"Sire, the authoress praises and extols the [GOD'S GRACE, LIKE HIS PROVIDENCE, WORKS BY wonders created by your majesty; but" The admiral did not finish his phrase. "I understand you," said Napoleon, with a singular inflection of voice; they speak ill of me in that work;" then turning towards the grand marshal, who, placed behind him, winked at the ambassador of Holland, in order to hinder him from saying any more of the book. "Well, then! Duroc," continued the emperor, you recollect our young man of Chambery. Was I not right to hold firm? You see there is no end with this woman." And, giving to his body a light swinging motion, Napoleon bent a little his head, as if he wished to look at the fine buckles sparkling in his shoes, and exclaiming, as aside, to himself "There are some persons who are incorrigi ble!" Then, after a moment's silence, raising up his head suddenly, he saluted the group, in order to give a word to the Austrian minister, M. Metternich, whom he observed modestly seated in the most retired part of the saloon. "EARLY TO BED AND EARLY TO RISE.' "EARLY to bed and early to rise"- Try what can be done in the morning sun, Full many a day forever is lost By delaying its work till to-morrow; The minutes of sloth have often cost Long years of bootless sorrow. And ye who would win the lasting wealth Must begin at the early hour. We make bold promises to Time, Yet, alas! too often break them; We mock at the wings of the King of kings, And think we can overtake them. But why loiter away the prime of the day, In the beam of the early hour ? Of gems to the gaze of the lark, دو NATURAL MEANS.] "'T is true indeed, and we readily acknowledge, that there is an obscurity sitting upon the face of this dispensation of grace; for we cannot feel the impressions nor trace the footsteps of its distinct working in us; the measures of our proficiency in goodness seem to depend entirely upon those of our own diligence; and God requires as much diligence as if he gave no grace at all; all this we acknowledge, and that it renders the dispensation obscure ; but then, on the other side, it is as plain that there is the same obscurity upon every dispensation of God's temporal providence; and so there is no more reason for doubting of the one than of the other. They that will not allow that God does by any inward efficacy confer a sound mind, allow nevertheless that he gives temporal good things; but how, in the mean time, does this dispensation appear more than the former? For when God intends to bless a man with riches, he does not open windows in heaven, and pour them into his treasures; he does not enrich him with such distinguishable providences as that wherewith he watered Gidcon's fleece, when the earth about it was dry; but he endows such a man with diligence and frugality, or else adorns him with such acceptable qualifications, as may recommend him to the opportunities of advancement, and thus his rise to fortunes is made purely natural, and the distinct working of God in it does not appear; when God intends to deliver or enlarge a people, he does not thereupon destroy their enemies, as he did once the Assyrians, by an angel, or the Moabites by their own sword; but he inspires such a people with a courageous virtue, and raises up among them spirits fit to command, and abandons their enemies to luxury and softness; and so the method of their rising becomes absolutely natural, and the distinct work of God in it does not appear; and, in the same manner, when God does by the inward operation of his grace promote a man to spiritual good, and bring him to the state of undefiled religion, he does not thereupon so suddenly change the whole frame of his temper, and chain up all the movements of his natural affections, and infuse into him such a system of virtuous habits as may make him good without application and pains; but he works his spiritual work by a gradual process, and human methods; instilling into such a man first a considering mind, and then a sober resolution, and then a diligent use of all such moral means as conduce to the forming and perfecting of every particular virtue; and now, while God, in all these instances does work in a human and ordinary way, and never supersedes the power of Nature, but requires her utmost actings, and only moves and directs, and assists her where she is weak, and incompetent for her work; both his grace and When the spangles of light on Earth's green breast his providence are like a little spring, covered with Put out the stars of the dark. If we love the purest pearl of the dew, And the richest breath of the flower, Oh! pleasure and rest are more easily found To sum up our figures, or plough up our ground, The eye looketh bright and the heart keepeth light, ELIZA COOK. a great wheel, though they do all, they are not commonly seen to do anything; and man, when he pleases to be vain and ungrateful, may impute all events to his own power and application. Now 't is certain that God leaves this obscurity upon his dispensations on purpose to administer an advantage and commendation to our faith, not an opportunity or argument to our doubting; but yet if we will doubt, the case is plain, that we may as well doubt of any act of his ordinary providence as of his sanctifying grace; and so (by this method of reasoning) God will have no share left him in the management of the world."