grandchildren will have to pay double taxes for the interest of it." With what indignation should we repel his absurdities! "Miserable mole that you are," we might exclaim, "the question is not whether our grandchildren shall pay a few hundred dollars more or less taxes, but whether they should have any voice in paying their own taxes at all; whether they shall have a country and free institutions, or be the servants of strangers. Away with such short-sighted folly!"

The English people enjoy the glory of having resisted a continent like Europe and overcame a man like Napoleon. It was not to be expected that they should have this glory for nothing, nor are they unwilling to pay the price for it. They are not so foolish and so wicked as the Democratic Review hopes or believes them to be.

There is yet, however, one alternative which I had nearly forgotten. He of the Democratic may say that there is no objection to a nation borrowing all they can in such a crisis, but that the next generation may repudiate the debt if they see fit. But this course will be found on examination to be equally unjust to their ultimate posterity. For repudiation though it may answer very well for the first time, is not a game to be played twice. If the second generation repudiates what the first borrowed, the third will not find it easy to borrow again should they require it ever so much. And what more mortifiying position can we imagine that of a generation which, with every honest intention and prospective means, finds itself so damned by the bad faith of its predecessors as to be incapable of obtaining credit? Thus in whatever light we view the question, it appears most clearly that the party which maintains the obligations of a State is the one truly mindful of the interests of posterity.

TO the Honorable Horace Mann:

SIR,

Since even under the aristocratic governments of the Old World, a cat is proverbially permitted to look at a king, much more, in this land of democracy, may a private individual address without previous introduction

a Member of Congress. Undeniable is it, that our private individuals have not been slow to use and abuse this privilege, and numbers of them make it their business to bother public men on all occasions, in or out of season. Nor should I have been willing to follow so many bad examples, had you not, in some sense, yourself given the provocation.

Some two months ago I happened to see in the Literary World, a brief and complimentary notice of your "Thoughts for a Young Man," which mentioned your holding up Stephen Girard as an example, and John Jacob Astor as a warning. The latter gentleman was my maternal grandfather, and having been accustomed to look upon him during his life, and to regard his memory since his death, with a considerable amount of respect, I naturally felt a little curious to see what he had done to be held up as a warning, particularly what legal or moral crime he had committed to make you put him in the same category with the ferocious despot Nicholas, or that prince of swindlers, the ex-railroad king, George Hudson — as the same journal informed me you did. True, in the course of twelve years or more, during which time I had sufficient opportunities of becoming acquainted with his life and character, I had never seen or heard anything to induce the suspicion of such a probability; nevertheless, as it is notorious that we often learn a great deal about ourselves and our private affairs from strangers, it seemed not impossible that some such information might be obtained in the present instance.

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Of Stephen Girard, I knew only that he had been. the richest man, or one of the richest men, in the country; that he was a Frenchman by birth, but had lived most of his life a very solitary one, without near relations or friends in Philadelphia; that he left the greater part of his fortune to establish a college for orphans, into which no minister of any religious denomination was ever to set foot, under any pretext or circumstance whatsoever which always struck me as a very ingenious contrivance for the increase of knowledge without virtue; and that the college had been but lately. opened, after a delay of some fifteen years. Nor did I gain any further details from your "Thoughts." But I did learn the gravamen of Mr. Astor's offence in your

eyes, viz. that he did not leave more than one-sixteenth of his fortune for any public purpose; conduct, which you profess yourself unable to palliate or account for except on the supposition of absolute insanity, - (p. 65, note.)

Now, calling a man "insane," like calling him scoundrel, rascal or vagabond is a very convenient way to dispose of people whom we do not like, while we are unable to substantiate anything specific against them; but it is a weapon which cuts more ways than one, and the hasty or indiscreet resort to which it is somewhat dangerous to encourage. Different men have different ideas as to what constitutes this sort of insanity. For instance, when you make an abolition speech in Congress, the Southern and Southwestern representatives would doubtless be much delighted to shave your head and enclose you between the four walls of an asylum, and would be prepared with a wilderness of arguments, enough to convince themselves at least, if no one else, that you fully deserved such treatment. Or when, six or seven years ago, you took occasion in a public discourse to speak very disrespectfully of the ballot and universal suffrage, I will engage there was no want of persons who said you must be crazy to blaspheme institutions which to them were like an appendix to the Ten Commandments. A great many very sensible, though perhaps common-place people, agree in thinking that the Massachusetts transcendentalists have been made mad - whether by too much learning or not, they are less unanimous. I have no doubt we could find many devout men, who would say that, to found an institution for education from which all ministers of the gospel were systematically excluded, was little short of the act of a madman. In fine, there is a popular tendency to confound, by a loose use of language, madness with unreasonableness or folly; and in some cases to aggravate, in others to excuse actions, by assigning to them as a motive, insanity, when at most they can only come under the charge of irrationality, and very often are referable only to eccentricity or peculiarity. Yet the distinction is not so very subtle or metaphysical either one would think it simple enough. You may say that a drunken man is mad for the time; that a very angry man is so too. Possibly, but you would surely

