er hearts than minds, and stronger hands than heads, guard against impatience. Practical men, men of action, are, after all, the men who play the most mischief with improvements. Our principle is, no revolution, no destruction, but progress. Progress is always slow, and slow let it be; the slower it is the more speed it makes. So long as we find the thinkers busy canvassing all great matters, discussing all topics of reform, and publishing freely to the world the result of their investigations, we have no fears for the individual, none for society. Truth is omnipotent. Let it be uttered; let it spread from mind to mind, from heart to heart, and in due season be assured that it will make to itself hands, erect itself a temple, and institute its worship. Set just ideas afloat in the community, and feel no uneasiness about institutions. Bad institutions, before you are aware of it, will crumble away, and new ones and good ones supply their places.

We hold ourselves among the foremost of those who demand reform, and who would live and die for progress; but we wish no haste, no violence in pulling down old institutions or in building up new ones. We would innovate boldly in our speculations; but in action we would cling to old usages and keep by old lines of policy, till we were fairly forced by the onward pressure of opinion to abandon them. We would think with the Radical, but often act with the Conservative. When the time comes to abandon an old practice, when new circumstances have arisen to demand a new line of policy, then, we say, let no attachments to the past make us blind to our duty or impotent to perform it. All we say is, let nothing be done in a hurry, and let no rage for experiments be encouraged.

We are far from being satisfied with things as they are. We have had, perhaps, our turn with many others, of mourning over the wide discrepancy there is between the American theory and the American prac10

VOL. I. NO. I.

justice, but by precedent. The minister of state entrenches himself behind a wall of precedents; the member of parliament asks for precedents; the lawyer alleges precedents in favor of his client; the judge decides according to the precedents; and no one thinks of inquiring what is right, but what are the precedents? This is all in perfect keeping. An Englishman has no business to inquire for justice; for his liberty is a precedent and not a right, founded on precedent not on justice; though it must be said in his favor, that his precedents are often coincident with justice.

France, if we mistake not, has taken a step beyond England. We do not mean to say that France has more liberty than England, as a fact, but she has more as a right. The king has ceased to octroyer the charter; he accepts it, and in theory, it emanates from the people. The French people are therefore the sovereign of the king. This is much; it is at least the entering wedge to freedom. The old monarchy of Louis XIV. is abolished, the old feudal nobility is extinct, and the Bourgeoisie, or middle class, is now on the throne. This class is the one in every community the most praised; and it is always accounted the most virtuous. Perhaps it is so. It certainly has some very respectable virtues. It is composed of merchants, bankers, manufacturers, lawyers, large farmers, in a word of the stirring, business part of the community. It has no affection for hereditary nobility, and none for the doctrine of equality. It has no objection to levelling down to itself those who are above it, but it has an invincible aversion to levelling up to itself those who are below it. It demands a laboring class to be exploited, but it loves order, peace, and quiet. These, however, it knows are incompatible with the existence in the community of an ignorant, vicious, and starving populace; it, therefore, will attend to the wants of the lower classes, up to a certain point. It will build them, if need be, churches, and establish ministries for the especial purpose of

teaching them to be quiet; it will furnish them with the rudiments of education, see that they are fed, clothed, maintained in a good working condition, and supplied with work. All this it will do for those below itself; and this, though not enough, is more than a little; and when this is done more will be undertaken. This is the first step; and when the first step is taken, the rest of the way is not difficult. The prolétaires soon disappear, and the canaille become men and citizens. We are, therefore, far from deprecating, with some of our friends, the "monarchy of the middle classes." We believe its reign in a certain stage of social progress, not only inevitable, but desirable. We believe no worse calamity could at this moment befal France, than the overthrow of the present dynasty of the Bourgeoisie. Its reign will and must be salutary, however far short it may come of satisfying the wishes, or the views of the ardent friends of liberty. It has a mission to execute, and when it shall have executed its mission, it will then give way to the monarchy, not of a class, not of an order, but of Humanity, of justice. France appears to us to be on the route to freedom. May she obtain it! With her fine social qualities, and after all her toils, and struggles, and sacrifices, she deserves it.

But it is to our own country, that we must look for constitutional government, in the worthiest sense of the word. In the bills of rights which precede several of our constitutions, we have attempted to draw up an inventory of the natural rights of man, rights, which authority must ever hold sacred, and which the people, in their associate capacity, can neither give nor take away, in no shape or manner, alter or abridge. In the constitution of the United States, and in those of the several states, we have attempted to define the natural boundaries of the state, to fix its authority, and to determine the modes. of its action. These constitutions and these bills of rights may be very imperfect; they may not enumerate all the rights of the individual, and they may not ac

curately define the powers of the people in their capacity as a state; but if so we may perfect them at our leisure. They recognise the great principle for which we contend, that the people are not absolute, that the individual has rights they cannot alter or abridge, and which it is the duty and the glory of authority to preserve untouched, and which it may neither invade nor suffer to be invaded. They teach us that if society has powers the individual must obey, the individual has rights society must respect; that if the people as a body politic may do some things, there are some things they may not do; and that if majorities may go to a certain length, there is a line they may not pass. They teach us then what we have denominated the great democratic doctrine, and they prove that doctrine to be the doctrine of the American people, however far short they may fall of its perfect realization.

There may, indeed, be some among us, who, affected by their reminiscences of English Whiggism, regard our constitutions and bills of rights, not as attempts to enumerate the natural rights of man, and to define the natural powers of government, but as compacts between the people as individuals, and the people as a state, or, more properly, as declarations of what the people in convention assembled have willed to be the rights of individuals, and have ordained to be the powers of government. According to these persons, our liberties are not, in the strict sense of the word, rights, but grants. They are not grants from what is technically called the government, but from the people in convention assembled. They are not limitations of the supreme authority of the state, but favors which that authority is pleased to confer on its subjects. The people in convention assembled might have willed, had they chosen so to do, that the powers of government should be more or less than they now are, or that our rights should be different from what they are now declared to be. They were competent to draw the boundary line between the authority of

the state and the rights of the individual where they pleased. By meeting again in convention, they may unmake all our present rights, and make such new ones as seems to them good.

But this view of our bills of rights and constitutions, we are not prepared to admit. It implies the absolute sovereignty of the people, a doctrine we have denied and refuted. The people, neither in convention nor out of it, can make or unmake rights. If they can, if they may bind or unbind as they please, then are we, as we have already shown, absolute slaves as individuals to the will of the majority. If we allow that the people make the rights of the individual, we deny the validity of his rights, and deprive him of every thing to oppose to the tyranny of the many. Bills of rights and constitutions can avail him nothing when it is a question, not between him and the ministers of state, but between him and the state itself. They limit the action of his majesty's ministers, but not of his majesty himself. But this is not the fact. If these bills of rights and constitutions enumerate on the one hand all our natural rights, and recognise nothing to be a right which is not a right by decree of justice; and if they on the other hand accurately define the powers of government, they are unalterable, and are as much binding on the people in convention, as they are on the people's ministers of state, or on the individual. In denying sovereignty to the people, we deny that the people can make or unmake rights, bind or unbind; we limit their functions to the discovery and promulgation of the law, as it is in justice, which is anterior and superior to all conventions. Consequently our rights, in truth, are the same before as after the sitting of the convention. If we had no rights before, we have

none now.

It is true that, in the form of our bills of rights and constitutions, there are some things which would seem to authorize this English interpretation of them; and no doubt many statesmen, and most lawyers, have so