AN

ORATION

PRONOUNCED BEFORE THE

Phi Beta Kappa Society

OF

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE,

AUGUST 25, 1825.

BY CHARLES B. HADDUCK.

PUBLISHED BY REQUEST.

CONCORD:

PRINTED BY JACOB B. MOORE.

1825.

ORATION.

GENTLEMEN.

The anniversary of this Society of scholars, associated for the highest purposes of liberal minds, can scarcely be said to have drawn from his retreat an individual, whose pursuits are exclusively literary. Such an individual, I may almost say, is not enrolled on our lists. In the sense of the terms, when applied to the nations, who have preceded us in the progress of civilization, America does not possess an order of literary men. Society seems to have taken a new turn here, not only assuming a new form, but proposing to itself new objects. No man of us is living to study; we are all studying to live, to open the sources of rational cultivation to every member of the community; to multiply and perpetuate the means of universal intelligence, liberty, and happiness; to combine, as far as possible, the full development of genius and the perfect diffusion of all the blessings of civil and social life. Some of the richest productions of the Roman mind we owe to the voluntary exile of the greatest and best man Rome produced, from a scene of oppression and suffering, which he despaired of being able to alleviate. In modern times, letters have been, too often, the refuge of genius and virtue from sights of human degradation and woe, which it was not possible to relieve, or safe to describe. In the history of England, which has for two thousand years, exhibited a more enlightened and unconquerable spirit of liberty, than all the rest of Europe together, now seldom has the period recurred, when men of genius and integrity might not have declined the publick service, for the reason once ascribed to Milton for declining the office of Secretary to Charles the second, that "he wished to live and die an honest man." - But the genius and patriotism, HERE nourished by as propitious skies, as magnificent and beautiful scenery, and as ennobling recollections, as were ever inherited by a people, are to be employed, - not in creating ideal worlds, in which the tired spirit may seek to escape from the miseries of real life, - but in trying once more, on the new hemisphere, the only unpolluted theatre, which the earth affords, for the great experiment, and under circumstances, which God has eminently adapted to the enterprize, to realize, to the full, the fabled blessings of rational and social existence. We want no Arcadia, no Utopia, no Oceana, to fly to. More than Sidney, or More, or Harrington, ever dreamed of, is here realized. We have only to perpetuate and perfect the wonderful inheritance.

I shall, therefore, instead of occupying this hour with a subject purely literary, venture to ask your attention to THE PRESENT CONDITION AND CHARACTER OF ENGLAND, AS PECULIARLY ENTITLED, IN COMPARISON WITH ALL THE FORMER PERIODS OF HER HISTORY, TO THE CONSIDERATION OF OUR YOUNG MEN; of those, especially, who are hoping to bear a part in the future counsels and transactions of their country.

There is not among the causes of national character one more obvious, or universal, than the society of neighbouring communities. The intercourse of nations implies a constant interchange of thoughts and habits, as well as of the products of labour. All modern refinement is greatly indebted to the ancient nations. As far back as the records of society carry us, the descent of opinions and sentiments may be almost as distinctly traced, as the inheritance of common features and external relations. Even the means and modes of expression, the languages and forms of composition, of the modern nations, bear an analogy to those of the remotest times, quite too intimate and too general to be accounted for by the common nature and common circumstances of men. In this perpetual descent of the intellect and spirit of past ages, the transmigration of the soul, so beautifully fabled by the old philosophers, seems to be realized; in this sense, the spirits of Homer, and Phidias, and Plato, truly animate new bodies, and live again in successive generations.

What consequences may result to the world, what changes in government, in the constitution of society, in the direction of the human powers, may arise, from the improved intercourse of the Eastern nations, it would be presumptuous to conjecture. The extension of commerce and the dissemination of literary, political, and moral influence by means of the press, are causes of too peculiar and too powerful operation to be judged of by any principles, drawn from the experience of mankind.

But the relation of America to Great-Britain is, in many respects, peculiar. Thought separated by an immense geographical distance, in comparison with the nations, who have influenced each other on the Eastern Continent, the art of navigation, which, a few hundred years ago, scarcely connected the opposite shores of the Mediterranean, or the Baltick, but which has now brought together the opposite sides of the globe, has, to every purpose of intercourse and influence, nearly annihilated the three thousand miles of ocean, that lie between us, bringing us, in fact, nearer to each other, than Italy was formerly Greece, or to her German provinces.

We are of the same primitive family with the inhabitants of Great-Britain, partaking with them, of the original traits of our common ancestors of the north. Until a recent period we were on people, going on together in the course of civilization, under the influence of a common climate, common pursuits, common institutions, and common interests. There is, therefore, an original sympathy between us. We have not, like the nations of the continents, to undergo a peculiar preparatory culture, before we can understand and appreciate each other.

In speaking the language of England, also, we sustain a relation to her, distinguished from any that has before subsisted between independent communities. The Grecian colonies were, indeed, nearly independent; and, in some respects, their relation to the Parent Country was strikingly analogous to ours. Forsaking their homes in quest of new fields of enterprize, the colonists had settled themselves in a country, since the fall of Troy nearly unoccupied, of great fertility, abounding in new and striking scenery, and open to the free intercourse of their native land. Carrying with them the spirit, they had left behind their attachment to the forms and institutions of the mother country, and were enabled to lay, in Asia, the foundations of a republican government, which became the model of nearly all the free institutions Greece enjoyed. But, much as they resembled us in these relations to the parent state, the Colonists felt comparatively little of the influence of the Grecian intellect. There were no means of diffusing its productions. To feel the power of her leading men, they must go up to Athens. The Press, the modern system of moral circulation, carrying the intelligence and spirit of the capital to the remotest extremities of the body politick, was unknown. The spirit of freedom, which, in our time, has passed like Electricity across the Atlantick, was a century in finding its way over the Ægæan Sea.

