. Skepticism bowed to the prodigies of his performance; romance assumed the air of history; nor was there aught too incredible for belief, or too fanciful for expectation, when the world saw a subaltern of Corsica waving his imperial flag over her most ancient capitals. All the visions of antiquity became common places in his contemplation; kings were his people-nations were his outposts; and he disposed of courts, and crowns, and camps, and churches. and cabinets, as if they were the titular dignitaries of the chess-board!

3. Through the pantomime of his policy, fortune played the clown to his caprices. At his touch, crowns crumbled, beggars reigned, systems vanished, the wildest theories took the color of his whim, and all that was venerable, and all that was novel, changed places with the rapidity of a drama. Even apparent defeat assumed the appearance of victory-his flight from Egypt confirmed his destiny-ruin itself only elevated him to empire. Amid all these changes he stood immutable as adamant. It mattered little whether in the field or the drawing room-with the mob or the levee-wearing the Jacobin bonnet or the iron crownbanishing a Braganza, or espousing a Hapsburg-dictating peace on a raft to the czar of Russia, or contemplating defeat at the gallows of Leipsic-he was still the same military despot!.

PHILLIPS.

CXXVI. THE STABILITY OF OUR GOVERNMENT.

1. IF there be on the earth one nation more than another, whose institutions must draw their life-blood from the indi

vidual purity of its citizens, that nation is our own. Rulers by divine right, and nobles by hereditary succession, may, perhaps, tolerate with impunity those depraving indulgences which keep the great mass abject. Where the many enjoy little or no power, it were a trick of policy to wink at those enervating vices, which would rob them of both the ability and the inclination to enjoy it. But in our country, where almost every man, however humble, bears to the omnipotent ballot-box his full portion of the sovereignty—where at regular periods the ministers of authority, who went forth to rule, return to be ruled, and lay down their dignities at the feet of the monarch multitude-where, in short, public sentiment is the absolute lever that moves the political world, the purity of the people is the rock of political safety.

2. We may boast, if we please, of our exalted privileges, and fondly imagine that they will be eternal; but whenever those vices shall abound, which undeniably tend to debasement, steeping the poor and ignorant still lower in poverty and ignorance, and thereby destroying that wholesome mental equality which can alone sustain a self-ruled people, it will be found, by woful experience, that our happy system of government, the best ever devised for the intelligent and good, is the very worst to be intrusted to the degraded and vicious. The great majority will then truly become a many-headed monster, to be tamed and led at will. The tremendous power of suffrage, like the strength of the eyeless Nazarite, so far from being their protection, will but serve to pull down upon their heads the temple their ancestors reared for them.

3. Caballers and demagogues will find it an easy task to delude those who have deluded themselves; and the freedom of the people will finally be buried in the grave of their virtues. National greatness may survive; splendid talents and brilliant honors may fling their delusive luster abroad—theso may illume the darkness that hangs round the throne of a monarch, but their light will be like the baleful flame that hovers over decaying mortality, and tells of the corruption that festers beneath. The immortal spirit will have gone;

and along our shores, and among our hills-those shores made sacred by the sepulcher of the pilgrim, those hills hallowed by the uncoffined bones of the patriot-even there, in the ears of their degenerate descendants, shall ring the last knell of departed liberty!

C. SPRAGUE.

CXXVII. AGAINST CURTAILING THE RIGHT OF SUFFRAGE.

1. GENTLEMEN :-I address the men who govern us, and say to them-Go on, cut off three millions of voters; cut off eight out of nine, and the result will be the same to you, if it be not more decisive. What you do not cut off, is your own fault; the absurdities of your policy of compression, your fatal incapacity, your ignorance of the present epoch, the antipathy that you feel for it, and that it feels for you; what you will not cut off, is the times which are advancing, the hour now striking, the ascending movement of ideas, the gulf opening broader and deeper between yourself and the age, between the young generation and you, between the spirit of liberty and you, between the spirit of philosophy and you.

2. What you will not cut off, is this immense fact, that the nation goes to one side, while you go to the other; that what for you is the sunrise, is for it the sun's setting; that you turn your backs to the future, while this great people of France, its front all radiant with light from the rising dawn of a new humanity, turns its back to the past. Gen. tlemen, this law is invalid; it is null; it is dead even before it exists. And do you know what has killed it? It is that, when it meanly approaches to steal the vote from the pocket of the poor and feeble, it meets the keen, terrible eye of the national probity, a devouring light, in which the work. of darkness disappears.

3. Yes, men who govern us, at the bottom of every citi. zen's conscience, the most obscure as well as the greatest, at the very depths of the soul-I use your own expression— of the last beggar, the last vagabond, there is a sentiment, sublime, sacred, insurmountable, indestructible, eternalthe sentiment, which is the very essence of the human

conscience, which the Scriptures call the corner-stone of justice, is the rock on which iniquities, hypocrisies, bad laws, evil designs, bad governments, fall and are shipwrecked. This is the hidden, irresistible obstacle vailed in the recesses of every mind, but ever present, ever active, on which you will always exhaust yourselves; and which, whatever you do, you will never destroy. I warn you, your labor is lost; you will not extinguish it, you will not confuse it. Far easier to drag the rock from the bottom of the sea, than the sentiment of right from the heart of the people!

VICTOR HUGO.

CXXVIII. TO THE AMERICAN TROOPS BEFORE THE BATTLE OF LONG ISLAND, 1776.

1. THE time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; and whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of a brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or to die.

2. Our own, our country's honor, calls upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion; and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. Let us, then, rely on the goodness of our cause, and the aid of the Supreme Being, in whose hands victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble actions. The eyes of all our countrymen are now upon us; and we shall have their blessings and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the tyranny meditated against them. Let us, therefore, animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a freeman contending for liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on

earth.