can be overrun even by the barbarians, or a nation of armed men, after fighting against a foreign foe, refuse to be the mere tools and creatures of despotism at home. The times are ripening.

Let us devote a paragraph to noting the 'successful' defence of Prince Albert from the charge of conspiring with his blood relations against England. Only the witnesses are the delinquent's next friends, and so notorious as liarsof course we mean only liars in public-that no sane man can believe them. W. Beresford, the agent of the Carlton, gets off as creditably even the Judge shammed a belief that there was no compromise, when no evidence was produced. Humbug for ever! And never a Public Prosecutor. Nor a Pym.

THE POLISH DEMOCRATIC COMMITTEE

Have issued the following appeal to the Secretaries and members of the "Committees formed through Great Britain in 1851, for the Relief of the Polish Refugees; and, though we know but too well the present straits of English working-men (ever the first to help the martyrs for Right), and though we well understand how continual giving wears the edge even of liberal sympathy; we yet can not but in the present need, say most urgently to all who care for European Freedom-Help yet again, and that quickly, with your little or your much, as your hearts dictate, these the true soldiers of that Freedom. Help, helpand quickly. He is no true republican who hangs back now. But our friends' own words should be enough. Read them with your eyes and with your hearts! 'We have but too long deferred addressing you in the present European crisis. 'And yet we knew how urgent for our country's sake it was for us to address you. 'And yet nobody knew better than ourselves that in your generous readiness two years ago, you were actuated by a higher motive than mere commiseration for individuals; that you obeyed the Divine call of justice toward a country, which, deserving independence and freedom, had been by a conspiracy of kings doomed to dismemberment and slavery, and now sees again looming through the Turkish War an opportunity for claiming aud conquering her imprescriptible rights.

'But you, Gentlemen! had already borne the burthen fatally incumbent upon the foremost in zeal,--but no inhabitant of the United Kingdoms could be ignorant that the interest of his own country lay in the restoration of ours, as the only possible barrier against the future encroachments of Russian ambition, but our solemn anniversaries at London and in Jersey had reminded the friends of liberty and justice of their present duty and for these reasons we waited, reluctant to overload the shoulders of those whose zeal we knew to be unimpaired, but whose forces and means, we were afraid, might be partially exhausted.

'May you, Gentlemen! forgive us our hesitating to fill your hands with work for which your hearts are eager.

'Yes, Gentlemen! for the lovers of Liberty, of Humanity, of Poland, of their own country, there is work ready, and work the more urgent, the more worthy of your zeal, for being definitive and tending at last to the ultimate solution of the great question of

the age.

The chief of European absolutism-the keystone of kingcraft combined against all that still remains of liberty and progression-the chief oppressor of Poland, the helpmate of Hungary's hangman-Nicholas-has met with a first defeat. His forces are from the

innermost recesses of the empire streaming toward two yawning gulfs the Danubian principalities and Georgia, leaving comparatively unprotected those numerous races, languages, and nations, which force alone lept together under the iron sceptre of the Tzars. The peoples are aware of a new era looming upon them from the East, and wait but the internal decomposition of that heterogeneous mass to claim their own rights and put an end to this unexampled system of wholesale butchery, by which our age is degraded and lowered beneath the darkest of all preceding centuries and made but as the coliseum of imperial Rome, where pagan crowds applauded the beasts loosed by a Nero or a Caligula against the precursors of a new world. But the kings also are aware of the impending danger. War is liberty; and liberty to peoples is ruin to their oppressors. The tyrants of all shades have therefore united to put an end to the war, or at least to restrain it within the limits of unjust and obsolete treaties, and thereby to keep up all former injustices and spoliations. Whole nations are to remain chained, progression thrown back, the press gagged, the prisons filled, torture preserved and butcheries continued, provided no new restraint be put on their arbitrary whim. And in this shameful and treasonable conspiracy Great Britain is to be made a partner! Hand in hand with the Austria of Haynau and Szela her ambassadors are already dictating to triumphant Turkey terms of agreement, and her flects, quietly looking upon Russian men-of-war burning unarmed towns and sinking crews of passengers defended by a few frigates and brigs in a Turkish seaport, keep themselves in readiness to prevent retribution and to enforce peace, upon the first opportunity found by Turkey to insure her own safety and the liberty of Europe by carrying the war upon the territory of Russian-Poland or Austrian-Hungary. Against such plans, against such a stifling of renascent European liberty, against such a blot upon the flag of England, a successful rising of Poland is the only efficacious remedy: and until this has been applied we appeal to the people of England to oppose the carrying out of those plans by the force of public opinion, and by manifesting their sympathies for the claims of Poland, to let her know that, in her ultimate struggle for independence, she will not be left alone by those whose security and welfare along with her own freedom she will be conquering at the expense of her blood. To you, therefore, her tried friends-to you, the generous protectors of her outcast sons, we appeal at this decisive hour to reconstitute your committees; to strengthen them by new members, whom maturer considerations, the convincing force of public events, your own praiseworthy efforts, and, above all, the irresistible eloquence of the present situation and the enlarged circle of your activity, may have brought over to your own sentiments; to create new means for enlightening and stimulating opinion by public meetings, lecturing, publication and activec orrespondence; and lastly to collect funds, sufficient not only for the English agitation (which to carry out its object and effectively to protest against the shame thrown upon the nation must be national) but also for aiding our Polish task of preparing our country for the struggle, so that she may carry it on