The principal institutions of England, too, her Law, her Religion, her modes of Education, are substantially ours. And more than all besides, we have a common property in the inheritance of her great national recollections, in her consciousness of illustrious descent, of kindred blood with the first names, that adorn the annals of science, or art, or arms, or imagination, the martyrs to her Freedom and her Faith.

These circumstances all constitute so remarkable a difference between our relation to England, and the relation of any other nations, which have communicated with each other, as to render it unquestionable, that the English mind must exert over us an influence, which no people of the Eastern world has yet exerted over another, surpassed only by the influence, which she herself, in common with the rest of Europe, is receiving from us. London is almost as much a centre of intellectual and moral influence to the people of these States, as to England herself. The efforts of her ever active intellects are as certainly, and almost as soon felt, here, as upon the shores of the Irish Sea, or the German Ocean. While the productions of her presses are winding their way over the mountains of Wales and North Britain, they are traversing, also, our great canals and lakes of the west. The leaves of a London Review are scarcely dry, before it is advertised in every important town in America. A distinguished speaker has but just sat down in the Parliament House, when his voice is echoed from the banks of the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains.

We could not break off all connexion with England, could not forget our mother tongue, and exhale our native spirit, as well as throw off the dominion of the parent country. It was not to be desired. Our literature might, in that case, have been more independent and peculiar. But it would have been more feeble and meager. With the untaught and incommunicable freshness and grace of youth, it would have had its poverty and immaturity of thought. Why covet a Literature as unlike, as possible, to that of England? A people should cultivate a peculiar literature, only because none can be valuable and durable, which is not an expression of national thoughts, and feelings, and manners. Where these but partially differ, there need be only corresponding differences of national literature. It was not the sin of the Romans, that they imitated the Greeks. They might have imitated their own earlier authours, as almost every succeeding age, in all literary nations, has done. They might have borrowed, largely and lawfully, from any people, as even the national writers, the brightest ornaments of one of the most inventive and richest periods of English genius, did of Italy; as the Classical models of the age of Anne did of France; and as all Europe has been content to do, for centuries, of the inexhaustible Greeks. The errour of the Roman authours was, that, in the imitation of foreign models, they gave up their own peculiar recollections, lost their characteristick features; that, instead of invigorating the genius of Italy, by occasional resort to the scenes of Grecian glory and inspiration, they endeavoured to clothe it with a Grecian body, to naturalize it in a foreign land.-We stand to England more in the relation of a later to an earlier age, than in that of one people to another. A part of the same national mind, translated to another world, we are, like the individual mind in the philosophy of Plato, ever mingling with the events, and scenery, and fresh recollections of our present state, the shadowy, but high and elevating remembrances of a former existence. Rich, therefore, as his own country is, beyond all other lands, in unexplored natural resources and beauty, in whatever is wise and prosperous in human policy, great in human enterprise, splendid in achievement, constant in danger and suffering, or immortal virtue; sacredly as he is bound, by all the obligations, which a good man and patriot feels, to make that country the first and last object of h is study as well as of his affections, and labours, and sacrifices; the American can never be incurious in respect to any period of the great national mind of the land of his Fathers.

From the long series of writers, who have given expression to the English mind, of Statesmen, Soldiers, and Artists, who have illustrated it, from the days of Elizabeth, a period of three hundred years of various and powerful intellectual exertion, I have no hesitation in selecting the age, in which our own fortunes are cast, the last thirty years, as peculiarly entitled to our intimate contemplation.

It is an age remarkable, above all that preceded it, for intense, vigorous, and successful thought.

The Government, under which we live, is distinguished from all the civil institutions which human ingenuity has devised, by being, practically and thoroughly, a Government of opinion. No series, no system of publick acts can be adopted, which does not express the sentiments and wishes of the people. The Government of Augustus was ostensibly free, practically a tyranny. That of England is more free in theory than in practice. Her representative system, the basis of her liberty, is rendered essentially defective and ineffectual by the immense influence of the Crown, of the powerful orders dependent on it, and of the great Proprietors of the Kingdom. A hundred and fifty members, at least, sit in Parliament by the nomination of Proprietors and Patrons. The consequences are illustrated by an anecdote of Patron of the time of George the second. Lord Falmouth applied to the minister Pelham, for the office of Captain of the band of Pensioners. The minister replied, that the place was destined for a favourite of the King. The only answer Lord Falmouth made was, "Sir, we are nine." The minister and the King submitted. Mr. Pitt complained "that by means of boroughs, which had no one quality of representation, the Nabob of Arcot had seven or eight members in the House of Commons." But, popular as our Government is in its theory, it is still more so in practice. In theory, for example, the representative is supposed, in his official acts, to express his private, individual sense of right and policy; in fact, he is little more than the organ of the united sentiments and feelings of the district he represents. The representation of the people in our legislative bodies is becoming, every year, more literal and perfect, a means, merely, of annihilating the distance of the subject from the centre of the state, of swelling his voice, that its notes of advice and authority may be heard in the Capitol. Under Institutions thus essentially popular, regarding every man, who is fit to be a subject, as fit also, to share in the government of the state, and entitled to have his voice heard in it, it is plain, that civil union, wise and prosperous policy, must be founded on the intelligence and vigour of the publick mind the soundness and clearness of publick opinion. What spirit of our Institutions demands in the character of the people, is required, no less, by the condition of our country, fresh from the Creator's hand, rich in golden promises to every species of human enterprise and invention, and filling up, beyond all former example, with millions upon millions of human beings, subject to all the ambition, the passions, and the wants of men; and more especially, by the prospect of our being brought, with these institutions, in the course of no long series of years, into new and trying relations. Hitherto oceans have rolled between us and the great civil communities of the world. But there are coming forward a host of nations, some of them on our borders, all of them on the same continent, laying the foundations of free and powerful governments. What turn may be given to human affairs in the new world, new not more in its discovery, than in its modes of life and polity, is yet a secret. It is no secret, however, that events are destined to transpire here, such as the world has not witnessed. The progress of Government, of trade, and of power among ten or fifteen nations of men, animated with the spirit and enterprise of successful revolution, free to enthusiasm, cannot long continue, without giving rise to scenes of momentous interest, filling as full and as brilliant a page in human history, as the revolutions of the Eastern world have supplied. We have lived to confute all the maxims of the political philosophers of Europe, to disprove the predictions of the enemies, and remove the apprehensions of the friends, of Liberty; we have survived external war, and intestine divisions. But, if all history does not deceive us, our civil institutions are destined to a severer trial than they have yet experienced. The event is with Heaven. If the publick character can be sustained, our liberties will be safe; without intelligence and vigour in the popular mind, they can have no security.

