son so effectual as that of silent forbearance. But only the most elevated souls are equal to such a course as this. Howard left me to my evils, but it was evident that his whole life was a prayer for me. I begged him to accompany me in my expedition to Canada line. He consented. Our journey by ordinary conveyance to the north of Vermont was sufficiently monotonous, and commonplace. But when we arrived at a little village some twenty miles from "the line," and were informed that the stage would not go over the mountain till the next week, there was some little prospect of adventure. We were just ten minutes too late for this week's stage. The village where we stopped was on an elevated plain, situated between the Green Mountains where they form a sort of double range. It boasted a meetinghouse, a town-house, and a doctor, besides some very pretty girls. A week was sufficient to make me acquainted with all these, and at the end of it I found myself desperately in love with one of the girls. I had no wish to hunt smugglers. It seemed to me a very vulgar business. Howard endeavored, unwisely enough, to bring me to my senses, and to make me think once more of the expedition I had entered upon with so much enthusiasm. But a tallow candle that has melted from the wick, and run down into the pan of the candlestick, is as capable of enlightening the good people who sit in darkness, as I was of any useful, or energetic exertion. I was melted down at the feet of my mountain enchantress. I forgot the world without me, I even almost forgot to take tobacco. Howard waited a most unreasonable time' for some sort of dénouement, and finally told me that he had made up his mind to leave the next morning. I had no intention of going with him. I should as soon have thought of "carrying myself in a basket" as doing any such thing.

But happily I did not tell him so; I wished to see what an agony my divine Caroline would be thrown into by the announcement of our departure. So I made my way with Howard to the parlor, and announced our intentions. The fair girl was netting very busily, and I looked to see her faint, or at least turn very pale; and drop her work, but she did neither. She looked up with the most earnest manner, and exclaimed, "you must not go to-morrow, for Will

iam is coming to-morrow evening, and you must see him."

"I should be very happy to see your brother, or friend, whichever Martin William may be," said I She stopped me with a merry laugh, "My brother!" said she, and she clapped her little white hands in most gleeful style. "He is my husband, sir." Here was a dénouement with a vengeance! I had not been formally introduced to her, She looked younger than her sisters, and they all called her Caroline. 1 could have bit my tongue off with a relish. How I ever got out of that scrape, and found myself mounted on a ragged thistle-eating French horse, with his mane, tail and ears most unmercifully cropped by some brutal Canadian, his legs like posts, and his gait like the slow motion of a fulling mill, I cannot tell. One thing I know, at an early hour next morning all this had happened to me. Howard was enraptured with the scenery; I could not conceive how anything could look pleasant to anybody. Even the glowing flush of acres of pink ayalia, looked bloody to me, and the pure white blossoms of the same shrub seemed to mock me; my spirit was not white, why should the flowers be. I hated the ayalia.

When a man hates flowers and children, he may as well love tobacco. The fiends have a mortgage of him, and ten to one they will foreclose, and take possession. Slowly and moodily we toiled up the mountain, without seeing any person till late in the afternoon. We were now weary and hungry, and began to look for some signs of humanity, with a very hungry interest. At last we met a boy, and inquired for a tavern. The little fellow hesitated, as though there really were no such place within the bounds of his knowledge, and then said, "Right down in the hollur there is Mr. Poorzes, where they kind o' entertains folks."

We rode on and soon found ourselves before a log house. An ugly fellow, with a fox-skin cap that looked as though it grew into the shape which it had taken by the aid of some rude manufacturer, a wolf-skin coat, and a person that corresponded exceedingly well with its outward adornings, took our horses. We entered the public room of the inn. It had a bar-this was indispensable; several men and dogs lay about on chairs, benches and the floor. The prospect for the night looked any

greater crime than if he had picked the lock of Mr. Hoyt's private drawer, for the purpose of stealing his cash. In the one case, little confidence is reposed, and, therefore, little is violated-it is mainly a breach of the peace; the other involves that higher criminality, a breach of trust. All crime may be said, to some extent, to involve this peculiar species of guilt, but especially is this the case with injuries to that kind of property, or, rather, propriety, (to use an obsolete yet most expressive form of the word,) whose great security is in this sacred confidence, or feeling of honor, among mankind.

The question may arise-Can there possibly be circumstances under which this may be rightly, and, if rightly, honorably done? Even when thus stated, a truly upright and conscientious person would not answer rashly in the affirmative. The negative position is surely safe, until the other is most indubitably shown to be right. If it be said that great good may come from disclosures thus procured, or that great evils may be prevented by them, still the question returnsCan there be a greater good to society than the cultivation of this sacred feeling of confidence, even when carried to what may seem extreme bounds; and can there be a greater evil than that universal sentiment of suspicion and mistrust, which must be the result of hazarding, without great caution, exceptions to so conserva. tive and religious a principle? Let us

admit, however, that there might be two most extreme cases in which the rule would bear to be relaxed: namely, when the object is to discover and prevent a suspected and atrocious conspiracy for the injury of a fellow-citizen, or to defeat a plot of treason against the State. These cases, however, have a peculiar feature, which would seem to justify the exception. The atrociousness, secrecy, and treachery of such conspiracies may be said to negative the very idea of confidence. So also in case of war, no trust is reposed or promised, either expressly or by implication. There is, on all sides, a mutual consciousness of this, and therefore that same injury is not done to the moral sense; there is not that universal, fear-inspiring feeling of distrust, the tendency of which is to dissolve society to its very elements, and to produce a social condition, the very opposite of that in which consists the true life of the State.