-Dean Young's Sermons, vol. 1, p. 155. From the United Service Magazine. THE CONVICT QUESTION AT THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE. SIR W. MOLESWORTH has in the House of Commons so fully expatiated on the misgovernment and manifold grievances of which the British colonies have so long, and with so much reason, complained, that it would be superfluous here to recapitulate what has been by him so ably and so eloquently described. But whatever may be the wrongs inflicted on our unhappy colonial dependencies, by official ignorance, official blunders, or official indifference, the colony of the Cape of Good Hope is, of all our foreign settlements, that which has ever been doomed to bear the greatest proportion of neglect, of grievances, hardships, and oppression.. Hemmed in on all sides by hordes of savage barbarians-inadequately guarded, and frequently without any protection whatever from the everrecurring depredations of these sanguinary tribes; neglected and overlooked, misgoverned, detracted, and calumniated, its inhabitants have, from the very first period of its annexation to the British empire, been in turns the prey of fanaticism and of falsehood; of unmerited censure, and the most heartless system of oppression-a system now carried to an extent likely to exceed even the limits of the forbearing patience of its spite of their wrongs-hitherto loyal and dutiful inhabi tants. Cast we a retrospective glance on the condition of the Cape, from the date of its annexation as a dependency to the British empire; our first act to commence with was so to oppress the Boers, and leave them so completely exposed to native depredations, as at last to drive them in despair to open rebellion. This outbreak subdued, we next proceeded to frame such puerile enactments as appeared purposely intended for the encouragement of Kaffir aggression. We next passed an act by which all wholesome restraint was removed from an unruly, idle, and vagrant native population; a measure which rendered property insecure, and moreover deteriorated in value, for want of requisite labor, the hitherto cultivated lands of the colony; but that deterioration was tenfold depreciated by the premature emancipation of the slaves, without any adequate compensation to their former owners; an act neither more nor less than a legalized felony, which brought to the verge of ruin every landed proprietor in the country. But all these oppressive enactments had hitherto chiefly weighed on the Dutch colonial inhabitants; it now became the turn of British-born subjects equally to participate in those evils, which, under our rule, appear ever to have oppressed this ill-fated colony. The Eastern Province had, from the abovementioned causes, been deserted by its former sturdy defenders, the Dutch Boers; the colony was now therefore laid open without defence to the depredations of the Kaffirs-the urgency of the case required some instant remedy; that remCCLXXXV. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXIII. 15 edy was to send out in 1820 several thousand English emigrants at the expense of government. These poor people were deluded into the belief of being allowed to settle at the spot of their debarcation on the shores of Algoa Bay; on arriving there, to their consternation they discovered that they were to be sent at their own expense -far into the interior, to act as a barrier, or sort of advanced guard to the colony, against the constantly renewed aggressions of a set of cruel and blood-thirsty savages! This was rather a pleasant predicament for a community of peaceful mechanics and laborers to find themselves thus suddenly placed in ! It will, no doubt, be taken for granted, that they were, in so perilous a position, fully protected by a watchful and paternal government, both in rights and persons, against their barbarous neighbors; quite the contrary-they were left entirely to the tender mercies of this so-called "gentle and inoffensive race of shepherds," who plundered our poor countrymen right and left, whilst the latter were by the most stringent regulations debarred from even the use of fire-arms in the defence of their persons and property! Did they not complain? They did. Were not their complaints listened to ? No. And wherefore? Because a set of interested and wily hypocrites had, under the specious cloak of religion and philanthropy, gained the ear of the British public, and British authorities. Because these mendacious traitors had aspersed with vile calumnies their injured fellow-countrymen, had represented their spoliators, these " irreclaimable Kaffir barbarians," as more sinned against than sinning, and had thus succeeded in turning the current of public opinion decidedly in the latter; the colonists continued therefore to be plundered without redress. And what was the consequence of this " philanthropic" forbearance on the part of the British government towards these banditti hordes of savages? The consequence was, that the Kaffirs, mistaking such forbearance for fear, looking with contempt on a power from whose functionaries constantly emanated the most childish, contradictory, and vacillating edicts, openly set that power at defiance, and, without even a declaration of war, rushed in overwhelming numbers across the border, their onward course fearfully marked by incendiarism, slaughter, and devastation. Hence the Kaffir war of 1834-5, followed by a renewed series of missionary misrepresentations, of consequent false and injudicious measures on the part of government, the result of which eventually led to the last ruinous Kaffir war of 1846-47, and 48; next followed a renewed persecution of the expatriated Boers, and lastly that most flagrant of all former acts of injustice and oppression-the unjust and unauthorized decree, which, if carried out, would eventually transform an innocent, a rural, and inoffensive population, into a race of felonious malefactors; for moral, like physical contamination, once communicated, speedily runs through every part of the social as well as of the 200 years' standing, into a convict settlement, in human frame! Such is the fate at present-like the sword of Damocles-impending over this ever ill-used and much-to-be-pitied colony. Let England however beware; let her pause ere she carry into effect so flagitious a decree, for persecution