constitutional liberty to a vanquish- bered that the French rose to shake ed people, while his own subjects off a despotism, it is true, but not a were in the most abject slavery, foreign one; that they had no fesstill the act itself was so spontane- tering wounds from the galling ous, so unexpected, that the Poles, chains of a foreign yoke, to sting dazzled thereby, believed they had them to maddened fury; and that really obtained a free constitution, the driveling dolt whom they hurlThey were soon undeceived: the ed from his throne, however despiGrand Duke, appointed command- cable and deeply sinning, was yet er-in-chief of the Polish army, was their countryman, and the descennot slow in throwing off the mask. dant of an illustrious family, which Every method by which disregard their ancestors had delighted to and contempt for national feelings honor. For, always excepting the could be conveyed, was adopted by sanguinary period of the first revohim, in open violation of the princi- lution, France has ever been disple of that constitution which his tinguished by a most loyal attachimperial brother had given to the ment to the person and family of Poles. Into the Polish army he the reigning sovereign. But in the introduced corporal punishment, recent-the actual case of Poland, which he often inflicted with his not only was there nothing to call own hands. Self-destruction in some for similar sympathies, but every instances followed such intolerable possible inducement to the adoption outrage. Excesses, indignities, bar- of measures of stern retributive barities of all kinds, were committed justice; and we think a dispassionunder various pretences, by this ate observer will rather find cause miserable scion of despotism, who to wonder at their forbearance, than being deemed unfit to rule in his to censure the momentary impetu own country, was thought well cal- osity by which some of their opculated to crush the spirit of the pressors were sacrificed. Polish people. But at length this trampled spirit turned, and with a moderation which we can hardly admire, they have suffered the brutal mimic of manhood to escape, without wreaking vengeance on him, for his oppression and murder of their long-suffering countrymen. On the 29th of November an affray broke out between the Russian guards and the pupils of the military school. The flame spread rapidly, and, as at Paris, armed women and youths distinguished themselves by a devoted heroism, which, if tyranny were to be taught at all, might teach it that a spirit too mighty for oppression-a spirit strengthening the feeble with unconquerable energy, has roused the nations to an assertion of their rights. We regret that this heroism on the part of the Poles has not been marked by that moderation which so nobly distinguished the glorious struggle in Paris. But it should be remem The Provisional Government issued a proclamation acknowledging the authority of Nicholas, but requiring, on his part, that the Constitution granted by Alexander be preserved, and administered according to its original and true interpretation-that the States be kept separate-that no foreign troops be admitted into Polandand that the old Polish provinces, formerly separated from the kingdom, and added to Russia, be now restored to Poland. That these demands were deemed extravagant by an autocrat schooled in the doctrines of despotism, and flushed with the success of recent and important victories, was to be expected. But we are willing to hope that even he and those of his order may perceive-we know that they shortly must be taught that there is a right prior and more indefeasible than their own, and that no longer can it be thwarted or oppressed. A Manifesto has since been issued, which proclaims their wrongs in a dignified and feeling manner, and their enthusiastic determination to remedy them. An immediate levy of 200,000 men has been decreed, and that invaluable force, the Burgher Guard, has been formed. The whole population will arm, and, if war must decide the question, it will be war to the knife. There is every reason to hope that Gallicia and Posen will respectively shake off the trammels of Austrian and Prussian dominion. With all our conviction of the bigoted despotism by which the courts of Vienna and Berlin are guided in their estimate of popular rights, we are yet disposed to believe that they will have enough to do at home for some time to come. And at St. Petersburgh too, the capital of that imperial philanthropist, who is reported to have sworn with ungovernable rage, that the rascally Poles should return to his benevolent guardianship, or he would slay every man of themeven at St. Petersburgh certain indications have appeared of a nature to alarm his fatherly solicitude. We see that the government have found it necessary to issue a proclamation against young men of rank, and of no rank, for combining together for the purpose of what think you, reader?