With this character of mind - free, liberal, fearless thought - no period of English history is so replete as the present.

Individual authours may not be found so prominent above the general level of society, as in some former ages. This is one of those periods in the history of intellect, when individuals, instead of anticipating the people by a century or two, can scarcely keep in advance of them, are in danger of being lost and forgotten in the "great motions of the common mind." No works of genius may be issuing from the press, worthy of comparison with the standard productions, which have settled the principles of the English Law and Jurisprudence, have illustrated and defended the Morality and Religion of our Fathers, have enriched and embodied the Science and Philosophy, or developed the Taste and Imagination, of England. There may exist no Bacon, defining the boundaries of human knowledge, and lighting up the path of science; no Newton, determining the Laws of the Universe, and extending our vision, against distance and darkness, to the utmost orbs of Heaven. There may be living no Locke or Boyle, no Hooker or Taylor, no Milton or Shakespeare. But there is, what none of these men ever witnessed, a universal diffusion of cultivation. There is an elevation of the general mind never before known; an enlightened and bold search after truth; a wide spread and well directed spirit of intellectual enterprise; a union of unnumbered minds, in the pursuit of publick happiness.

The honest German is not altogether to be laughed at, who envied Newton the "opportunity of demonstrating the system of the universe." There are times, when everything is unsettled, when the principles of Government and Law are undigested, the doctrines of Philosophy, of Morals, and of Religion, confused, and loosely held. At such times an "opportunity" is given to great men to fix what is unsettled, to arrange and combine the scattered elements of knowledge, to command order and beauty out of the chaos of human thoughts. And they never fail to rise up and do it. This the great men did, whose names occur to us, when the history of England is mentioned. It is not now doing over again, because it does not require to be done a second time. What object, worthy of the ambition of such a man, could there be in undertaking anew, what Blackstone did for the English Law, what Hooker did for the English Church, what Cudworth and Lardner did for the English Religion? If the occasions for such efforts could recur, there are not wanting men in England, riper and ready for the task. What, with all their personal merits, was the Philosophy of Locke, or the Logick of Bacon, compared with the simple and sublime conceptions of the compass, relation, and destination of the human powers, communicated to us by the works of Stewart, or Brown? In point of mere attainment, Newton himself was inferior to our own Bowditch. - But intellectual power has found other channels. Opportunities of leading the way in discovery, and erecting permanent systems, are rare. The genius, however, employed in the perfection of those already established, may be as remarkable, as that, which first proposed them. The skill, which moulds, and beautifies, and raises to its place the key-stone of the Arch, may be as conspicuous, and as worthy of contemplation, as that which lays its broad foundations.

Though living authors may not be erecting as proud monuments of genius, as in some former times, there never was so much talent so successfully applied to the purposes, for which talent is, at this time, most useful in England. So brilliant constellations may not be, here and there, breaking forth from the midst of surrounding darkness; but the whole firmament of intellect was never before so studded and lighted up. It is no long time, since but two classes of men existed in England; the Baron, independent, proud, and tyrannical, the proprietor of the soil, bound by no sense of right, or law, or public opinion; and his vassal, the ignorant and reckless slave, with scarcely one of those qualities, which hold society together. The intermediate classes of industrious, enlightened and patriotic citizens, to whom, at present, belong the strength, and wealth, and influence of the country, have sprung up in modern times. Fast as the poor have multiplied, and the titled orders grown in numbers, intelligence, and wealth, the progress of the middling classes have been vastly greater, and, in spite of power, on the one hand, and beggary, on the other, is rapidly assimilating the condition of England to that of our own country, in respect to the distribution of property and influence.

