Feudal system itself, which entered with William the Conqueror, became the handmaid of freedom, and was for centuries the chief safeguard of the subject against the oppressions of the sovereign. Under its broad shield was Magna Charta wrested from the grasp of the reluctant John. Secured from the fear of punishment by the power it gave them, the rebel barons frequently treated with their king on terms of equality, and extorted at the point of the sword those privileges which constitute at this day the dearest rights of Englishmen: De Montfort died the first martyr in the cause of freedom, and watered with his blood the tree of liberty. The haughty race of Stuart, madly attempting to reëstablish absolute power on the ruins of the constitution, and to wrest from the subject his most valued rights, soon found that they had stirred a fever in the Saxon blood, which all the drugs and opiates of royal diplomacy could not alleviate. The nation rose in its might, and hurled the tyrant from his throne, and the imperious Charles discovered too late, that ENGLISHMEN WILL NOT BE SLAVES. The days of the commonwealth evinced the same sturdy Saxon spirit ; and the Protector himself, though enthroned in the affections of the people, was forced to behold those who had published scandalous libels upon his government, torn from the hands of the law by a fearless jury. In the revolution of 1688, a second Stuart paid the forfeit of his rashness, and the accession of William the Third introduced a new era in constitutional freedom. Since the commencement of the eighteenth century, and under the mild sway of the House of Hanover, the progress of free principles, although scarcely less rapid than before, has been marked by fewer important crises, and distinguished by fewer great and sudden changes.

Thus we see that the stream of English liberty, from the period of the Saxon invasion down to our own time, has been ever deepening, widening, and receiving accessions from every age and from every reign, until at this day it rolls on with its present majestic flow, until "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," have become sacred privileges and "inalienable rights." That magnificent structure, the British constitution, was, like the church of St. Peter, the work of centuries; and it has at length attained a grandeur and completeness to which forty generations have contributed their labors and their blood. Of the truly Gothic order of governmental architecture, its sublimity inspires the beholder at once with admiration and awe. The parent of our own institutions, we owe to it all the blessings we enjoy under our own free government. As the human form affords the model after which the sculptor shapes his creations of beauty to an ideal perfection, thus by imitating the excellences and avoiding the defects of the British constitution, our noble ancestors have elaborated the matchless perfections of our own, and have almost realized the ideal in this favored land. Such is English liberty; such is the rich inheritance of every Englishman, hallowed by the associations of the past, and by the blood so freely shed to secure it, replete with blessings for the present and with hopes for the future. Like the dew of heaven, it distills unnumbered blessings upon the head of the subject.

But in this age of radicalism and of progressive democracy, there is a certain class of men, who, notwithstanding the antiquity, the massive grandeur, the blood-bought freedom of the British government, are prone to indulge in dark forebodings of the future. They can read in the book of destiny nought but destruction and death. Revolution and civil war stare out upon them from every page of England's future history. They can already see the prophetic hand-writing on the wall, "Behold, the glory is departed from thee!" They will point you with exultation to the supposed democratic tendency of all the European states, which is to overturn and overturn, until all the kingdoms of the world shall enjoy the blessings of popular government. They will tell you of a French revolution. They will point you to Switzerland, Belgium, Poland, and Spain, where the uprisings of popular violence have baffled the wisdom, and shivered to atoms the elaborate workmanship of the Holy Alliance; or, if repressed, could only be put down at the point of the sword, and by the utmost exercise of arbitrary power. The leaven of democracy, say they, is even already beginning to work beneath the surface of English society, and will soon extend its influence to every atom of mind in the kingdom. In proof of this, they alledge that the mobs of Birmingham, the disturbances of Scotland, Wales, and Kent, the million of Chartist petitions, the Chartist riots now so common all over England, all show that she is but a slumbering volcano, and an eruption may break forth at any moment. The Repeal agitation, say they, is destined to shake the British government to its centre, and Ireland will be free, or involve England in her own destruction. The extreme density of her population affords another dark ground of fear; the great problem of the age now is, how to feed the many mouths which are crying for sustenance, and Malthusian barbarities have already been proposed, and even tried, in order to prevent the farther increase of population. These evils, too, are greatly aggravated, say the radicals, by her iniquitous system of Corn Laws, and all her legislation, they tell us, is adjusted to the express purpose of grinding down the faces of the poor. The oppressions and wrongs of the English operative are descanted upon in glowing language. The numberless evils entailed by the Feudal System, say they, still cling to her skirts. Riches and landed property, instead of being distributed among the masses, are all concentrated in the hands of the few. Her immense national debt is a millstone about her neck, which, unless cast off, will sink her in the sea of revolution and anarchy. A fearful catalogue of national sins rises up to call down curses on her head. The blood of oppressed Ireland "crieth from the ground" against her. Her unscrupulous rapacity has become a by-word all over the world. Her Indian enormities will yet demand a fearful retribution. Her Chinese wars and Australian cruelties will yet receive their recompense in blood.

