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establishing a thousand miles of telegraph upon the island, a portion of it being now in operation.

It is well known that about two years ago England and France proposed a convention with the United States relative to Cuba. Our government was solicited to acquiesce in the following article:

"The high contracting parties hereby severally and collectively disclaim, now and hereafter, all intention to obtain possession of the island of Cuba, and they respectively bind themselves to discountenance all attempts to that effect on the part of any power or individuals whatever. The high contracting parties declare severally and collectively, that they will not obtain or maintain for themselves, or for any one of themselves, any exclusive control over said island, nor assume nor exercise any dominion over the same."

In the admirable reply from the Department of State at Washington, Mr. Everett takes the position that the United States cannot come to equal terms with France and England respecting Cuba.

"The President," he says, "does not covet the acquisition of Cuba for the United States; at the same time, he considers the condition of Cuba mainly as an American question. The proposed convention proceeds on a different principle. It assumes that the United States have no other or greater interest in the question than France or England; whereas it is necessary only to cast one's eye on the map to see how remote are the relations of Europe, and how intimate are those of the United States, with this island.

"The United States feel no uneasiness at the acquisitions that England and France have already made; but the transfer of Cuba to either of these powers would be a different thing. We should view it in somewhat the same light in which France and England would view the acquisition of some important island in the Mediterranean by the United States; with this difference, it is true, that the attempt of the United States to establish themselves in Europe would be a novelty, while the appearance of a European power in this part of the world is a familiar fact. But this difference in the two cases is merely historical, and would not diminish the anxiety which, on political grounds, would be caused by any great demonstration of European power in a new direction in America."

The objections to the convention were, —

1. That it would not be viewed with favor by the Senate,

and its rejection by that body would leave the question of Cuba in a more unsettled position than before.

2. It may be doubted whether the Constitution of the United States would allow the treaty-making power to impose a permanent disability on the American government for all coming time, and prevent it under any circumstances from doing what has been so often done in times past. Louisiana and Florida have been purchased. May not circumstances at some future period favor and justify the purchase of Cuba?

3. It has been the policy of our government to avoid entangling alliances with European powers.

4. The island of Cuba is remote from Europe, but lies at our doors. It is in a position to control our commerce. If it guarded the entrance of the Thames or the Seine, instead of the Mississippi, and we should propose a convention like this to France and England, those powers would assuredly feel that the disability assumed by ourselves was far less serious than that which we asked them to assume.

This document from the Secretary of State represents the vast increase of the territory of the United States, and the inevitable continuance of that increase, and adds:

"Little less than half a million of the population of the Old World is annually pouring into the United States, to be incorporated into an industrious and prosperous community, in the bosom of which they find political and religious liberty, social position, employment, and bread. It is a fact that would defy belief, were it not the result of official inquiry, that the immigrants to the United States from Ireland alone, besides having subsisted themselves, have sent back to their kindred, for the last three years, nearly five millions of dollars annually. Such is the territorial development of the United States in the past century. Is it possible that Europe can contemplate it with an unfriendly or jealous eye? What would have been her condition in these trying years, but for the outlet we have furnished for her starving millions?"

Mr. Everett argues that, as Great Britain has been benefited by the prosperous commerce that has resulted from the establishment of the independence of the United States, by the home that has been provided for the multitudes she could not or would not support, and the remittances her subjects have received from them, so Spain, far from being injured by the

loss of this island, would, by peacefully transferring it to the United States, derive more profit from the free commerce that would spring up with her, favored above all other nations by ancient associations and common language and tastes, than from the best contrived system of colonial taxation.

Cuba commands the sympathies of every friend of freedom. Shall she not be liberated from the despotic power of Spain? When liberated, can she comfortably remain independent, with hungry John Bull on one side, and greedy Jonathan on the other? Either country would propose a connection to the island far more advantageous for it than solitary independence. Surely we can afford to outbid England; for even if we do not want it ourselves, we cannot permit it to go into the possession of any other powerful nation.

We watch with interest, not to say jealousy, every new development relating to this island, and trust that the time will be hastened when, if not ours, it shall become, by the introduction of such liberal institutions of government, of learning, and of religion as we enjoy, what Nature seems to have designed it to be, the Queen of the Antilles and the garden of the world.

