the prodigious, and, as we fear, degrading transition which is going on amongst us. We are not blindly attached to the customs of former times, and willingly admit, that, in some respects, a change for the better has taken place; but in others how wofully for the worse; and how prodigious, at all events, is the alteration, whether for better or worse, which is in progress! With the feeling of chivalry still giving dignity to the higher ranks, and a sense of loyalty yet elevating the lower; with religion paramount in all the influential classes, and subordination as yet unshaken among the industrious poor, a state of manners ensued, a degree of felicity was attained, a height of national glory was reach ed, to which the future generations of Europe will look back with the more regret, that, once lost, it is altogether irrevocable. We do not despair of the fortunes of our country, still less of the human race; but we have no hope that those bright and glorious days can ever return. Vigour, indeed, is not awanting; activity, restless insatiable activity, is in profusion; talent is as yet undecayed; but where are the elevated feelings, the high resolves, the enduring constancy, the religious inspiration, the moral resolution, which gave dignity and grandeur to the past age? These qualities, doubtless, are still found in many individuals; but we speak of the general tendency of things, not the character of particular men. Even where they do occur, are they not chiefly to be discerned in those of a certain standing in life; and are they not remarked by the rising generation as remnants of the former age, who are fast disappearing, and will soon be totally extinct?

Look at education,-above all, the education of the middling and lower orders, and say whether a vast and degrading change is not there rapidly taking place? It is there more than any where else that "coming events cast their shadows before." Elevating or ennobling knowledge; moral and religious instruction; purifying and entrancing compositions are discarded; the arts, the mechanical or manufacturing arts, alone are looked to-nothing is thought of but what can immediately be turned into mo

ney; the church, and all the institutions connected with it, are considered as not destined to any lengthened endurance, and, therefore, classical learning is scouted and abandoned. The philosopher's stone is alone sought after by the alchymists of modern days; nothing is studied but what will render the human mind prolific of dollars. To purify the heart, and humanize the affections; to elevate the understanding and dignify the manners; to provide not the means of elevation in life, but the power of bearing elevation with propriety; to confer not the power of subduing others, but the means of conquering one's self; to impress love to God and goodwill towards men, are deemed the useless and antiquated pursuits of the monks of former days. Practical chemistry and sulphuric acid; decripitating salts and hydraulic engines; algebraic equations and commercial academies; mercantile navigation and double and single book-keeping, have fairly, in the seminaries of the middling ranks, driven Cicero and Virgil off the field. The vast extension of education, the prodigious present activity and energy of the human mind, the incessant efforts of the middling ranks to elevate and improve their worldly situation, afford, we fear, no reasonable grounds for hoping that this degrading change can be arrested; on the contrary, they are the very cir cumstances which afford a moral certainty that it will continue and increase. That the energy, expectations, and discontent now generally prevalent among the labouring classes, and appearing in the feverish desire for social amelioration and the ready reception of any projects, how vain soever, which promise to promote it, will lead to great and important changes in the condition both of government, society, and manners, is too obvious to require any illustration. The intense and feverish attention to worldly objects which these changes at once imply and produce; the undue extension of artificial wants among the labouring poor which they generate; the severe competition to which all classes are in consequence exposed; the minute subdivision of labour which such a high and increasing state of manufactur

ing skill occasions; the experienced impossibility of rising in any department without a thorough and exclusive attention to its details, are the very circumstances of all others the most fatal to the improvement of the understanding, or the regulation of the heart. Amidst the shock of so many contending interests, the calm pursuits of science, which lead not to wealth, will be abandoned; the institutions which as yet maintain it will be sacrificed to the increasing clamour of democratic jealousy; literature will become a mere stimulant to the passions, or amusement of an hour; religion, separated from its property, will become a trade in which the prejudices and passions of the congregations of each minister will be inflamed instead of being subdued; every generous or ennobling study will be discarded for the mere pursuits of sordid wealth, or animal enjoyment; excitement in all its forms will become the universal object; and in the highest state of manufacturing skill, and in the latest stages of social regeneration, our descendants may sink irrecoverably into the degeneracy of Roman or Italian manners.

