INDEX TO TWENTY-SIXTH VOLUME. An Acrostic.. A Surprise. By a late Traveler... A Portrait from Life. By H. J. Bradfield. Chateaubriand's Sketches of English Literature.. Centralization.. Earning a Living; a Comedy in Five Acts. (Concluded.)...... Financial and Commercial Review... General Lopez, the Cuban Patriot.... Government Finances.. PAGE. ..82 .353, 433 .400 .113 .289 .......50 ..83, 174, 273, 369, 465, 561 ..97 .193 .17 .44 History and Historians of Oliver Cromwell... By the author of "Danton," &c. History of the United States. By R. Hildreth.............. History of the Divining Rod, with the adventures of an Old Rodsman.218, 317 Jesuit; or the Amours of Captain Effingham and the Lady Zarifa. 235, 346, 439 By Thomas W. Whitley. Kossuth in Prison, after his Last Battle. By Captain H. Bradfield.......72 Sermon to the Clergy.. .226 Sir Thomas More, as a Statesman and a Scholar. By E. L. Pierce..252, 305 .513 ..565 The Island Home... .49 To Leuconoe.-Translation from Horace-Ode XI. ..59 .73-143 The Wind and the Weathercock. .132 The Song of the Ejected Tenant. By Wm. P. Mulchinock. ..142 By Michael Doheny, author of the "American Revolution." ONE of the chief causes of the slow growth of republican institutions in Europe, is, doubtless, the proximity of powerful aristocratic landed interests, whose system of internal oppression furnishes them with the means of external corruption, and which they have never been slow to apply to the internal affairs of any state, where the tendency is to republicanism. Unhappy Poland was distracted, and ultimately dismembered, through the influence of surrounding despots, operating upon the interests, passions, prejudices and vices of its own leaders. The circumstances of the first Republic of France, show with what unscrupulous boldness an English ministry supported and paid party-leaders, whose business it was to hurry the republicans into excesses which alienated the sympathies of the middle masses, and compelled monarchical reaction. The enormous scale on which the forgery of assignats, as proved in courts of law, was carried on by the government of England, under the immediate direction of William Pitt, for the double purpose of corrupting party-leaders in Paris, and of ruining the French finances, by destroying (through excess of supply, as well as risk of fraud) the credit of that paper which was the only resource of the revolutionary government, is a fearful instance of the machinery which corrupt governments can put in operation against the stability of those institutions which they dread, and the integrity of those countries of which they covet a portion. The position of parties in the United States, and the general circumstances of the continent in relation to Great Britain, indicate the working of similar schemes against the integrity of the Union, and the continuance of the "Model Republic." Within the last thirty years, the most extraordinary change has been wrought in the position of England in her relations to other countries; and while she has been apparently descending in the scale of natious, and seemingly becoming annually more dependaut for necessaries upon the rest of the world, she has been slowly and cautiously weaving a web of diplomacy, designed to replace her at once VOL. XXVI.-NO. CXXXVI. and forever at the head of commercial and manufacturing nations, and to confirm her in the dominion of the seas. From remote points, her combinations have been gradually developed, until the crisis is now at hand, and she hopes to make a final and successful grasp at commercial supremacy over a dismembered union of the states. The course of affairs since the peace of 115, has been steadily to increase the importance of the raw materials, of manufactures, and of tropical productions, to the civilized nations of the temperate latitudes. The progress of science, and the inventions of genius, have exerted a constant influence in increasing the facility with which the nations of Europe may supply themselves with industrial products, and, therefore, to diminish the amount and importance of their international trade. This tendency has, however, only served to enhance their competition for the productions of tropical climates, and of newly settled regions, of which the exports are always that rude produce necessary to supply the dense populations of the older and wealthier nations with the material for labor. Those who can best succeed in cominanding these, in exchange for a small proportion of the wrought fabrics, have the best prospect of outstripping their rivals in the race for wealth and power. This became manifest to the British statesmen immediately on the settlement of Europe by the treaty of Vienna, when the prospect of continuing to England her manufacturing and commercial monopoly, by keeping Europe embroiled, was at an end. A new policy was then adopted. Since she could no longer maintain a monopoly of sale at high prices, she prepared to encounter growing competition, by laying a foundation for ample supplies of raw materials and produce from her own resources, and at the same time for cutting off, as far as practicable, the supplies drawn by other nations. The great items of demand were cotton, hemp, flax, silk, sheep's wool, and indigo, as raw materials, with coffee and sugar as tropical productions-each year becoming more necessary to her people. Of the raw materials, cotton and wool were the most important; as yet, however, the demand for the latter had not greatly exceeded the English home supply, but was evidently increasing beyond it. The colony of Australia was fixed upon as the source of future supply, and of all her schemes of aggrandizement, in that alone has England been measurably successful. The wants of cotton manufacturers were daily becoming more urgent, and with every new spindle put in operation, the dependance of England upon the United States was enhanced. The British statesmen fixed upon the East India possessions as the quarter whence abundance of cotton could be realized, in full confidence that any quantity could be there raised, of a quality equal to that of the United States. Earnest attention was therefore directed to the amelioration of the condition of the people of that region to prepare them for an extensive system of cotton culture. Simultaneously with this confident reliance upon the capabilities of India to produce cotton, she adopted the calculation that free African and East India labor, applied to her West India Islands, would produce sugar and coffee much cheaper than those articles could be raised in Brazil and Cuba by the expensive and wasteful system of slave labor, more particularly if the cost of slaves and the expense of procuring them should be enhanced by the suppression of the African trade. It followed, if her reasoning was sound, that by raising ample supplies of wool and cotton in her own possessions, and increasing the sugar and coffee productions of her West |