ART. VII. Thesaurus of English Words, so classified and arranged as to facilitate the Expression of Ideas and assist in Literary Composition. By PETER MARK ROGET, late Secretary of the Royal Society, Author of the Bridgewater Treatise on Animal and Vegetable Physiology, &c. Revised and edited, with a List of Foreign Words, defined in English, and other Additions. By BARNAS SEARS, D.D., Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. Boston: Gould & Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 468.

WE congratulate that large, respectable, inexpressive, and unexpressed class of thinkers, who are continually complaining of the barrenness of their vocabulary as compared with the affluence of their ideas, on the appearance of Dr. Roget's

volume. If it does nothing else, it will bring a popular theory of verbal expression to the test; and if that theory be correct, we count upon witnessing a mob of mute Miltons and Bacons, and speechless Chathams and Burkes, crowding and tramping into print. Dr. Roget, for a moderate fee, prescribes the verbal medicine which will relieve the congestion of their thoughts. All the tools and implements employed by all the poets and philosophers of England can be obtained at his shop. The idea being given, he guarantees in every case to supply the word. Dr. Sears, the American editor, has, it is true, deemed it his duty to retrench the exuberance of the original in the phraseology of slang, and has thus made it a useless book to a numerous and constantly increasing class of beaux-esprits, whose conceptions and passions would find no adequate vent in any dialect milder and cleanlier than that which derives its force and flavor from Billingsgate and Wapping; but for all ordinary purposes, either of copiousness or condensation, of elegance or energy, Dr. Roget's volume, as weeded by Dr. Sears, will be found to be amply sufficient. Indeed, if the apt use of words be a mechanical exercise, we cannot doubt that this immense mass of the raw material of expression will be rapidly manufactured into history, philosophy, poetry, and eloquence.

Seriously, we consider this book as one of the best of a numerous class, whose aim is to secure the results without imposing the tasks of labor, to arrive at ends by a dexterous dodging of means, to accelerate the tongue without accelerating the faculties. It is an outside remedy for an inward defect. In our opinion, the work mistakes the whole process by which living thought makes its way into living words, and it might be thoroughly mastered without conveying any real power or facility of expression. In saying this, we do not mean that the knack of mechanical rhetoric may not be more readily caught, and that fluency in the use of words may not be increased, by its study. But rhetoric is not a knack, and fluency is not expression. The crop of ready writers, of correct writers, of elegant writers, of writers capable of using words in every mode but the right one, is already sufficiently large to meet the current demand for intellectual husk, chaff,

and stubble. The tendency of the time to divorce the body of words from the soul of expression, and to shrivel up language into a mummy of thought, would seem to need the rein rather than the whip. The most cursory glance over much of the "literature" of the day, so called, will indicate the peculiar form of marasmus under which the life of language is in danger of being slowly consumed. The most hopeless characteristic of this literature is its complacent exhibition of distressing excellences, its evident incapacity to rise into promising faults. The terms are such as are employed by the best writers, the grammar is good, the morality excellent, the information accurate, the reflections sensible, yet the whole composition neither contains nor can communicate intellectual or moral life; and a critical eulogium on its merits sounds like the certificate of a schoolmaster as to the negative virtues of his pupils. This fluent debility, which never stumbles into ideas nor stutters into passion, which calls its commonplace comprehensiveness, and styles its sedate languor repose, would, if put upon a short allowance of words, and compelled to purchase language at the expense of conquering obstacles, be likely to evince some spasms of genuine expression; but it is hardly reasonable to expect this verbal abstemiousness at a period when the whole wealth of the English tongue is placed at the disposal of the puniest whipsters of rhetoric,- when the art of writing is avowedly taught on the principle of imitating the "best models," when words are worked into the ears of the young in the hope that something will be found answering to them in their brains, and when Dr. Peter Mark Roget, who never happened on a verbal felicity or uttered a "thought-executing" word in the course of his long and useful life, rushes about, book in hand, to tempt unthinking and unimpassioned mediocrity into the delusion, that its disconnected glimpses of truths never fairly grasped, and its faint movements of embryo aspirations which never broke their shell, can be worded by his specifics into creative thought and passion. The bill of fare is indeed immense; what a pity that the absence of such insignificant elements as mouths, stomachs, and the appetite of hunger, may preclude the possi bility of a feast!

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