The extension and improvement of the mechanical arts-the multiplication of rail-roads, canals, and harbours-extraordinary rapidity of

internal communication-increasing craving for newspapers, and excitement in all its forms; the general spread of comfort, and universal passion of luxury, afford no antidote whatever against the native corruption of the human heart. We may go to Paris from London in three hours, and to Constantinople in twelve; we may communicate with India, by the telegraph, in a forenoon, and make an autumnal excursion to the Pyramids or Persepolis in a fortnight, by steam-boats, and yet, amidst all our improvements, be the most degraded and corrupt of the human race. Internal communication was brought to perfection in the Roman empire, but did that revive the spirit of the legions, or avert the arms of the barbarians? did

it restore the age of Virgil and Cicero? Because all the citizens gazed daily on the most sumptuous edifices, and lived amidst a forest of the noblest statues, did that hinder the rapid corruption of manners, the irretrievable degeneracy of character, the total extinction of genius? Did their proud and ignorant contempt of the barbarous nations save either the Greeks or the Romans from subjugation by a ruder and more savage, but a fresher and a nobler race? Were they not prating about the lights of the age, and the unparalleled state of social refinement, when the swords of Alaric and Attila were already drawn? In the midst of all our excursions have we yet penetrated that deepest of all mysteries, the human heart-with all our improvements have we eradicated one evil passion or extinguished one guilty propensity in that dark fountain of evil? Alas! facts, clear undeniable facts, prove the reverse

with the spread of knowledge, and the growth of every species of social improvement, general depravity has gone on increasing with an accele rated pace, both in France and England, and every increase of knowledge seems but an addition to the length of the lever by which vice dissolves the fabric of society.* It is not simple knowledge, it is knowledge detached from religion, that produces this fatal result, and unhappily that is precisely the species of knowledge which is the present object of fervent popular desire. The reason of its corrupting tendency on morals is evidentwhen so detached it multiplies the desires and passions of the heart without any increase to its regulating principles; it augments the attacking without strengthening the resisting powers, and thence the disorder and license it spreads through society. The invariable characteristic of a declining and corrupt state of society is a progressive increase in the force of passion and a progressive decline in the influence of duty, and this tendency, so conspicuous in France, so evidently beginning amongst our

as the Father of the State, and he is feared by all as its master. If he be weak, he is despised; if he be strong, he is detested. He is himself full of animosity and alarm; be finds that he is as a stranger in his own country, and he treats his subjects like conquered enemies.

"When the provinces and the towns formed so many different nations in the midst of their common country, each of them had a will of his own, which was opposed to the general spirit of subjection; but now that all the parts of the same empire, after having lost their immunities, their customs, their prejudices, their traditions, and their names, are subjected and accustomed to the same laws, it is not more difficult to oppress them collectively, than it was formerly to oppress them singly.

"Whilst the nobles enjoyed their power, and indeed long after that power was lost, the honour of aristocracy conferred an extraordinary degree of force upon their personal opposition. They afforded instances of men who, notwithstanding their weakness, still entertained a high opinion of their personal value, and dared to cope single-handed with the efforts of the public authority. But at the present day, when all ranks are more and more confounded, when the individual disappears in the throng, and is easily lost in the midst of a common obscurity, when the honour of monarchy has almost lost its empire without being succeeded by public virtue, and when nothing can enable man to rise above himself, who shall say at what point the exigencies of power and the servility of weakness will stop?

"As long as family feeling was kept alive, the antagonist of oppression was never alone; he looked about him, and found his clients, his hereditary friends and his kinsfolk. If this support was wanting, he was sustained by his ancestors and animated by his posterity. But when patrimonial estates are divided, and when a few years suffice to confound the distinctions of a race, where can family feeling be found? What force can there be in the customs of a country which has changed, and is still perpetually changing, its aspect; in which every act of tyranny has a precedent, and every crime an example; in which there is nothing so old that its antiquity can save it from destruction, and nothing so unparal leled that its novelty can prevent it from being done? What resistance can be offered by manners of so pliant a make, that they have already often yielded? What strength can even public opinion have retained, when no twenty persons

"The annals of France furnish nothing analogous to the condition in which that country might then be thrown. But it may be more aptly assimilated to the times of old, and to those hideous eras of Roman oppression, when the manners of the people were corrupted, their traditions obliterated, their habits destroyed, their opinions shaken, and freedom, expelled from the laws, could find no refuge in the land; when nothing protected the citizens, and the citizens no longer protected themselves; when human nature was the sport of man, and princes wearied out the clemency of Heaven before they exhausted the patience of their subjects. Those who hope to revive the monarchy of Henry IV. or of Louis XIV., appear to me to be afflicted with mental blindness; and when I consider the present condition of several European nations-a condition to which all the others tend-I am led to believe that they will soon be left with no other alternative than democratic liberty, or the tyranny of the Cæsars."-ToQUEVILLE, ii. 247.

