and Kentucky. The greatest service which can be rendered any country is, to add a useful plant to its culture, especially a bread grain; next in value to bread is oil. Whether the act for the more general diffusion of knowledge will ever be carried into complete effect, I know not. It was received by the Legislature with great enthusiasm at first; and a small effort was made in 1796, by the act to establish public schools, to carry a part of it into effect, viz., that for the establishment of free English schools; but the option given to the courts has defeated the intention of the act. ¶ The bulk of mankind are schoolboys through life.

HONEST

TONESTY, disinterestedness and good-nature are indispensable to procure the esteem and confidence of those with whom we live, and on whose esteem our happiness depends. Never suffer a thought to be harbored in your mind which you would not avow openly. When tempted to do anything in secret, ask yourself if you would do it in public; if you would not, be sure it is wrong. In little disputes with your companions, give way rather than insist on trifles, for the love and the approbation of others will be worth more to you than the trifle in dispute. Above all things, and at all times, practise yourself in good humor; this, of all human qualities, is the most amiable and endearing to society. Whenever you feel a warmth of temper arising, check it at once and suppress it, recollecting it would make you unhappy within yourself and disliked by others. Nothing gives one person so great an advantage over another under all circumstances. Think of these things, practise them, and you will be rewarded by the love and confidence of the world.

I

KNOW that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. It is this preposterous idea which has lately deluged Europe in blood. ¶Their monarchs, instead of wisely yielding to the gradual changes of circumstances, of favoring progressive accommodation to progressive improvement, have clung to old abuses, entrenched themselves behind steady habits, and obliged their subjects to seek through blood and violence rash and ruinous innovations, which, had they been referred to the peaceful deliberations and collected wisdom of the nation, would have been put into acceptable and salutary forms.

¶ Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable as another of taking care of itself, and of ordering its own affairs.

¶ The land belongs in usufruct to the living, and the dead have no power over it.

THE

HE station which we occupy among the nations of the earth is honorable, but awful. Trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence

it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth ever become susceptible to its benign influence. All mankind ought then, with us, to rejoice in its prosperous, and sympathize in its adverse, fortunes, as involving everything that is dear to man. And to what sacrifices of interest or commerce ought not these considerations to animate us? To what compromises of opinion and inclination, to maintain harmony and union among ourselves, and to preserve from all danger this hallowed ark of human hope and of human happiness? That differences of opinion should arise among men, on politics, on religion, and on every other topic of human inquiry, and that these should be freely expressed in a country where all our faculties are free, is to be expected.

¶ In a government bottomed on the will of all, the life and liberty of every individual citizen becomes interesting to all

KNOW, indeed, that some honest men fear that a Republican Government can not be strong; that this Government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the laws, would fly to standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.

HOSE who labor in the earth are the chosen people

THO

of God, if he ever had chosen people, whose breasts he has made the peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age or nation has furnished an example. Generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any State to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound and healthy parts, and it is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption.

LET

ET us, then, with courage and confidence, pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to our Union and representative government. Kindly separated by Nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal rights to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting, not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed and practised in various forms, yet all of them including honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter;

with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens-a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

PINION is something with which the government has

no business to meddle; it is quite beyond its legitimate province. Millions of innocent men, women and children since the introduction of Christianity, have been tortured, fined, burnt, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. Let us reflect that the earth is inhabited by thousands of millions of people; that these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion; that ours is but one of that thousand; that if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the nine hundred and ninety-nine wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such we can not effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. For these, free inquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it, while we refuse it ourselves?

¶I have ever found in my progress through life, that acting for the public if we always do what is right, the approbation denied in the beginning will surely follow the end.