—of breaking the windows. This care on the part of the executive, proves, as the Petersburghians are told in the proclamation, how watchful the government are for their welfare, and for the preservation of order. To us it proves something more-namely, that in the present convulsion of the political world, the autocratic thrones begin to totter, and that, while Nicholas and Metternich, and the Prussian state-pilot, are gnashing their idle rage at the movement they would fain control in Poland, their immediate efforts may be required in Petersburgh, in Austrian Italy, and among the often bamboozled patriots of Berlin. In this latter city, a convulsion is expected, and, may we not say hoped ? And we doubt not that you will find better work for his Prussian Majesty than looking after Posen. We are no lovers of revolutions. We know their almost necessary evil, their fearful summoning of the fiercer passions of our nature, the sullen, civil hatred by which brother is armed against brother, the long ordeal of furious license, giddy anarchy, and promiscuous slaughter! Of all this we are fully aware. The crime of the man who lets loose the revolutionary plague, for revenge, love of gain, or love of power, is beyond all measure and all atonement. The The first revolution of France, in 1789, was an abhorred effort of an ambition which nothing could satiate, and nothing could purify. The late revolution was a thing of strong necessity, less an assault on the privileges of royalty, than a vindication of human nature. people who could have succumbed under so base and insolent a violation of kingly promises, would have virtually declared themselves slaves, and fit for nothing but slaves. The Polish revolution is justified by every feeling which makes freedom of religion, person, and property, dear to man. Poland owes no allegiance to Russia. The bayonet gave, and the bayonet will take away. So perish the triumph that scorns justice, and so rise the holy claim of man, to enjoy unfettered the being that God has given him. Nothing in history is equal in guilty and ostentatious defiance of all principle to the three Partitions of Poland. The pretences for the seizure of the Polish provinces were instantly the open ridicule of all Europe. But Russia, Prussia, and Austria had the power; they scorned to wait for the right; they as profligately scorned to think of the torrents of blood that must be poured out in the struggle by the indignant Poles. Thousands of gallant lives sacrificed in the field; tens of thousands destroyed by the more bitter death of poverty, exile, the dungeon, and the broken heart; the whole productive power of a mighty kingdom extinguished for half a century; fifteen millions of human beings withdrawn from the general stock of European cultivation, and branded into hewers of wood and drawers of water, the helots of the modern world! were a price that the remorseless lust of dominion never stopped to contemplate. Its armies were ordered to march, and the fire and sword executed the law. If the late French Revolution could justify but slight difference of opinions among sincere men, the Polish Revolution can justify none. It is a rising, not of the people against their monarch, but of the oppressed against the oppressor, of the native against the stranger, of the betrayed against the betrayer, of the slave against the tyrant; of a nation, the victim of the basest treachery and the most cruel suffering in the annals of mankind, against the traitor, the spoiler, the remorseless author of their suffering. Their cause is a triumph in itself; and may the great Being who "hateth iniquity, and terribly judgeth the oppressor," shield them in the day of struggle, and give a new hope to mankind by the new victory of their freedom! NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. NOTHING can be more unfounded than the objection which has been taken, in limine, by persons, well meaning perhaps, certainly narrow-minded, against the study of natural philosophy, and indeed against all science, that it fosters in its cultivators an undue and overweening self-conceit, leads them to doubt the immortality of the soul, and to scoff at revealed religion. Its natural effect, we may confidently assert, on every wellconstituted mind, is and must be the direct contrary. No doubt, the testimony of natural reason, on whatever exercised, must of necessity stop short of those truths which it is the object of revelation to make known; but, while it places the existence and principal attributes of a Deity on such grounds as to render doubt absurd, and atheism ridiculous, it unquestionably opposes no natural or necessary obstacle to further progress on the contrary, by cherishing as a vital principle an unbounded spirit of inquiry, and ardency of expectation, it unfetters the mind from prejudices of every kind, and leaves it open and free to every impression of a higher nature