never say in any serious conversation or writing, that a man was insane according to any legal or medical sense of the term, because you had once seen him in a violent passion, nor yet because you had once seen him intoxicated. Every man who commits a crime, nay, every man who wittingly and deliberately commits sin, acts contrary to the dictates of reason, but such a man's mind is not, therefore, permanently disordered, otherwise, what a great madhouse the whole world would make! But the mention of crime leads me to the real cause of this abuse of words. The morbid sympathy shown by a certain class of philanthropists for criminals, and especially for the more atrocious criminals, such as murderers, has, among ways of screening such wretches from condign punishment, suggested the plea of insanity. In this our sentimentalists are greatly aided by the craniologists, many of whose speculations go directly to refer all great crimes to defective mental organization. The public mind thus becomes accustomed to associate with ideas of permanent insanity, individual acts of great wickedness or irrationality. A clever legal friend of mine seriously professes a theory that every person is a monomaniac, or mad upon some one point, by which he probably means to say that every person has a weak point on which he has a tendency or susceptibility to be led astray and a times act irrationally.

I suppose then, your saying that Mr. A.'s only excuse for leaving his fortune to his relations instead of to the public, is to be found in the supposition of his insanity, is only a characteristically exaggerated way of expressing that you think he made a foolish and unreasonable disposition of it. Mr. Girard, on the contrary, is lauded with equal extravagance for the establishment of his college to promote irreligious education among orphans, as opening a fountain of blessedness so copious and exhaustless that it will flow on undiminished to the end of time (p. 64.) To judge of the value and justice of this condemnation and this laudation, it will be necessary to look at the lives and circumstances of the two men, very briefly, but rather more in detail than you have done.

I have taken the trouble to make myself somewhat acquainted with the history of Mr. Girard, and more

particularly with the history of his college since his death. The difficulty of procuring the necessary documents has delayed for many weeks the appearance of this little epistle, which would otherwise have been laid before you a few days after your book fell into my hands.

Stephen Girard was a native of France, but a citizen, and for many years a resident of Philadelphia. He was a bachelor, and had no near relatives except a brother, with whom he was not on the best terms. He lived unsocially, and was as frugal of the ordinary courtesies of life as of his gold. As a merchant and banker, he accumulated a large fortune, variously estimated, but certainly not less than seven or eight millions of dollars. It does not appear that he ever entertained the idea of distinguishing himself in any other walk of life. Dying without intimate friends, he left his whole property, with the exception of a few trifling legacies, to establish a college for orphans, within the premises appropriated to which no ecclesiastic, missionary, or minister of any sect whatsoever, is ever to be admitted for any purpose. * The plan, material, and dimensions of the collegiate buildings were most particularly specified, but insuperable architectural difficulties prevented these directions from being carried out to the letter. To support the roof of the main building, it was necessary to erect a portico of Corinthian columns a lucky necessity, as it enabled the architect to convert a very plain into a very splendid exterior. For fifteen years the college was in embryo, owing partly to these architectural difficulties, and partly to others, some of which I cannot find prominent allusion to in any of the reports or documents emanating from the institution. There have been rumors of obstinate and protracted litigations, but since about these xλéos olov anovouer, I know nothing about them except from hearsay, we may pass them briefly over. One might suspect without being very superstitious, that these delays were the first judgment of the Almighty on an institution established in defiance of him. At any rate, let one thing be borne in mind, the college has only been in operation two years. All your fine talk therefore about „opening a fountain of blessedness," &c. is quite gratuitous, being

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* See the ninth subdivision of the twenty-first clause of his will.