The reign of George the third was distinguished above all preceding reigns, for the rapid and uniform progress of the nation in the settlement of great principles, the reduction of every thing in government, science, art, education, and charity, to method and system. The grant of Magna Charta rendered the reign of John in an era in the British Annals; similar honors belong to the times of the first Edward, and the Revolution. But none of these periods presents to our contemplation any thing like the incorporation with the institutions and thoughts of the English, of the profound and permanent doctrines of finance, commerce, jurisprudence, education, and foreign policy, which made the last the most prosperous and glorious, as he was, by nature, the most amiable, of Sovereigns. Never were the rights of man, the doctrines of civil liberty, of trade, of political economy, the arts of life, and the methods of education, so well understood as this day. Never was the power of life, and methods of education, so well understood, as at this day. Never was the power of knowledge, the dominion of the mind, so fully asserted. Speculations on the origin and theory of society, the Lockes and Miltons, the Metaphysics and the Poetry of Politics, have had their day. The reasonings of politicians are more and more grounded upon the experience of society, upon the experience of society, upon facts, collected from all parts and ages of the world with an industry before unknown. Ancient travelers, said Johnson, guessed modern travelers observe. There is more true and valuable knowledge of mankind, of the sources of national character and national prosperity, more that can be turned to account in the improvement of society, to be gained from the views of foreign manners, institutions, and policy, published within thirty years, than from all that had appeared before. What Johnson applied to travelers, is almost as true of historians. They, too, have guessed, have reasoned, and speculated, where they ought to have inquired. Robertson wrote a history of India, and of South America, in which there is said to be scarcely as much of truth, as in the historical romances of De Foe, or his illustrious follower, the author of Waverley. It has been the fortune of man to impress his own frailty upon every thing he touches. Truth has taken its hue from the mind, which has attempted to seize it and transmit it. How distant soever the time, or the scene, the Historick Muse, even of England, has too often uttered her voice in the dialect and the spirit of the party, which invoked her. Even her Mitford, who has surveyed the antiquities of Greece with a keener eye than was, perhaps, ever before turned back upon her history, in his utter abomination of Republican government, could find in the Tyrant of Syracuse-to the elder historians the perfect personification of atrocious despotism-little else than mild virtues of the Father of his Country; while Demosthenes, the dreadful organ and everlasting monument of Athenian freedom, is converted, by him, into an artful, shameless demagogue. To his diseased vision the beautiful light of liberty, which gilds the mountains of Greece, and is reflected from summit to summit along the whole tract of subsequent civilization, turns out to be a murky flame from the volcano of passion and anarchy. - But history is changing its character. The past has come to be surveyed from so many points, by so many eyes, that between scholars, statesman, and divines, Catholics, Protestants and Infidels, we are likely to find the truth. The blending of all these different rays id reflecting the light of day upon the transactions of the world. The records of society are becoming more complete, more severe; and more prophetic. Its phenomena are traced more and more to a few simple principles and traits of human nature; more to the passions and interests of the man, and less to the speculations and policy of the statesman.

Since the close of the late war, the combined wisdom and learning of a nation of minds have been brought to bear upon the origin, improvement, and perpetuation of whatever is valuable in the institutions or character of England. No longer ago than the middle of the last century, it was a rare event for speeches in Parliament to be published. It was not permitted that the clerks report them. That singular and wonderful monument of Johnson's genius, the Parliamentary Debates, owes its existence entirely to the danger of gratifying the public demand for the discussions upon the removal of Sir Walpole from the Ministry. At this day, the debates and resolutions of Parliament are studied and commented on from one end of the kingdom to the other. There have, consequently, been more true and profound views expressed, on every subject, which has come before Parliament for the last twenty-five years, than can, probably, be found in all the treatises, which the nation has before produced. Her real progress, the causes and consequences of her revolutions, the tendency of her successive systems of policy, the sources of her calamities, and of her prosperity and power, may be better learned from the publications of the last quarter of a century, than from the speculation of preceding ages. What English statesman would not now blush to acknowledge, as Fox did, that he has not read Adam Smith's Theory of the wealth of nations, "because it was a subject, which he could never understand, and he did not believe, that anybody else understood it?" There was, indeed, but one man of his time, who did understand it. To that man nothing seems to have been unknown. Like Cicero, whom he more nearly resembled, than any other individual of ancient or modern times, himself a philosopher, without embracing any one of the systems of preceding philosophers, without being able, perhaps, to follow the profoundest of them into their sublime depths, he yet saw farther than man ever saw before, into the real nature and constitution of society, and apprehended more perfectly the relation of all human interests and institutions to each other, and to the great ends of society. To him England is more indebted than to any other statesman of the last age. He gave to our infant cause the enthusiasm of his youth and the vigour of his manhood; to his own country, not the support of unadvised and ruinous measures, but the first example in her annals of a beautiful system of political philosophy, established upon the foundations of fact and experience. His theory of human government, like his Reflections on the French Revolution, seems to have been a prophetic vision of history. The works of Edmund Burke, with all their splendid sophistry on the rights of the Crown, the "historical basis" of the Monarchy, are in their great political and economical principles, liberal, and free, and have done more than almost anything else, to enlarge and elevate the minds of the present generation of English politicians.

In the popular complaints of the loose and superficial form of the literature of this age, it is not always considered, that the forms, assumed by the productions of intellect are uncertain indications of its character. The mode of giving expression to the thoughts of men conforms itself to the period of their progress. The art of printing always adapts itself to the art of reading. The folio of the seventeenth century did well enough for the use of the few in England, who, at that time, thought of reading any thing. But it would not become a modern Parlour library, nor be conveniently carried in the mail to every cottage in the kingdom. The Octavo, Duodecimo, Pamphlet, and Periodical, of our time, are exactly adapted to the universal and periodical demand of the publick on its men of genius. They have not sunk to the level of the community. The community have almost overtaken them. The power of genius is not restrained; it has only adapted its vehicle to the regions it has to traverse.