After having thus enumerated all those ominous clouds which overhang the political horizon of Great Britain, men of this stamp, terrified by the phantoms they have conjured up, will whisper in our ears dark prophecies of the future. They tell us the day of retribution is at hand. All the horrors of the French revolution, before a century has passed

away, shall be acted over again on British soil. London shall behold the excesses at which Paris shuddered. Some future George shall meet the untimely fate of Louis the Sixteenth. A political convulsion, like the earthquake which shook Lisbon to the ground, shall engulf all that Englishmen hold most dear. The crown and the peerage shall be alike trampled under foot by an infuriate populace. Such are the views with regard to the fate of the British empire, which are becoming somewhat fashionable in a certain quarter, and which, among politicians of the Democratic school, seem to find especial favor and currency. That these fears are groundless, it shall be our object to show, and that England may yet survive the storms of centuries, perhaps when our own glorious Union is known only in the traditions of the past.

Her insular position, her "wooden walls," her Saxon spirit, present an impregnable barrier against invasion, and afford demonstrative evidence that England can never be conquered. Her danger, if danger she has to fear, is not from without, but from within. Here she may be endangered from two causes-either by the inordinate extension of the royal prerogative, or by having all her conservative institutions broken down, and her limited monarchy converted into a raging democracy. From the first of these influences she has little cause for dread. Compared with most of the European kingdoms, her standing army is small, and it is mostly on service in her distant colonies. The sinews of her strength lie in her navy, a species of force impotent in the service of tyranny, although it has made her queen of the seas and inistress of both oceans. The sovereign, therefore, has it not in his power to overawe either people or parliament by the exhibition of an armed force; while the latter, by refusing to grant supplies, may compel him to submission. But, more than all, the great struggles by which English liberty was won, must remain forever a warning to tyrants. Magna Charta, extorted from the unwilling John, the execution of Charles I, the revolution of 1688, the lives of a Hampden, a Cromwell, and a Vane, all prove that English liberty is placed on too secure a basis to be thus shaken by the crown. The British constitution, therefore, impregnable at every other point, will fall, if fall it must, by the parricidal act of British subjects. A Democracy must rise upon the smoking and blood-stained ruins of time-honored institutions and longcherished principles. Samson-like, the English people must tear away the pillars of the state, and bring the same destruction on themselves which they draw down on king and parliament. Need we fear that Englishmen will thus in a single day demolish that vast fabric which their ancestors have been centuries in erecting,-that they will blot out the sun from their political heavens, and fill its place with the strange luminary of a lawless democracy? The people of England are eminently conservative. They have little of that enthusiasm, that fiery energy-they have none of that love of change, we had almost said, fickleness, which are so highly characteristic of our own people. Those evils arising from the instability of legislation and rotation in office, from perpetual changes in policy and laws, under which we groan, are scarcely felt or known in the mother-country. From the

restrictions imposed upon the right of suffrage, likewise, the masses of their population are excluded from the ballot-box, and having no opportunity of participating in the affairs of government, no share in the election of their rulers, they have little of that party-spirit which has here risen to such an alarming height. A general election does not there, as here, shake the kingdom from the Orkneys to the Isle of Wight; but after producing something of a tempest in the upper regions of the social atmosphere, it passes away without exciting a single hope or fear in the bosoms of the lower orders. The staid and sober Englishman, therefore, has nothing of that excitability which makes our own countrymen, like the phosphoric match, ready to start into a flame at the slightest friction. Those exciting causes, which in America would well-nigh breed a rebellion, in Great Britain would scarcely draw forth an address to the throne. The Englishman cheerfully bears a load of taxation, which the American would not sustain for an instant; he endures the galling yoke of caste and the factitious distinction of classes almost without a murmur; he suffers the inequality of representation and the deprivation of his civil rights with unshaken loyalty.; and under all these burdens, in his horror of republicanism, he felicitates himself upon his happy destiny.

