talent or natural aptitude is requisite, the want of which must render effort vain; then, and not till then, let us acquiesce in this indolent and timorous notion which contradicts the whole testimony of antiquity and all the experience of the world. - Wirt.

CXIV. ELOQUENCE AND LOGIC.

OUR popular institutions demand a talent for speaking,

and create a taste for it.

in all ages.

Where the

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Liberty and eloquence are united sovereign power is found in the public mind and the public heart, eloquence is the obvious approach to it. Power and honor, and all that can attract ardent and aspiring natures attend it. The noblest instinct is to propagate the spirit, to make our mind the mind of other men," and wield the scepter in the realms of passion. In the art of speaking, as in all other arts, a just combination of those qualities necessary to the end proposed is the true rule of taste. Excess is always wrong. Too much ornament is an evil,-too little, also. The one may impede the progress of the argument, or divert attention from it by the introduction of extraneous matter; the other may exhaust attention or weary by monotony. Elegance is in a just medium. The safer side to err on is that of abundance,—as profusion is better than poverty; as it is better to be detained by the beauties of a landscape than by the weariness of the desert.

It is commonly, but mistakenly, supposed that the enforcing of truth is most successfully effected by a cold and formal logic; but the subtleties of dialectics, and the forms of logic, may play as fantastic tricks with truth as the most potent magic of Fancy. The attempt to apply mathematical precision to moral truths is always a failure, and generally a dangerous one. If man, and especially masses of men, were purely intellectual, then cold reason would alone be

influential to convince; but our nature is most complex, and many of the great truths which it most concerns us to know are taught us by our instincts, our sentiments, our impulses, and our passions. Even in regard to the highest and holiest of all truth, to know which concerns us here and hereafter, we are not permitted to approach its investigation in the confidence of proud and erring reason, but. are taught to become as little children before we are worthy to receive it. It is to this complex nature that the speaker addresses himself, and the degree of power with which all the elements are evoked is the criterion of the orator. His business, to be sure, is to convince, but more to persuade; and, most of all, to inspire with noble and generous passions. It is the cant of criticism, in all ages, to make a distinction between logic and, eloquence, and to stigmatize the latter as declamation. Logic ascertains the weight of an argument, eloquence gives it momentum. The difference is that between the vis inertia of a mass of metal, and the same ball hurled from the cannon's mouth. Eloquence is an argument alive and in motion,-the statue of Pygmalion inspired with vitality. Wm. C. Preston.

CXV.-LIBERTY THE MEED OF INTELLIGENCE.

SOCIETY can no more exist without government, in one form or another, than man without society. It is the political, then, which includes the social, that is his natural state. It is the one for which his Creator formed him, into which he is impelled irresistibly, and in which only his race. can exist, and all his faculties be fully developed. Such being the case, it follows that any, the worst form of government, is better than anarchy; and that individual liberty or freedom must be subordinate to whatever power may be necessary to protect society against anarchy within or destruction from without; for the safety and well-being of

society are as paramount to individual liberty, as the safety and well-being of the race is to that of individuals; and, in the same proportion, the power necessary for the safety of society is paramount to individual liberty. On the contrary, government has no right to control individual liberty beyond what is necessary to the safety and well-being of society. Such is the boundary which separates the power of government and the liberty of the citizen or subject, in the political state, which, as I have shown, is the natural state of man,—the only one in which his race can exist, and the one in which he is born, lives, and dies.

It follows, from all this, that the quantum of power on the part of the government, and of liberty on that of individuals, instead of being equal in all cases, must necessarily be very unequal among different people according to their different conditions. For, just in proportion as a people are ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt, exposed to violence within and danger without, the power necessary for government to possess, in order to preserve society against anarchy and destruction, becomes greater and greater, and individual liberty less and less, until the lowest condition is reached, when absolute and despotic power becomes necessary on the part of the government, and individual liberty extinct. So, on the contrary, just as a people rise in the scale of intelligence, virtue, and patriotism, and the more perfectly they become acquainted with the nature of government, the ends for which it was ordered, and how it ought to be administered, and the less the tendency to violence and disorder within and danger from abroad, the power necessary for government becomes less and less, and individual liberty greater and greater. Instead, then, of all men having the same right to liberty and equality, as is claimed by those who hold that they are all born free and equal, liberty is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances. Instead, then, of liberty and equality being

born with man,-instead of all men and all classes and descriptions being equally entitled to them, they are high prizes to be won; and are, in their most perfect state, not only the highest reward that can be bestowed on our race, but the most difficult to be won, and, when won, the most difficult to be preserved. -John C. Calhoun.

CXVI. THE TEACHER THE HOPE OF AMERICA.

LOOK abroad over this country; mark her extent, her wealth, her fertility, her boundless resources, the giant energies which every day develop, and which she seems already bending on that fatal race, tempting, yet always fatal to republics, the race for physical greatness and aggrandizement. Behold, too, that continuous and mighty tide of population, native and foreign, which is forever rushing through this great valley towards the setting sun, sweeping away the wilderness before it like grass before the mower; waking up industry and civilization in its progress; studding the solitary rivers of the West with marts and cities; dotting its boundless prairies with human habitations; penetrating every green nook and vale; climbing to every fertile ridge; and still gathering and pouring onward, to form new States in those vast and yet unpeopled solitudes, where the Oregon rolls his majestic flood, and

"Hears no sound save his own dashing."

you hold

Mark all this, and then say by what bonds will together so mighty a people and so immense an empire? What safeguard will you give us against the dangers which must inevitably grow out of so vast and complicate an organization? In the swelling tide of our prosperity, what a field will open for political corruption! What a world of evil passions to control and jarring interests to reconcile !

What temptations will there be to luxury and extravagance! What motives to private and official cupidity! What prizes will hang glittering at a thousand goals to dazzle and tempt ambition! Do we expect to find our security against these dangers in railroads and canals, in our circumvallations and ships of war? Alas! when shall we learn wisdom from the lessons of history? Our most dangerous enemies will grow up from our own bosom. We may erect bulwarks against foreign invasion, but what power shall we find in walls and armies to protect the people against themselves?

There is but one sort of "internal improvement" (more thoroughly internal than that which is cried up by politicians), that is able to save this country. I mean the improvement of the minds and souls of her people. If this improvement shall be neglected, and shall fail to keep pace with the increase of our population and our physical advancement, one of two alternatives is certain: either the nation must dissolve in anarchy under the rulers of its own choice; or, if held together at all, it must be by a government so strong and rigorous as to be utterly inconsistent with constitutional liberty. Let the one hundred millions which, at no very distant day, will swarm our cities and fill up our great interior, remain sunk in ignorance, and nothing short of an iron despotism will suffice to govern the nation, to reconcile its vast and conflicting interests, control its elements of agitation, and hold back its fiery and headlong energies from dismemberment and ruin.

How, then, is this improvement to be effected? Who are the agents of it? Who are they who shall stand perpetually as priests at the altar of freedom, and feed its sacred fires by dispensing that knowledge and cultivation on which hangs our political salvation? I repeat, they are our teachers, the masters of our schools, the instructors in our academies and colleges, and in all those institutions, of whatever name, which have for their object the intellectual