When we think of the vigour of the English intellect, the loftiness and beauty of the English spirit, I know, the contest for the crown of France, and the wars of the Roses, - upon which the Muse of History herself breathes the highest Poetry, and the warmest conceptions of Poetry pass the truth, - the Reformation, and the Revolution, naturally occur to us. The Revival of the productions of these periods of gigantick and immortal genius is itself one of the indications of the manly tone of the intellect of our own times. But rich as these productions are, they will often disappoint us. Their authours were called too frequently, to consecrate the finest talents, with which men were ever blest, to local and temporary subjects. Principles, which they established by the labour of a life, the world are now content to take for granted; while subjects, which they never approached, are concentrating its energies, and provoking its eager inquiry. The monuments of their intellectual struggle and triumph are as massive, as high, and as durable, as genius can aspire after. But, like the Pyramids of Egypt, they have outlived the sympathy of mankind. They remain unchanged and imperishable, the wonder of successive generations, but they have ceased to instruct us. These men did right in dedicating their genius to the times, which inspired it. But they can never again become the favourites of mankind. In all the branches of Philosophy, in Morals, in Politicks, in Religion, we have become more rational, more practical, more perfect. Even in Poetry, the most appropriate and peculiar theatre of youthful enthusiasm and unchastened genius, our age has little reason to dread comparison with the glorious era of Elizabeth, and James, and Charles. The hundred living bards of Britain, if they have not produced as perfect a national work, as some of the earlier sons of the lyre, have, at least, the honour of giving to Poetry more consistency and perfection, of more fully and harmoniously combining all the great features of the muse, than was ever done before. It the Poetry of our day has less of the vigour and freedom of youth, it has more of the Philosophy, the intelligence, the perfect development of age.

We do not always make allowance enough for the Romance of history, the disposition of mankind to venerate a noble ancestry for qualities, with which imagination has invested them. Two of the most signal displays of bold intellect, ever witnessed in England, the Reformation, and the Revolution, were, to a great extent, the acts of individuals, not of the people. The Reformation owed, we know not how much, to the caprice of Henry the eighth. If the Pope had consented to divorce his Queen, the Catholick succession might, perhaps, have been perpetuated. At the Revolution, the people were, with out doubt, thoroughly aristocratical. If they had been polled at the time, they would probably have declared for the prerogative of the Stuarts.

The present is the only period, in which any thing like the free, the majestick, the uncontrollable movements of the whole people, the characteristick and glory of our own country, has been observed in England. When Harrington, in the height and frenzy of English liberty, tried to persuade Cromwell to adopt his Republican notions, the Protector replied, that "the gentlemen had like to trepan him out of his power; but what he had go by the sword, he would not quit for a little paper shot." An English Monarch of this century would rather face the cannon of all Europe, than the "little paper shot" of a Wilberforce, or a Brougham.

It is not the least powerful claim of this age of universal action and intense thought upon our attention, that it is perfectly described. Men have profited so little by the experience of past ages, because that experience has been so little known. The chief defect of all ancient, and, it may be added, modern history, is, that it is not particular enough. The principal result of human enterprise and passion are sufficiently made known. Light enough is thrown upon the surface of the landscape; the mingled varieties of fruit and flower, the fountain freshening and gladdening, as it flows, and the volcano scattering ruin and desolation, are, for the most part, faithfully depicted. But the complicated operations of the thousand agents, in the mighty laboratory beneath, mysteriously shaping and issuing forth these forms of beauty and terrour, are left covered with darkness. - No period was ever so fully and minutely delineated, as the present. Every motion of the blood, every pulsation of the heart, is recorded by a hundred pens. The Press is the self-registering thermometer of the British character.

The present is, also, an age of elevated sentiment and morals.

Changes of Taste and Fashion do not always imply a change of moral character. The different periods of national, as well as individual existence, have their peculiar forms of virtue and vice. Because the features of youth are no longer discernible, in manhood, we may not infer, that the keen sense of virtue and honour, the enthusiasm of love and patriotism, are succeeded by selfishness, misanthropy, and vice. The moralist delights to portray the purity and virtue of youth. It is, indeed, a period of unformed character. It may be a period of innocence. But virtue, high and impregnable virtue, belongs to the age of reflection, of intelligent and settled principle. Since the days of Rousseau, it has been attempted to invest the infancy of nations with a corresponding charm of unsophisticated, generous sentiment. Civilized and refined imagination has spread its own colours over the simple, free, enthusiastic manners of the savage, amidst the untouched works, the unprofaned solitudes, of nature. But Rousseau and Chateaubriand, full of the taste and sentiment of Paris, are very different beings, in the wilderness, from a North American savage. What are the beauty and magnificence of nature to him? What, that eternal forest, stretching from ocean to ocean, and shutting out the light of Heaven from the face of a Continent? What, but a convenient hunting ground, a place to chase the deer and entrap the bear? What is it to him, that God has piled the mountains to the clouds, that he pours the rivers from their sides, causing them to swell and roll to the ocean? He hears the thunder of the cataract, and stands, with awe, to see the waters dash and foam. But to him the "broad column comes" not "like an eternity;" it is, to him, no "Phlegethon," no "Hell of waters;"

"on its verge

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

No Iris sits, amidst the infernal surge,
Like hope upon a death bed;-

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Resembling, mid the torture of the scene,
Love watching madness with unalterable mien."

No, the great impression, the mighty moral, is all lost upon him. The charm of nature is, after all, an artificial charm. Her greatest spectacles are only so much rock, and wood, and water. Intellect, cultivated intellect, invests the world with beauty.