We shall not stop to show how pre" cisely these views of Tocqueville co incide with what we have invariably advanced in this miscellany, or to express the gratification we experience at finding these principles now embraced by the ablest of the French Democratic party, after the most enlightened view of American institutions. We hasten, therefore, to show that these results of the French Revolution, melancholy and depressing as they are, are nothing more than the accomplishment of what, forty-five years ago, Mr Burke prophesied of its ultimate effects.

"The policy of such barbarous victors," says Mr Burke, "who contemn a sub.. dued people, and insult their inhabitants, ever has been to destroy all vestiges of the ancient country in religion, policy, laws, and manners, to confound all territorial limits, produce a general poverty, crush their nobles, princes, and pontiffs, to lay low every thing which lifted its head above the level, or which could serve to combine or rally, in their dis tresses, the disbanded people under the

standard of old opinion. They have made France free in the manner in which their ancient friends to the rights of mankind freed Greece, Macedon, Gaul, and other nations. If their present project of a Republic should fail, all securities to a moderate freedom fail along with it; they have levelled and crushed together all the orders which they found under the monarchy: all the indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed, insomuch that if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendency in France, under this or any other dynasty, it will probably be, if not voluntarily tempered at setting out by the wise and virtuous counsels of the prince, the most completely arbitrary power that ever appeared on earth."-BURKE, v. 328, 333.

Similar results must ultimately attend the triumph of the democratic principle in Great Britain and Ireland. The progress may, and we trust will, be different; less bloodshed and suffering will attend its course; more vigorous and manly resistance will evidently be opposed to the evil; the growth of corruption will, we trust, be infinitely more slow, and the decline of the empire more dignified and becoming. But the final result, if the democratic principle maintains its present ascendency, will be the same.

If we examine the history of the world with attention, we shall find, that amidst great occasional variations produced by secondary and inferior causes, two great powers have been at work from the earliest times; and, like the antagonist expansive and compressing force in physical nature, have, by their mutual and counteracting influence, produced the greatest revolutions and settlements in human affairs. These opposing forces are NORTHERN CONQUEST and CIVILIZED DEMOCRACY. Their agency appears clear and forcible at the present times, and the spheres of their action are different; but mighty ultimate results are to attend their irresistible operation in the theatres destined by nature for their respect ive operation.

We, who have, for eighteen years, so invariably and resolutely opposed the advances of democracy, and that equally when it raised its voice aloft on the seat of Government, as when it lurked under the specious guise of

free trade or liberality, will not be accused of being blinded in favour of its effects. We claim, therefore, full credit for sincerity, and deem some weight due to our opinion, when we assert that it is the great moving power in human affairs, the source of the greatest efforts of human genius,—and, when duly restrained from running into excess, the grand instrument of human advancement. It is not from ignorance of, or insensibility to, its prodigious effects, resolute in resisting its undue exthat we have proved ourselves so pansion: it is, on the contrary, from a full appreciation of them, from a thorough knowledge of the vast results, whether for good or evil, which it invariably produces.

It is the nature of the democratic passion to produce an inextinguishable degree of vigour and activity among the middling classes of society-to develope an unknown energy among their wide-spread ranks-to fill their bosoms with insatiable and often visionary projects of advancement and amelioration, and inspire them with an ardent desire to raise themselves individually and collectively in the world. Thence the astonishing results-sometimes for good, sometimes for evil-which it produces. Its grand characteristic is energy, and energy not rousing the exertions merely of a portion of society, but awakening the dormant strength of millions; not producing merely the chivalrous valour of the high-bred cavalier, but drawing forth "the might that slumbers in a peasant's arm." The greatest achievements of genius, the noblest efforts of heroism, that have illustrated the history of the species, have arisen from the efforts of this principle. Thence the fight of Marathon and the glories of Salamis-the genius of Greece and the conquests of Rome-the heroism of Sempach and the devotion of Haarlem-the paintings of Raphael and the poetry of Tasso-the energy which covered with a velvet carpet the slopes of the Alps, and the industry which bridled the stormy seas of the German Ocean--the burning passions which carried the French legions to Cadiz and the Kremlin, and the sustained fortitude which gave to Britain the dominion of the waves.