which it is susceptible of receiving, guarding only against enthusiasm and self-deception by a habit of strict investigation, but encouraging, rather than suppressing, everything that can offer a prospect or a hope beyond the present obscure and unsatisfactory state. The character of the true philosopher is to hope all things not impossible, and to believe all things not unreasonable. He who has seen obscurities which appeared impenetrable in physical and mathematical science suddenly dispelled, and the most barren and unpromising fields of inquiry converted, as if by inspiration, into rich and inexhaustible springs of knowledge and power on a simple change of our point of view, or by merely bringing to bear on them some principle which it never occurred before to try, will surely be the very last to acquiesce in any dispiriting prospects of either the present or future destinies of mankind; while, on the other hand, the boundless views of intellectual and moral as well as material relations which open on him on all hands in the course of these pursuits, the knowledge of the trivial place he occupies in the scale of creation, and the sense continually pressed upon him of his own weakness and incapacity to suspend or modify the slightest movement of the vast machinery he sees in action around him, must effectually convince him that humility of pretension, no less than confidence of hope, is what best becomes his cha racter. But while we thus vindicate the study of natural philosophy from a charge at one time formi dable from the pertinacity and acrimony with which it was urged, and still occasionally brought forward to the distress and disgust of every well-constituted mind, we must take care that the testimony afford ed by science to religion, be its extent or value what it may, shall be at least independent, unbiased, and spontaneous. We do not here allude to such reasoners as would make all nature bend to their narrow interpretations of obscure and difficult passages in the sacred writings such a course might well become the persecutors of Galileo and the other bigots of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but can only be adopted by dreamers in the present age. But, without going these lengths, it is no uncommon thing to find persons earnestly attached to science, and anxious for its promotion, who yet manifest a morbid sensibility on points of this kind,-who exult and applaud when any fact starts up explanatory (as) they suppose) of some scriptural allusion, and who feel pained and disappointed when the general course of discovery in any department of science runs wide of the notions with which particular passages in the Bible may have impressed themselves. To persons of such a frame of mind it ought to suffice to remark, on the one hand, that truth can never be opposed to truth; and, on the other, that error is only to be effectually confounded by searching deep and tracing it to its source. Nevertheless, it were much to be wished that such persons, estimable and excellent as they for the most part are, before they throw the weight of their applause or discredit into the scale of scientific opinion on such grounds, would reflect, first, that the credit and respectability of any evidence may be destroyed by tampering with its honesty; and, secondly, that this very disposition of mind implies a lurking mistrust in its own principles, since the grand and indeed only character of truth is its capability of enduring the test of universal experience, and coming unchanged out of every possible form of fair discussion." OJEDA'S ADVENTURES IN SOUTH AMERICA. WHEN Ojeda sailed on his second voyage to America, in 1502, the Spanish Government granted him power to "colonise Coquibacoa,and, as a recompense, he was to enjoy one half of the proceeds of its territory, provided the half did not exceed 300,000 maravedies: all beyond that amount was to go to the crown. A principal reason, however, for granting this government and those privileges to Ojeda, was that, in his previous voyage, he had met with English adventurers on a voyage of discovery in the neighborhood of Coquibacoa, at which the jealousy of the sovereigns had taken the alarm. They were anx ious, therefore, to establish a resolute and fighting commander like Ojeda upon the outpost; and they instructed him to set up the arms of Castile and Leon in every place he visited, as a signal of discovery and possession, and to put a stop to the intrusions of the English." Ojeda's whole career is beyond a romance. Proceeding as above directed, he landed on the coast of Carthagena; and "when the friars had read a pious manifesto, Ojeda made signs of amity to the natives, and held up glittering presents. They had already suffered, however, from the cruelties of white men, and were not to be won by kindness. On the contrary, they brandished flames. Seventy Indians were made captive and sent to the ships, and He |