Another revolution like that which, half a century since, desolated France, no country will probably ever again behold. That awful convulsion so shocked and horrified the world, as effectually to prevent its own recurrence. Men had rather endure the worst tyranny, than to have the fountains of the great deep of society broken up, and all they hold most sacred overwhelmed by the deluge of a second French revolution. But if any nation were ever insane enough to reenact these horrors, these bloody scenes never could be acted over again upon the soil of England. The English people never could, never can, do such violence to that Saxon spirit which they have inherited from their forefathers. They have not a particle of that visionary character which the philosophy of Voltaire and Rousseau has infused into French liberty, French modes of thought, and a Frenchman's idea of government. The republic of the French jacobins was a distorted, misshapen imitation of the ancient commonwealths, with all of their defects and few of their excellences. It was nearly the embodiment of that idea of the ancient governments, which would be formed by a school-boy from the reading of Plutarch. But English liberty has in it something peculiarly its own. "Tis no servile imitation of antiquity, but, like the Saxon portion of our mother-tongue, it is derived from the purer fountain of its own individuality. The British constitution bespeaks its purely Saxon origin in its every line and feature. "Tis no mongrel offspring of antiquated failures, no adopted foundling of the past, no revival of obsolete theories dug from the ruins of Grecian and Roman greatness; but born on English soil, based upon the deepest principles of the English character, and enthroned in the English heart.

It would seem that during the reign of Charles the First, if ever, so great a political convulsion was to be anticipated. Amid the bigotry of fanatical sects raging for supremacy, amid the perjuries and treasons of

the perfidious Charles, amid the festering abuses which were spreading mortification through the body politic,-then, if ever, was England to behold her plains deluged in the blood of her children, and the guillotine glutted with its victims, after the true Parisian mode. But what was the issue? The nation rose in its strength, and after a comparatively bloodless civil war, dethroned the tyrant, and his single life restored tranquillity. All these exciting causes and aggravated abuses scarcely sufficed to produce a revolution at that day; they can never recur again in half their former force. And shall that constitution which has survived the storms of thirteen centuries be prostrated now? The analogy of history, the annals of the past, the Anglo-Saxon character, forbid it.

state.

Her national debt has now become one of the main pillars of the Her aristocracy, from the turbulent barons of the reign of John, have become an imperial guard around the throne. The moneyed interest, the middle classes, all who have aught to lose by revolution, are ardent in the support of the constitution as it is. Ages have hallowed it in the memory of Englishmen. Holy associations cluster around every section of the great charter of their liberties, and invest it with a historic grandeur. Every line kindles in the English heart a fire of patriotism, and tells of noble deeds and mighty names. Its fundamental privileges are indissolubly connected with the memory of the illustrious dead, who gave their lives to secure them. Its cardinal principles are consecrated by the great struggles through which it was attained. It has been baptized in the blood of the martyrs of civil liberty. It has been the progressive work of successive generations, to which age after age has brought its votive offering of toil and suffering and tears. English history is but the protracted record of its development; English liberty is but another name for the blessings it bestows. Tell us not, then, that Britons will ever be found base enough to destroy this, their precious birthright,-that they will ever dishonor the memory of their ancestors by hastening the downfall of their glorious constitution, or even by exhibiting too slight an appreciation of its value. In reference to it, "Esto perpetua" is their pious prayer; may it be ours.

ON MEMORY.

THERE is an isle! where ling'ring plays

The sunlight of those earlier days,

When o'er the soul's most sadden'd feeling

Some joyous future would be stealing,

And every passing moment brought

Some rapt'rous sense-some glowing thought

Effacing that which went before,

Like waves upon the moonlit shore,