Mind, mind alone, bear witness, earth and heaven!
The living fountains in itself contains,
Of beauteous and sublime.

That it still continues to be questioned, whether knowledge be favorable to virtue, and the plausibility, which ingenious, but misanthropic or paradoxical writers have been able to give to their splendid declamations on the state of nature, evince the difficulty of comparing the successive periods of society. Whether we survey the present, or revert to the past, we are equally subject to delusion. The moral, as well as the physical diseases of our nature, always seem to prevail more, as we grow older. If either had really increased, as we imagine them to have done in our day, the world would, long ago, have come to an end. The truth is, not that our maladies multiply, as our remedies improve, but that the sphere of individual observation enlarges, as we advance into life, till we come, at last, to compare the evils of the community, or the world, with those of our native village. Hence, in no small degree, the disposition of each succeeding age to exaggerate the virtue of its predecessors; a noble disposition, wisely ordained to accelerate our progress by reversing the order of nature, presenting the real future in the imaginary past, crowding the pathway of our race already trodden in its ceaseless march, with the beautiful and ennobling forms of ages yet to come.

Complaints of degeneracy were uttered by the remotest generations of men. There are never giants in the earth in these days. The golden age is always a distant age. The present is the age of Iron. So thought the Greeks. So have thought their more enlightened successors. So thinks the Hindoo. And so thought his ancestors, to the remotest period of his fabulous antiquity.

Our moral poets praise "the good old time;" But when that good time was, they do not say.'Tis not in my remembrance, for though old, I knew not Nestor, and he said "'Twas past." On his authority we may conclude 'Twas in some period when no poet lived, No Orpheus harped, and "ignorance was bliss;" For all from Homer to our Cowper own, It was not in their day, and gently breathe A hint to their contemporary friends, That they are base, degenerate, and vile.

That the world has, however, become more virtuous, as well as more enlightened, is as clear, as the records of human manners and feelings can make it. Individual nations may have declined from the rectitude and purity of a high-minded ancestry. Rome did so. So has New-England done. But it is not in either case, and it never is, the natural result of civilization. The torrents, which overwhelmed, in their turn, the liberty of the Roman Republick, and the thrones erected on its ruins, and borne down in so rapid and terrible succession, were fed by other and far different fountains. The Fathers of New-England, too virtuous to live in their native country, were too virtuous, also, to be able, in any country, to transmit their own character, untarnished, to a numerous, diffuse, and enterprising posterity. Their pure morality and sublime devotion were too far above those of the most virtuous portions of mankind to be fully sustained. Even in the Low Countries, and within the limits of the primitive Colonies, it was not easy, as the history of their jurisprudence shows, to preserve, undecayed and unmixed, the stern virtues of the persecuted Puritan. In seeking an Asylum, where he might worship God, according to the dictates of his conscience, he necessarily left, in the fiery persecution, from which he fled, one of the great supports of the very devotion, which he sacrificed all to enjoy and sustain.

With respect to England, nothing is more manifest in her annals, than a progressive improvement in all virtuous and exalted sentiment. Within the records of authentick history, since the beginning of the Christian era, Great Britain, from being an Island of barbarians, so degenerated, as their Historians assert, from the virtue of their ancestors, that the Deity had already visited them with his chastisements, has risen to a degree of national virtue, honour, and happiness, rarely attained; has become a radiating point not only of light, but of virtuous influence, to a wider extent of human society than any nation, the people of these States alone expected, were ever permitted to act upon. She may be wresting empire from those, to whom Heaven has given it, by means, which Heaven can never sanction. She may be conniving at practices, abhorred by God, and shocking to humanity. But, when passed there by an age less obnoxious to this charge?

There have been periods of decline in the British character, passages of appalling darkness and horrour in this path of light. Internal convulsions have agitated the Island to its center; the floods of moral desolation, like the billows that lash its iron coast, have beaten angrily upon it; the volcanoes of the continent have wrapped it in smoke, and burnt up its verdure. But it has remained fixed on its old foundations; and clothed itself, after every conflagration, with new and fresher beauty. No people was ever truer to its original character. It was from the first a noble character, a character of comparative dignity, generosity, and virtue, respect for God and for man. These feelings it has preserved native and entire. Preserved, did I say? It has strengthened them a hundred fold. The fatal opinions and malignant passions, which have inundated, and overwhelmed other nations, have neither destroyed, nor altered, but consolidated and purified, the elements of the British character. With every successive generation, the idea of England, the land of valour, of genius, of piety, of domestick love, has acquired a more elevating influence; of England, to the imagination of her sons, one great altar of the holy sacrifice of happiness and life for God and Liberty's sake, one wide field of monuments, imperishable memorials, of virtue, glory, and happiness.

When were English manners more virtuous, English principles more pure an dignified, than at this moment? Not, surely, under the Saxon, or the Danish kings, when the elements of society were scarcely held together; when neither property, nor liberty, nor life was secure. Not under the dominion of the Roman church, when the Bible, the great standard of moral and religious, of social and patriotic feeling, as well as the covenant of God's love, and the charter of our hopes, was a sealed, almost an unknown book; when indulgence in every sin, which can tempt a licentious age, was purchased with money; the stains, which a thousand crimes had already fixed on the soul, or with which future crimes might blacken it, washed out for a few pence; when the sanctuaries of a virtue, too delicate for the rude intercourse of life, had become the haunts and nurseries of vice too loathsome for the sun to shine upon. Not in the region of Chivalry, even, with whose decline a romantic imagination has so feelingly associated the decline of manly virtue, honor, and magnanimity, times, undoubtedly, of great spirit, of high and enthusiastic valour, but, by no means times of private virtue. The institution of Chivalry, having its origin in practices of plunder and violence, which the laws could not restrain, growing directly out of the weakness of moral principle in the public mind, out of the prevalence of audacious vice, is itself a striking monument of the morals of the times. Like the atmosphere of light about the sun, while it invests the age with a glory too dazzling to be steadily looked upon, it furnishes the very means of discovering the darkness it envelopes.

