as it is evident that negroes are qualified to play the part of freemen, in the sane spirit and in true sympathy with the white

have proposed to themselves in this great enterprise of constructing the happiest Government upon earth, will be the listening with a too credulous ear to the teachings of those who may seek to poison their minds with the belief that the Ex-race, then the spirit of our law absolutely ecutive of the nation is a better friend to free- requires their enfranchisement, since it is dom than the Legislature. Administration has necessary that every real and competent too long already had the control of legislation. power, or source of power, should have its Let them be divorced; and let the President of influence in the government of which it is a the United States understand that it is the pre-natural and integral part. For the real rogative of the people to make the laws, and his duty to execute them as they come to his hand. It is the error of our time to suppose that the Chief Magistrate is a better judge of the wants of the people than the Chief Legislature. Give the people, through their legislature, full opportunity and power to enact what they desire, and the country will always be free and happy. This, sir, is the golden precept of General Taylor. It is worth, at this time, all the political wisdom of the day. It is his creed, his faith, his platform. Let the country

elect him and it will be theirs."

We venture to say that the public, including honest men of both parties, will be greatly obliged to Mr. Kennedy for his admirable exposition, and if our own feelings are in accordance with those of the most influential and judicious members of the press, the names of Democrat and Federalist will from this time be fixed upon those to whom they belong. To recur now once more, and in the way of summary, to the general subject:

Those maxims acknowledged by all, namely, that the citizen is the primary power, or source of power, and that the greatest combination of these primary powers should lead, are the key to our party politics. They explain every movement, illustrate every argument, and are the pivot of party strife.

Take for example that most agitating and difficult question of the day, the question of negro slavery. The difficulty springs from the one affirming, and the other denying the moral competency of the negro. The advocate for slavery in the abstract denies that the slave, arrived at adult age, is a social power at all, or a source of power. And as long as he is unable to discover in him the moral capacity for freedom, and for citizenship, as long as he believes that the negro cannot, conjointly and equally with the white man, exercise the moral power and maintain the dignity of a citizen, so long he is justified in denying him in fact, what is denied him in reality. But as soon

power of the whole is composed of all the real sources or individuals combined, and if the central government represents its integral members in any degree imperfectly, falsely, partially, or in excess, it is liable precisely in that degree to become at moment an irregular and tyrannical government. The republican sphere of power must be rounded and perfect; composed of all, representing all, in their real degrees and conditions."

any

Or take another question of the day, that of the presidential power, whether it shall, or shall not absorb the legislative. One party regards the President as the representative of the people in a sentimental and patronizing way, he is to them in place of an immediate exponent of the popular impulse of his party; he is expected to employ the power of his place, in upholding, strengthening, and augmenting the party that brought him into office; his duties are to make voters, by the employment of Executive patronage;-to force the legislature and judiciary into the adoption of the measures of his party;-to absorb all the powers of the government for the uses of the party.

The other side contend, on the contrary, that the President is the head not of his party, but of the mere executive will, lawfully ascertained of the whole people; that he cannot, therefore, be required to use any means out of the usual course of government for the augmentation or support of his party; that he should never, in a single instance, attempt to make voters, or to control representatives, and that any such

*The question whether slavery, as an institution, shall be extended by an action of the general government over territory already free, is not The argument against immediate emancipation affected by the general principle above stated. is the present unfitness of the negroes for immediate freedom, and the ruin that would be occasioned by a hasty step in that direction.

attempt is not only a derogation from the dignity and value of his office, but that it is an absolute violation of the spirit of a free government, whose foundation is in free opinion justly represented; that by such procedure the democratic ground of universal suffrage is removed; the free power of the individual citizen giving way before that of the Executive-the body of the people disfranchised, and the authority they should possess absorbed into the Presidential authority.

Or, take the question of the right of conquest. One party urge upon the government the policy of extending its power over neighboring states by military colonies, and by seizing provinces of the weaker neighbor, to increase the wealth and add to the glory of the nation.

ing the question of taxation, whether it shall be protective or merely for revenue, the same principles appear; for this question, though commonly understood to be one of economy merely, is in reality one in which the principles of democratic republicanism are as deeply involved as in that of a war policy. Protection, as we understand it, is a silent war against the foreign commercial monopolies. The democratic hatred of monopolies springs from ideas of democratic liberty. The monopolies of England are felt to be more injurious and dangerous to us than our own; and we make a silent but effectual war against them by the protective system. The protective system of Jefferson, Washington and Clay, is a part of the democratic war policy pursued by the administration of Madison. For the protection of commerce we have ships of war; for the protection of agriculture and manufactures we have tariffs. The latter are the most effective and the least expensive.