may be urged at last beyond the powers of human endurance; even the writhing insect will turn on the heel that crushes it; the submission of the hitherto loyal and dutiful inhabitants of the Cape may be tested by too high a degree of pressure; they have now solemnly declared their resolution not to submit, whatever be the consequences, to this new and greatest indignity with which, amidst their manifold wrongs, they have ever had the misfortune to be afflicted; to a contamination by which, not they alone will be immediate sufferers, but involving likewise the fate of a rising generation, and of their still unborn posterity, thus doomed, by a single stroke of an official pen, at once to physical degradation and moral perdition. This resolution has been passed at a monster meeting held at Cape Town on the 19th of May last, a meeting consisting of thousands of inhabitants of every class and color of which the colony is composed, and directed, moreover, by one of the most respectable and influential men of the colony. The organ of popular opinion at the Cape thus notices the sentiments expressed at this-it may be called-national assembly of the people of South Africa. Three hundred felons, convicted of crimes for which the mitigated code of England awards the extreme penalty of transportation beyond the seas, for the term of seven, ten, or more years, are already on their way to the Cape, here to be dispersed defiance of the universal protest of the inhabitants. No such power is inherent in the British crown. It is a usurpation. They regard it with respect to their children, to the remotest generations, as a matter of eternal life, and eternal death. They will not witness with their eyes the children of their love, through the extinction of their moral life, delivered over, by an act of their rulers, to the bitter pains of eternal death. They, therefore, lift up their hands to heaven, and swear by Him that liveth forever, that they will not submit to this wrong. Let, therefore, the minister-from whom has emanated such an act-pause, ere it be carried forcibly into effect; let him, ere too late, rescind this unjust, this arbitrary, this most ill-advised decree; for on his head will rest all the consequences which may ensue, if the inhabitants of the Cape be driven to commit some frantic act of despair. From the Spectator, 8 Sept. LOUIS PHILIPPE ON GOVERNMENT. EVERYTHING is true in its essence; falsehood lies in our imperfect knowledge. Louis Philippe's self-defence, as published in the Ordre, may be adulterated by error in the report, by self-deception on the king's part, or by the endeavor to give facts a twist in his own favor; still it is instructive; for much of it is too probable to permit entire disbelief; and, by whomsoever put into words, the reflections are sound. Taking it as we find it, the moral which we draw from it is, that the want of openness and directness, which was commended as a source of power in comparatively barbarous times, has ceased to be so, and now really derogates throughout the districts, to mingle with the popula- from the strength of political rulers. This contion, and to find their way to such fields of enter- clusion is suggested, whether we put implicit trust prize among the native tribes on the borders of the colony, the Kaffirs, Basutos, and Zoolahs, as may be most agreeable to their temper and genius! And should the colonial government permit them to land, at any port or place within this colony, they will, without doubt, be only the advanced guard of an invading army of as many thousands. This colony, then, which has hitherto resisted all attempts that have been made to stain its character, to pollute its domestic life, and to blast its political prospects, by the admixture of European felony, is thus to be recklessly struck down at a blow, by the secretary for the colonies, into the mire of despair and ignominy! The colonists are now fully acquainted with the moral fruits of transportation in penal settlements, completely developed in Van Dieman's Land and Norfolk Island, from which a cry of agony has issued, befitting the lowest depths of eternal woe. And they know that from the peculiar constitution of society in this colony, and among the tribes beyond, but in constant and dailyincreasing intercourse with it, the introduction and dispersion of felons will speedily open up a lower depth, to swallow up all that is estimable, all that is desirable, all that is hopeful in their lot; and they now declare, in the face of heaven and earth, that they will not submit to this wrong. They deny the right of the crown to inflict it. They deny the right of the crown to convert a free settlement of in the colloquy or not. The king avers that he governed "constitutionally," that is, by the advice of his ministers, and not according to his own individual will; but the very arguments which he adduces to prove it show that he was much more active in council than an English sovereign is understood to be. He intimates that he, with the rest, submitted to "the majority" in council, but that he urged his own views with extreme energy and pertinacity. Thus he wished an authoritative contradiction to the tradition of 1830, that some programme offered to him by Lafayette at the Hotel de Ville received his assent; there was, he insists, no such document; and he drew up a denial, under the signature of "Un Bourgeois de Paris," which he wanted to publish in the papers. Imagine Queen Victoria sending to the Times her version of the Bedchamber affair, and offering to the right honorable gentlemen in council an autograph letter, signed " A Westminster Elector!" But Louis Philippe's "article" was never published; the cajoling ministers put him off with assurances that the contradiction should be made, and Casimir Perier put the manuscript in his pocket. How one realizes the |