In the age of Elizabeth, the English mind begins to be embalmed in its literary productions. In Chaucer and his sparse and feeble successors, of the earlier day, and especially in the first drawings of the Drama, the Mysteries and the Moralities, by which even the churches were profaned for the entertainment of their gravest frequenters, we have shocking exhibitions of the indelicacy and grossness of the time. But under Elizabeth the taste and morals of the age are bodied forth in the boldest relief of the Dramatic art. When this art, as it did then, labors for the intelligent and best part of the community, it is sure criterion of the prevailing manners. Garrick, indeed, thought, in his youth, to direct the public taste; but experience taught him better; and in later life, he declared, that, "if the town required him to exhibit the Pilgrim's Progress in a Drama, he would do it."

The Drama's laws the Drama's patrons give,
For they that live to please, must please to live.

To pass over Jonson, Fletcher and Beaumont, what an age must that have been, which suffered, nay, obliged, Shakespeare himself to incorporate with his profound views of human life, his pervading and awful morality, a profane and monstrous impurity, that shocks the sensibility it does not benumb. And how fitted for such an age must have been the maiden Queen, who, after seeing Falstaff in war, commanded the author to exhibit him in love.

To trace the progress of sentiment and manners, through the following reigns to our own time, even as it appears in the literary productions, which have come down to us, were a work of extreme delicacy and labor. But hardly as posterity may incline to judge of us from the popularity of our Moores and Byrons, who seem to have tasked their genius not so much to put our modesty to the blush, as to render us incapable of blushing, we need not shrink from comparison with any generations, which listened with a delight to a Wycherly, a Congreve, a Farquahar, a Vanbrugh, an Otaway, a Rochester, or a Smollet; which, in their idolatry of genius, neither reprobated, nor keenly felt the profaneness and obscenity of Dryden, the vulgarity and filth of Pope; or which suffered the author of Gulliver's Travels and the Tale of a Tub to control the English mind, and rewarded the writer of Tristram Shandy with a rectorship in the English Church.

Under James the first the general prevalence of scandalous vices is dilated upon in the preamble to more than one act of Parliament. And while many were yet alive of the very generation, who, in their zeal for God, obliged Cromwell to add to the sin of his ambition, the greater sin of religious hypocrisy, King William, by a royal proclamation, and the Queen, by her letter to the Justices of Middlesex, at the earnest solicitation of the Commons, declare "the open and avowed practice of vice, immorality and profaneness," to "have universally spread itself." A little earlier than this we began to hear the murmurs of the moralist. The Essays of Collier, and the Papers of Steele and Addison, while they indicate the appearance of a better taste and purer morality, furnish incontestible evidence of the improvement of public feeling in our own time. Addressed professedly to the higher classes, not only do they abound in discussions of principles, now taken for granted by all classes, exhortations to practices become universal, and censure of vices, which if longer known, are known chiefly in the lowest spheres of life; but without seeming to be conscious of the indecorum, these Mentors of the age, not unfrequently indulge in language and allusions, by which a Modern writer would hazard his reputation for delicacy and virtue.

Voltaire, indeed, to console himself under the lash of public indignation, professes to believe, that modesty had, in his time, forsaken the heart, and taken refuge in his books; that, as we think to make up in language for what we have lost in virtue, the more our manners are depraved, the more our expressions are guarded. Byron, writhing under the scorching influence of English sentiment, has repeated the desperate sophism. The truth is, a truth, which these men were not interested to believe, that vice shrinks from the observation of virtue alone; and blushes, only when she has ceased to triumph.

The improvement of the lower orders in England is demonstrated by the increased security of property and life in every part of the kingdom; the universal dominion of wholesome law; the almost entire extinction of the predatory hordes that, under various names, formerly infested the Island; the more general diffusion of a spirit of benevolence and of a higher sense of character; by every thing, in short, in the whole aspect of the portion of the population. In the reign of Henry the eighth, two thousand persons annually suffered death for offenses, of which, in Elizabeth's reign, only four hundred, and, in that of George the third, less than fifty were convicted. The progress of virtuous feeling in the more enlightened and powerful portions of the community is sufficiently evidenced by the public acts. Fro three hundred and fifty years previous to the Commonwealth, the Jews had been exiled from the kingdom. And, though supported by great political considerations, the project of Cromwell for recalling them was utterly defeated by the overwhelming opposition of the clergy and the populace. Subsequent monarchs gradually connived at their return, and in 1753 an act was passed for their naturalization. Though this act was repealed in the following session of Parliament, as a necessary sacrifice to the bigotry of the people, the spirit, which it breathed, and which was eloquently uttered in and out of Parliament, has become the spirit of the British Public. The sons of Israel, though still aliens by law, are, by general consent, in the full enjoyment of all the rights and immunities of dissenting subjects. The Jew of Cumberland has nearly obliterated the Jew of Shakespeare from the public mind. Within the last half century, was passed the first act for abolition of the Slave Trade; an act, says the Biographer of Johnson, which "would have been crushed at once, had not the insignificance of the Zealots who took the lead in it, made the great body of planters, merchants and others, whose immense properties are involved in that trade, reasonably enough suppose, that there could be no possible danger." The progress of the age was, if possible, more strikingly illustrated by the late division of the House of the Lords upon the Catholic Bill; the older members being nearly all against it, the younger as generally in its favor; the former representing the generation going off the stage, the latter the generation coming on.