Federalists, of the tory school, favored the encroachments of England upon our commerce-they opposed the freedom of commerce. By the embargo, which injured commerce temporarily, the Democrats secured its perpetual freedom; the embargo was a part of the war against foreign interference. The tariff is only a modification of the embargo, and for the same end. By a tariff we secure that final freedom of trade and manufacture which Europe wishes to absorb from us; just as, by the embargo, we effected the same end against the same encroaching power. A tariff is a temporary measure, pursued only for a time, and for the establishment of particular liberties; considered in the abstract, it is a measure fraught with incon

Their opponents reply that the democratic doctrine of the indefeasible right of individuals and of states, precludes the establishment of any rights of conquest under any pretext. That a nation or an individual previously free, but enslaved by aggressive power, remains free still, in the eyes of democracy, and has not lost a single right, either of property or of selfgovernment, by the misfortune of being overcome in battle. That the real rights and liberties of mankind, whether singly or in societies, as far, indeed, as they possess and can exercise them, do not depend at all upon the accidents of a war, or in any sense upon fortunate concurrences, but only upon the fact that such nations or individuals are free moral persons, capable of managing their own affairs, without encroaching upon the liberty or property of their neighbors; that wars, undertaken for the conquest or annexation of neighboring states, are not democratic wars, but must orginate from some undue influ-venience and expense, but nevertheless ence—some domination or abuse of power in the government. That it was quite impossible for a real and unforced majority of free opinion in this country to favor measures of conquest and aggrandizement. These considerations compelled the Constitutional party to found their choice, during the late election, upon a candidate pledged only to the support of their primary and fundamental doctrine-namely, that opinion should be left free, and suffrage be unbiassed.

necessary to the establishment of national and democratic liberty. It is necessary to our freedom that the monopolies of foreigners should be met and their effects upon ourselves prevented. Should we succeed in doing this, all other nations, and by-and-by England herself, will have to thank us; for, by the present policy of England, governed as she is by a few enterprising capitalists with immense fortunes vested in manufactures, not only India, Ireland, America, and every other Again, in the contest of opinion, regard-nation in trade with her are laid under

contribution and reduced to poverty and dependence; but the agricultural and commercial poor, in England, together with a vast population of overworked operatives, are kept constantly on the verge of ruin. Now the whole of this tremendous mischief, suffered by Europe aud the New World, springs from the corruption of the suffrage in America under the system of Executive Patronage. An army of two hundred thousand officials, under the control of the Central Power, gives a bare majority in favor of England; take away this vast incubus of American Toryism, and we should no doubt have a two-thirds majority of all the votes in the Union in favor of protection. Thus we see that free and universal suffrage, in this as in the former instances, is the great democratic doctrine, and that all depends upon the purity of elections. When the real majority governs, all goes right; when the minority, all is trouble and misery. Important as our politics at present are to all civilized nations, the evils felt lightly by ourselves, but created by our own mismanagement, are felt in a greater degree by all. As the wealthiest and most influential nation, and as the farthest advanced in the science of government, we owe it to our proper dignity not to allow a foreign power to influence us to our own and others' disadvantage.

say, that the representatives of freedom and the enemies of monopolies in our own land should not allow themselves to be depressed and impoverished by the persuasions of England; that it is derogatory to our honor and rank among nations to permit such an interested interference.

In a military point of view, perhaps, no nation is our superior, but as far as economy is concerned we are managed by England as though we were a nation of children. Our Secretary of State reads the London Times newspaper, and stands aghast at the wisdom of Sir R. Peel, and Mr. Manufacturer Cobden. We exult mightily over miserable Mexico, we talk of a conquest policy and of an imperial glory,-but of that wisdom which provides the sinews of war, which, more than armies or ships, makes nations predominant,—of that wisdom we are destitute; England has us by the nose, and wields our opinion at her pleasure.

Let us look back two centuries to the conduct of that great republican and democrat, Oliver Cromwell, and inquire what he did; what the companion and friend of the first colonists, the Puritans and Huguenots, did for England. He gave her the commerce of the world by instituting navigation laws, and by making England the refuge and home of the persecuted handicraftsmen of Europe. England began from the time of Elizabeth, and in a still greater degree from the time of the establishment of the navigation laws, which obliged the merchants to employ English ships, to be the workshop of Europe. Her agriculture, her commerce and her manufactures were established by her protective policy; her villages became towns, her towns became cities; her people everywhere rose into wealth and estimation. The Commons at length governed England, and the crown became a mere pageant. She had learned the secret of popular wealth, and bent all her efforts to place the consumer by the side of the producer, the fashioner of products by the grower of products; and now, strong, rich and haughty as she is, she spares no means of money, intermediation, or argument to persuade her younger brother to put himself on the list of dependants, and take up with the same opprescomparative with our real capabilities,-ission voluntarily which poor Ireland has been due to the ingenuity and enterprise of a compelled to by force of arms. Her plan monied aristocracy in England. They is to subjugate our farmers and producers