From a glance at Mackenzie's introduction, we should judge that his own

conscience, obtuse as it must be, is not satisfied, unless he can bring his own offence, seemingly at least, under these or similar exceptions. He appears to labor hard to show that he has been actuated by a great desire to promote the public good. He even claims to be a champion of truth and fair-dealing. He blasphemously quotes Scripture in proof of the righteousness of "exposing hidden wickedness,"-" when rulers rule ill, and the people love to have it so." "Truth"indignantly exclaims this most honorable and conscientious man-" Truth is opposed, and there is not any that pleads for it-not any that has the conscience and courage to appear in defence of an honest cause, and confront a prosperous fraud and wrong." How little trust this man has in himself, or in the correctness of his own reasoning, appears from the fact that, after all his appeals to perverted passages of Scripture, and to the purity of his motives, he rests finally on a miserable argumentum ad hominem, thereby making this most suspicious of all positions his stronghold, and, in fact, the only defence in which he has, or can have, any real confidence. Some of those whose confidential letters he is thus basely giving to the public, had expressed themselves lightly in regard to the sacredness of the private correspondence of others, and this our martyr to truth and fair-dealing regards as his conclusive justification, with all conscientious men, for the same disgraceful offence, avowed and carried out on a scale of far greater magnitude.

These pleas, however, do not avail in the present case. Let those whose correspondence is thus disclosed be regarded, if you please, as most corrupt men. Admit that they are selfish, unpatriotic, governed by a base ambition, that seeks to obtain its ends by ignoble means; still they cannot be charged with a conspiracy to commit atrocious crimes against individuals, or treason, in any ordinary sense of the term, against the State. To justify on the ground of suspected evils of a less degree, or because the revealer allows himself to fancy that the disclosures would justly render them unworthy of the public confidence, and, therefore, place them in a condition of less power for mischief, would be so to relax a most salutary rule of morals, as to render it entirely nugatory. It would be, in fact, the complete adoption of the maxim, to "do evil, that good may come :"-besides,

leaving it to every individual to apply this dangerous principle according to his own private judgment of utility, free from any control of an established rule of social morality arising from the steady exercise of a sound public conscience.

We do not believe, however, that Mr. Mackenzie had any such motives. From his own account of himself and his connection with the men whom he seeks to injure, he appears, to us, governed by some of the lowest considerations that can influence a human being. Revenge for real or fancied injuries evidently prompted him to a course which he never would have taken, had those who once had his utmost confidence, continued to gratify his avarice or his ambition. These disclosures will, doubtless, be productive of essential service to the community, if it can overbalance the injury to its moral sense, which might arise from a general approval of the manner in which they were obtained; but might not their benefits and their injuries alike have remained unknown, had our martyr for truth been allowed to continue his official connection with those at whose corrup tion he manifests such a pious horror? The book has been laid on our table, and we have endeavored to discharge our duty towards it as faithful reviewers. The justifying introduction we have carefully examined, and the above is the only opinion we can form of its merits. The conclusion and some parts of the connecting statements contain valuable political information, in the main correct, and although previously known to intelligent men, yet so arranged and presented as to set the turpitude of the principal actors in the most striking light. With these parts of the book we find no fault, whatever may have been the author's motives. They are fair matters of history, and for such a compilation, the author, if he could wipe out the stigma which attaches to him from other parts, would be entitled to great credit, both on the score of utility, and for the evident ability with which it is made.

Of the letters themselves, we cannot say that we have read them, or intend to read them. We can only confess to a mere glance. Even in this there was a misgiving that it could hardly be reconciled with honor or correct principles, and that even our position and duty as public reviewers of already public matter, could scarcely justify the proceeding, did

not disgust at their sickening contents, of itself, interfere to prevent a continued perusal. Our knowledge of them is mostly derived from what has been forced upon our notice in the public prints. We shall make no extracts, nor exercise any instrumentality in giving them a wider publication than they already possess.