If luxury has increased, it is, to no small extent, in the gratification not the grosser appetites, but of taste and imagination. The vices, too, which have followed in its train, are less degrading and brutal, than those they have superseded. If amusements are still pursued with as keen a relish as ever, they are of a higher and more intellectual character. Every species of vicious indulgence, if not diminished, is, at least, more retired. The tournament, the mask, the Fox hunt, and the tavern scene, of past ages, have, in their mortal aspect, no substitutes among the present diversions of good English society.

Popular as the writings of Hume and his followers have been, they have not dried up the fountains of feeling and enthusiasm. Their cold, calculating, selfish philosophy has not become an element of the British character. The period of this withering and desolating skepticism has been the period of the utmost vigour and bloom of national feeling; of the birth, or regeneration and extended activity, of all of the great charitable institutions of England, - her systems of gratuitous education, carrying intelligence and moral sentiment to the lowest of her children; her Sabbath Schools; her Bible, Tract, and Missionary Societies, diffusing knowledge and virtue through a hundred and forty languages; her refuges of poverty and disease; her Savings Banks and Patriotick Funds; - institutions, supported by the patronage of all ranks, and all sects in Politicks and Religion; whose titles alone would fill a volume, whose Periodical and other Publications are diffused over the land, like a flood of grateful and healing light. Within this period, the animosities of the Religious sects, which have so preyed upon each other since the Reformation, have been softened down to a nearer approach to universal toleration and charity, than Europe has before exhibited. The Catholick and the Protestant, the Churchman and the Dissenter, feel, more than ever before, that the land is broad enough for all their spires to ascend, and all their altars to blaze together; that the gracious ear of God, in which the prayers of Fenelon, of Leighton, of Doddridge, of Gill, and of Wesley, mingled together, is ever open to sincere devotion, in whatever Church, and with whatever ceremonies the sacrifice may be offered. Within this period, the Engish Sailor and Soldier have added new wreaths to the laurel crown, won by their gallant ancestors at Calais and the Texel, on the fields of Cressy and of Agincourt. Howe and Nelson, Abercrombie and Wellesley, have well sustained the reputation of British valour, and given illustrious examples of British humanity, invoking the Angel of Pity together with the God of War. Within this period, also, the cry of degraded and oppressed Ireland, borne over the Channel on every wave, that has broken upon the English coast for ages, has been heard for the first time. The supplications of Greece, prostrate at the feet of the civilized world, in the beautiful and dear originals of her ancient sculpture, and uttering her agonies in the only surviving remnants of the Dialect of Homer and Demosthenes, are now melting the heart and calling forth the treasure and the Chivalry of the only spot in Europe, on which the spirit of her ancient liberty still lingers. The mountains of the South, too, are but just echoing back the voice of congratulation and sympathy, with which the GENIUS of Britain had charged the Seas.

If the view, which I have, perhaps presumptuously, attempted to give of the present character of England, in comparison with what she has been, in the brightest periods of her former history, were able to expressed in one sentence, I would say, that from whatever causes it has arisen, to whatever events it may lead, there is, at this moment, alive and beating in every breast, a deeper feeling than ever before, of the value of human life; the stake of individual man in the social, civil, and religious institutions of his country; the rich and elevated enjoyments, which God has laid up for him even in this world; - a clearer and more ennobling conception of his relations to the past, the present, and the future; his personal and individual responsibility, immortality, and happiness. Be it, if you will, an age of calculation and reason. Shall we never - the muses forgive us - shall we never rise above this Romance and Poetry of life? Will the world never have seen enough of the boasted periods of enthusiasm? Will it never have sacrificed enough of its glory and happiness at the shrine of the blind Goddess of feeling? Long, O, too long, have we been cheated with illusions of human greatness, of permanent glory. It is time to subject our passions and imaginations to the dominion of Reason, to strive to raise some solid and durable memorials of our earthly existence on the foundation of Truth.

And here, young men of my country, is the only spot upon earth, on which this enterprise can be attempted with certain success. It is your appropriate enterprise. The great empires have given you a noble theatre; and called you into life at the most interesting of all times. The great empires have, indeed, all been founded; the Conquests of the World have all been achieved; there remains no other quarter of the globe to be subdued and peopled. But one great enterprise is yet unaccomplished, the foundation of human government and happiness on the simple basis of truth and reason. Cast your eye over the field that stretches itself out before you, an immense Community, of youthful susceptibility of impression; without one of the great obstacles of improvement, the established orders and the old institutions, which, like a thousand anchors, hold the European nations almost stationary; in the midst, too, of a continent of still younger and more unformed Communities; - a spectacle of intense and increasing interest to the world. Look abroad upon this ample and open theatre. Review the stores of human wisdom and experience, which enrich our native language. And forget not, that you are descendants of men, who solemnly dedicated themselves, and their posterity through all coming time, to the cause of free and enlightened Reason. Feel, as warmly, as you will; follow as ardently, as you will, the impulse of your emotions. But consider always, that it is consistent neither with the nature we inherit, nor the Religion we profess, to bow before an earthly Throne, but the Throne of Reason, unrestricted, divine Reason, the portion inscribed upon our hearts, of the Universal Law, "whose seat is the bosom of God; her voice, the harmony of the World."