Again, the same principles appear, when the policy of internal improvements is agitated. For it is claimed by those who advocate the application of the public monies to the construction of roads, harbors, canals, and telegraphs, for the promotion of agriculture and of internal commerce, that as already a great degree of protection is extended to the commerce of the coast cities, by the maintenance of a powerful navy at a vast expense, enriching those whose occupation it is to inundate the country with the productions of England, to the detriment and impoverishment of the whole continent, it ill becomes us, as republicans, professing jealousy for our individual liberties and rights, to deny ourselves the privilege of accumulating wealth by internal commerce, knowing, as we do, that our present comparative poverty,

VOL. III. NO. I. NEW SERIES.

2

to the wise rapacity of her capitalists. | er period, in consequence of the cheapWith every importation of their goods, comes a quantity of printed arguments, parti-colored logic, for the especial gull and subjugation of our half educated wits. Truly we are a docile and obedient people, not without a religious veneration for our elder brother, whom, saith the Chinese bible, one must look up to as a superior. And yet, notwithstanding the disadvantages that result from a commendable trait of humility in us in not comparing ourselves with our betters, we have grown to an enormous magnitude, and begin to be physically superior to our elder brother, by force of mere nature and circumstances. We scatter ourselves over a vast territory, and produce an immense quantity of corn and cotton. Our total annual products, thanks to the superior ingenuity and freedom of New England, are already two hundred millions of dollars more than the products of Great Britain, and four hundred millions of dollars more than those of France; with a population inferior, indeed, in numbers, but superior in force to both. We now produce annually about two thousand millions worth, giving nearly an hundred dollars worth of products to every man, woman and child; but with a better and wiser policy, a policy better calculated for our defence and protection, why should we not soon produce two-fold

that amount?

Three-fourths, if not nine-tenths of all the foreign goods that are imported into this country, are imported by the capital of foreigners, to the care of commission houses in the coast cities, who there sell them at a profit for the uses of the people. These importations yield a revenue of between twenty and thirty millions annually. Our government pays our navy to protect English manufacturers, and a commerce which English manufacturers employ, and it has fixed a duty for their further protection so well contrived, that by lowering, for a while, the prices of their goods, they are enabled, soon after, to raise them to almost any price they please. Thus it will happen, that if the present depression in the iron market continue for a much long

ness and quantity of English imported iron, all the iron factories and furnaces will cease to produce, and the workmen betake themselves to producing a still greater unsaleable surplus of corn in the West. Meanwhile, England is paying equal attention both to agriculture and to manufactures. She is cultivating richer soils, reclaiming meadows and morasses, draining bogs, and inclosing commons: the time must soon come, when she will have grain and meat enough, and to spare. She will then be no longer dependent upon America, and will continue to produce iron cheaply at home, having a market for her products at the door of the workshop and the weaver's cottage. The lower the price of her goods, the lower goes our duty on them,-our ad valorem duty, which falls or rises as the market price, here, falls or rises. But no sooner is our capital withdrawn from manufactures, and our workmen sent off to the West, than English importers, finding they have the market to themselves, will begin to raise their prices, and having as much food as they can use at home, they will take nothing but gold and silver in exchange for their commodities. The price of their goods rises, and with it the duty begins to rise also: by the rise of the duty, American capital is again tempted into manufactures, and the emigrant workmen who come over to make iron and cloth in America, are again employed. The price goes down a second time, and with it, by the pernicious ad valorem, the duty also; and a second time the manufacturers are turned out of employment and sent off to the prairies. And this operation must continue to be repeated, until the continent is covered with middling poor farmers, living a half civilized life, unable to accumulate wealth, and sending all their surplus earnings in the shape of gold and silver to England, as is done by the poor Chinese, and the poorer Irish. No wonder a certain class of politicians are so delighted with our newly-discovered gold mines;-there will be need of much specie, if the present state of things be of much longer continuance.

REMARKS ON ENGLISH NOVELISTS.

“To measure the dignity of a writer by the pleasure he affords his readers, is not perhaps using an accurate criterion; but the invention of a story, the choice of proper incidents, the ordonnance of the plan, occasional beauties of description, and above all, the power exercised over the reader's heart by filling it with the successive emotions of love, pity, joy, anguish, transport or indignation, together with the grave, impressive moral resulting from the whole, imply talents of the highest order, and ought to be appreciated accordingly.”

Mrs. Barbauld's "Origin and Progress of Romance Writing.”