to success.

"This work which we call upon you to undertake is heavy-we know it--but we do not hide its weight, as the difficulty of conquering is always commensurate with the grandeur of the aim, and as only grand aims move generous minds.

'Events are hastening; public opinion must be brought speedily to keep pace with them. A speedy answer from you is therefore urgently requested and hopefully expected. LEO ZIENKOWICZ-ANTHONY ZABICKI-STANISLAUS WORCELL,' February 1st, 1854.

38, Regent Square, Gray's Inn Road, London.

LIBERTY AND EQUALITY.

HE Spirit of our earth has made but two steps upon the path of life. History has written but two chapters. They are the two phases of individual life liberty and equality.

Human life is educational. Humanity-the whole of human-kind-is as one man, whose law of life is growth, whose teacher is experience. Only in this they seem to differ: the man dies yet ignorant, immature, and his labour unaccomplished,-Humanity lives to try new problems, problem after problem, experience after experience, till the sum of knowledge shall be complete. The ages of the earth are but as the days of a single life; the experiences of nations are the world's acts.

History has been grandly called-one of God's poems. Be sure it is a poem neither wanting rhythm nor purpose, though to many readers the metre seem but uncouthly fashioned, and to some even of the writers-historians who undertake to transcribe a line or two here and there-the purpose is not very clear. The world indeed is but an act of God: his thought informs it, be the historian never so profoundly dull.

Human life, we repeat, has as yet gone through but two phases of its existence, the struggle for individual liberty, the struggle for individual equality. We date our years from the commencement of the second chapter. The first is the period of barbarism, the second is the era of Christianity. The first savage inhabitants of the earth were free. their God-the Ideal they worshiped-was Freedom. the Younger God-Equality or Equal Right. Of the them the wisest of the heathen scarcely dreamed.

Their ruling SpiritThey knew nought of Spirit to proceed from

The first problem set for the world's solving was this-How to establish Freedom without regard to equal right. For there are two sides to every question, two extremes to everything, use and abuse of all power. Men seek to propitiate the true divinity with offerings not divine. So Freedom was first sought for the sake of the seeker, not for love of the Truth. The world must prove all things before it shall hold fast what is good.

The Freedom of the world's first day was Anarchy: the anarchical assertion of Self. It vindicated only the will of the Stronger. When the Man would be free, it was for his own sake only: when the Nation asserted the right of Freedom, it was against all others. Freedom was my God-the genius of the individual, or our God-the tutelary deity of a peculiar people. The freest kept his slaves. The Medes and Persians overthrew great Babylon, but to found new Babylonish empires; the Persian overcame the Mede, but to strive for mastery with the Greek; Greece spurned back the monstrous invasion of Persia, but to be free to play the lord at home. The freest Greek 'Republics' were

but aristocracies: corporations of freemen with masses of slaves below. Sparta had its helotry and the crypteia to keep the helots down. Wisest Athens was no wiser. Rome's great freemen laboured to enslave the world; and God's favoured race, his peculiar people, worshiped also at that heathen shrine of Self. God was our God, who made the kings of the lands our captives and bound the noblest in fetters of iron. Equal Liberty was never the God of ancient worship. How could it be? Outside of Greece all was ‘barbarian ;' outside of that narrow Judea all was 'heathen;' and the Roman freeman had not his distinguishing renown for nought.