That the actual facts, however, which have been so thrust before the public eye, relating to the real character of political men and measures, may be hereafter properly adverted to, as historical data, is undoubtedly true enough; just as the facts which transpire in a case of slander, where the "greater the truth the greater is the libel," may be treated afterwards as matters of general credit. The public are not called upon to forget knowledge, however obtained; nor will they refuse to form their opinion of conduct and character on such evidence. The authenticity of the letters is, we believe, conceded. The book bids fair to become at some time a political classic, if it can outlive the odor of its baptism. This it will probably do on account of the still stronger qualities of its contents. Like Stackhouse's Body of Divinity, or Paley's Moral Philosophy, it is a text and commentary, and seems to contain a very full code of the ethics of the party. We shall deal at present with only that general odor which it sends forth, of-POLITICAL CORRUPTION,

With regard to the principal characters who figure in this correspondence, we believe that most intelligent men had just about the same opinion before the publi cation of these letters, as they have entertained since. The correspondence is probably just such a one as would have been expected from just such characters. It reveals, as far as we can learn, no enormous crimes, no very wicked conspiracies aimed directly against the State, or any secret malignant plottings against the lives and property of individuals. It does not rise to the diabolical dignity of a Cataline, a Guy Fawkes, or of the plotters and inventors of infernal machines in the French revolution. It is something meaner and more groveling, if not more wicked, than all this. It reveals no direct blows aimed designedly at the welfare of the State; but any one may see, without going into its nauseous details, that it does exhibit a gross and all-controlling selfishness, an utter recklessness of the public good in comparison with the at

tainment of political and party spoil-a continued course of corruption which is probably worse, in the long run and when it has thoroughly imbued any large party in the State, than the effects of the direst treason. The latter may be cured by prompt surgical operations, and the political constitution may be restored to even firmer vigor than it enjoyed before; the former becomes an ulcerating disease in the very narrow of the bones, "a fretting leprosy," spreading through both warp and woof, and which, when it becomes inveterate, can only be removed by taking to pieces the entire fabric into which the contagion has penetrated. As lovers of law and order, we utterly abominate the maxim of Jefferson, that it is for the benefit of a popular government to have an insurrection once in fifty years; and yet we have no hesitation in avowing the opinion, that Arnold's treason, and Armstrong's seditious letters, and Shay's rebellion, and the whiskey insurrection, and Hartford conventions, and South Carolina nullification, and the Dorr rebellion, and abolitionism, and anti-rentism, and even General Jackson's open and repeated stabs upon the very vitals of the constitution; yea, all these combined have not produced so deadly an injury to the true life of the body politic, as that most corrupt system introduced and sustained for so many years by Martin Van Buren, and of which these letters are the legitimate exponents. Direct, open, and violent attacks upon the law, have a tendency to rouse a conservative feeling, although this, alas, is often too inefficiently exhibited, and sometimes expires in the mere show of asserting its supremacy. At other times, however, such events are productive of great good, by turning the minds of men to a deeper investigation of the very foundations of government; but this gradual, secret, corrupt and corrupting substitution of party usages and spoil-precedents and the socalled principles of the democracy, for the constitution and the laws, may, in tine, and unless arrested, work an entire change in our political system. The foundation may have been removed; the State may have undergone a complete revolution in its character; it may have passed from a well-constructed, constitutional, representative republic, through the stages of a most corrupt party-ocracy (if we may be allowed to coin such a mongrel word for such a base idea) into the most unchecked democracy; and yet all the forms may remain, and little alarm be excited, because

the external appearance continues much the same, although all is crumbling and rotten within.

Such are the thoughts which are most naturally suggested by the book before us. Of just such a system it furnishes the evidence to those who have not sufficient intelligence to infer, from other sources of knowledge, the miserable wire pulling which has been taking place behind the scenes. We do not think that the founder of this system, or his followers, cared nothing for their country. We are not so uncharitable, or so foolish, as to suppose that they had any malignant hatred against its welfare, or that they ever deliberately planned schemes for its injury. It may doubtless be conceded, that, other things being equal, or other considerations of a personal kind being out of the way, they on the whole preferred its prosperity, and would have chosen their measures so as to promote it. They may have desired to be patriotic, but they had not the moral ability. A supreme selfishness controlled all their movements. They belonged to a class of minds for whom lesser and nearer ideas ever possess more power than the larger and apparently more remote. Hence the love of country had to give way to self-instituted party obligations; party yielded to caucus management; the caucus bowed to the influence of the secret circular or the confidential epistle from the prime manager to his chief; and thus, whilst to the world their language was ever "the people," the people,"—" the democracy,"-" the free and untrammeled public sentiment of the masses," which they so humbly professed to follow-it was ever in secret-" Whom shall WE offer to the convention ? "Who will best answer OUR purpose?” Whom shall WE present to the caucus and through them to the electors?" Amid all this, where are we refreshed by finding one pure and elevated sentiment, one single exhibition of unselfish devotion to the interests of the country when in conflict with the interests of party? Cases, too, are not wanting when even the claims of party were trampled under foot, and faithful partisans (faithful, at least, as far as so sacred a term could be predicated of so vile a subject) were sacrificed for the interests, and at the bidding, of those who were initiated into the more secret degrees of these abominable mysteries.

Such a system, almost entirely unknown to our previous history, was many