The religions of the old world were one: however various their dogmas, however different their manifestations. They were all but endeavours (differing according to the genius or circumstances of the peoples) toward the solving of that first problem of human progression-self-assertion-freedom for myself— the imperfect freedom which is anarchical—the religion of egotism, caste, and nationalism. Savage against savage first, the stronger claiming freedom even to enslave the weaker; then a warrior class-as in earliest Egypt-ruling all else; then priestcraft, for some time hand in hand with the warrior, and at length climbing upon his shoulders to still higher power, and—as in India— providing for the perpetuation of slavery by the establishment of castes. In the Holy Land the Jehovah of the Jews insists upon the narrowest worship, and there too is caste, the tribe set apart as holy, the privileged class, the Levitical mandarins. Phenicia was but an earlier Venice, as tyrannical a slavemaster. Sparta was no less terrible a despot. Athens taught her sons to swear upon her altar to make their country greater and more glorious; but only the citizen-class was so privileged; the slave and the alien shared neither the greatness nor the glory. One scourged the slave, massacring the bondmen when they grew too numerous, one slew the Amalekite, one dragged the nations at her horses' heels. The first Brutus could but transfer authority from the king to the patrician; Roman history within the walls is but the tale of neverceasing contentions between the discontented slaves and their imperious lords; and Spartacus and the Gracchi vainly strove to pass the bounds in which great Roman Freedom was so haughtily confined. O Brutus! thy name stands highest among those who have dared to worship Freedom; O Roman Regulus! thy patriotism shall not be surpassed: yet it was my freedom, and my country for which you dared and did. Self was written on the altar though it stood in Freedom's temple. So did the old world solve the question-How to establish Freedom without care for Equality. It could not be so established. The question had been wrongly put. Without Equality Freedom may not last.

And yet the God was worshiped in the Idol: though whom they did so ignorantly and devoutly worship had not been declared unto them. There is truth in the partial problem. Freedom even for one's self alone is so divine a thing.

The crypteia was this: When the Spartan authorities thought their slaves were growing too numerous, they sent out their young freemen to massacre a sufficient number. This was one of the institutions of the wise Lycurgus. Plato proposed a similar institution for his Cretan 'Republic.'

Needs first that we call down the Divine into our own souls. Thereafter the Spirit which has become one with us shall go forth to those that are yet in darkness. Divine indeed was the Spirit of Freedom which, burning fervently in the horn-lanterns of those untaught hearts, lit men's lives from the close darkness of the tomb of Self, to the beholding-not indeed of the horizoned width of earth, but of-the far-surrounding walls of earth's great templeCOUNTRY. It was something to step from the littleness of Me to the grandeur of My Country. The chamber of Self was enlarged, the prison of Freedom widened out. It was the Temple instead of the Ark. There was room for the imprisoned God, though still it was but a room: and the Universal Spirit could not be content. However, Time was young. The child walks in leading-strings before its thews are strung. So the Free walked in the support of an antagonistic and selfish patriotism before he had gained strength to journey through the world. The fire was for awhile shut in, that it might grow more intense. By and bye it shall embrace the world. Then men scarce knew there was a world. What was the world to the Roman ? The Sabine and the Carthaginian enemy might be conquered or absorbed. Beyond were Scythian forests and the dim realms of the unknown, hidden in the fogs of the surrounding ocean. What could he discern in that bewilderment and gloom, whose very shape and bound was but an obscure enigma? But before him burned the sacred fire upon the altar of patriotism, the glory shone around the brows of her who sate upon the seven hills; he bowed him down and worshiped where the Divinity appeared. Glorious Roman selfishness-scarcely to be called selfish, however based on selfishness-indeed it was a yearning out of self!-glorious and devout selfishness of a Brutus, a Curtius, and a Regulus! The highest Spirit of Freedomwhose name is Unbounded Duty-might well smile upon worshipers such as those. The glorious army of Martyrs for Humanity has no nobler company than those who served Truth even though they knew him not. Their love of country was indeed selfish. Even within their country was the fatal division of noble and debased. Notwithstanding, as the wide-spreading oak is in the acorn, so the sublimity of Duty had its germ in Roman deed.

And then, as ever, were the men before their time, who without seeing the error of the system in which they lived, made of their lives an unconscious protest against it, and a prophecy of the future to which perhaps their highest thought had never soared. For the earliest age has in it some fore-casting of the maturest. How many harvests in the one seed-corn! It is only for the sake of better understanding that we divide into periods. Even in the narrow hardness of old Rome were instincts of the universal humanity, and sometime hopes of a brotherly organization. Nevertheless, the broad characteristic of antique time was the worship of Unequal Freedom. Such exceptions as the following alter not the meaning of the whole. They are of the protests and the prophecies of which we spoke but now.

The Fabii were of the liberal party of the patricians. Unable to stem the tide of patrician oppression or to persuade the senate to consent to the longdeferred and meaned-to-be-deferred division of the public lands among the plebeians, whose blood and sweat had earned them, Caso Fabius, in his third