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for instance; or of Poland by Russia; or of Hungary and Italy by Austria; or of Ireland and India by England! We shall see the latter subduing, plundering, depopulating, carrying decay or death whereever they spread, maintaining their supremacy only by armies of functionaries and soldiers, who consume the substance and blast the industry of their dependents; and shaping their entire policy with a single eye to their own interests. We shall see, also, that they are hated and cursed, with unrelenting bitterness, by their victims. On the other side, we own no subject nations, no colonial victims, no trembling provinces-and we never desire to own them;-we waste no fields, we ruin no cities, we exhaust no distant settlements;-the weak Indian tribes among us we have striven to redeem and civilize; the weak Mexican and Spanish races about us, a prey to anarchy and misrule, we offer the advantages of stable government, of equal laws, of a flourishing and refined social life; and we aim at no alliances which are not founded on the broadest principles of reciprocal justice and goodwill. Away, then, with the base calumnies which hold us up to the world as a nation of reckless filibusters! Away with the European cant of the invading tendencies of Republicanism!

"Our past, at least," as Webster said, "is secure." It brings no crimson to our cheeks: not, however, that our people are any better in themselves than other people-human nature, we suppose, is much the same every where-but because our free and open institutions, through which the convictions of men and not the interests of monarchs or families are expressed, incite no sinister and iniquitous proceedings. The glory of Republicanism is, that it is aboveboard, reflecting solely the extant wisdom and justice of the aggregate of its supporters.

Thus far, we have only disposed of the invectives of foreigners, showing what gratuitous and unfounded malice they are; but we have yet to consider our subject in its most important aspects, or in its bearings upon the internal policy of the State. The annexation of contiguous territories, in one shape or another, is a question that must constantly arise in the course of our progress, and it is well for us to know the true principles on which it should be managed.

From the time that Adam was sent out of the sunset gate of Eden; from the earliest descent of the Scythians upon the plains of Iran; from the Phoenician settlements in Grecce; the tremendous invasions of the Mongolians in Russia; and

the dispersion of the Teutonic races over Italy, France, and England; down to the exodus of the Pilgrims, and the hegira from all lands into the golden reservoirs of California, there appears to have been a decided movement southward and westward of the populations of the world. It was never constant and continuous, and yet, contemplated in large epochs, it was always discernible. Sometimes, creeping slowly like a silent brook in the shade of forests; sometimes arresting itself like pools in the hollows of rich valleys; sometimes, indeed, seeming to recede, and then springing suddenly from hill-top to hill-top, as the lights which bore the news of Grecian victory, in old Homer's poem, it has gone forward, to the gradual civilization of the earth. By natural growth, by the multiplying ties of trade, by warlike excursions, by voluntary migrations, by revolutions and by colonizations, the superior races of the great central cradles of Western Asia have spread, pursuing the paths of the sun, until they now quite circle the globe. Nor is there any reason for believing that this diffusive connatus will be stopped, while there remains a remotest island, or secluded western nook, to be reduced to the reception of Christianity and European arts. An instinct in the human soul, deeper than the wisdom of politics, more powerful than the sceptres of states, impels the people on, to the accomplishment of that high destiny which Providence has plainly reserved for our race.

Annexation, consequently, is an inevitable fact, and it would be in vain for the American people to resist the impulses which are bearing all nations upward and onward, to a higher development and a closer union. Nor, when we consider the attitude in which we are placed towards other nations of the earth, is it desirable for us, or them, that this expansive, yet magnifying influence, should be resisted? As the inheritors of whatever is best in modern civilization, possessed of a political and social polity which we deem superior to every other, carrying with us wherever we go the living seeds of freedom, of intelligence, of religion; our advent every where, but particularly among the savage and stationary tribes who are nearest to us, must be a redemption and a blessing. South America and the islands of the sea ought to rise up to meet us at our coming, and the desert and the solitary places be glad that the hour for breaking their fatal enchantments, the hour of their emancipation, had arrived.

If the Canadas, or the provinces of South

or Central America, were gathered into our Union, by this gradual and natural absorption, by this species of national endosmosis, they would at once spring into new life. In respect to the former, the contrasts presented by the river St. Lawrence, which Lord Durham described, and which are not yet effaced, would speedily disappear. "On the American side," he says, "all is activity and bustle. The forests have been widely cleared; every year numerous settlements are formed, and thousands of farms are created out of the waste; the country is intersected by roads. On the British side, with the exception of a few favored spots, where some approach to American prosperity is apparent, all

seems waste and desolate. . . The ancient city of Montreal, which is naturally the capital of Canada, will not bear the least comparison in any respect with Buffalo, which is a creation of yesterday. But it is not in the difference between the larger towns on the two sides, that we shall find the best evidence of our inferiority. That painful but undeniable truth is most manifest in the country districts, through which the line of national separation passes for a thousand miles. There on the side of both the Canadas, and also of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, a widely scattered population, poor, and apparently unenterprising, though hardy and industrious, separated by tracts of intervening forests, without town or markets, almost without roads, living in mean houses, drawing little more than a rude subsistence from ill-cultivated land, and seemingly incapable of improving their condition, present the most instructive contrast to their enterprising and thriving neighbors on the American side." The Canadas have rapidly improved since Durham wrote, galvinized into action chiefly by American example and energy, and the larger freedom they now enjoy; but what might not their development be if wholly emancipated and republicanized? Or, still more, in respect to the silent and barren regions of the Southern Continent, what magical transformations, a change of political relations would evoke? The rich wastes given over to the vulture and the serpent,-where the sunshine and air of the most delicious climate fall upon a desolation,-would blossom and put forth like the golden-fruited Hesperides, opening a glorious asylum to the over-crowded labor of Southern Euгоре; the immense rivers which now hear no sound, save their own complaining moan as they woo in vain the churlish banks that spurn their offers of service, would then laugh with ships and go rejoicing to the

sea; the palsy-smitten villages broken into pieces before they are built, would teem like hives with "singing-masons building golden caves;" and the scarcely human societies, leprous with indolence, or alternately benumbed by despotism, or convulsed by wild, anarchical throes, would file harmoniously into order, and like enchanted armies, when the spells of the sorcerers are gone, take up a march of triumph:

"Such power there is in heavenly polity."

Nor would the incorporation of these foreign ingredients into our body,- we mean by regular and pacific methods, by a normal and organic assimilation, and not by any extraneous force or fraud,swell us out to an unmanageable and plethoric size. It is the distinctive beauty of our political structure. rightly interpreted, that it admits of an almost indefinite extension of the parts without detriment to the whole. In the older nations, where the governments assume to do every thing, an increase of dimensions is always accompanied by an increase of danger.—the head is unable to control the extremities, which fly off into a St. Vitus's dance of revolution, or the extremities are paralyzed, through a congestion of despotic power in the head. But with us there is no such liability: the political power, dispersed and localized, the currents of influence pass reciprocally from the centre to the circumference, and from the circumference to the centre, as in the circulation of the blood; and whether the number of members in the system be more or less, the relations of strength between them and the head remain pretty much the same; or, rather, as our federal force is the net result and quotient of the contributions of the separate States, it is rather strengthened than weakened by the addition of new elements. Our circle of thirty-one integers works as harmoniously as it did when it was composed of only thirteen, while the probability of rupture is lessened, from the greater number which are interested in the Union. A powerful community, like New-York or Ohio, might have its own way opposed to a mere handful of smaller communities; but opposed to a vast network of communities, though never so small in themselves, it would be compelled to listen to reason. Indeed, the dangers likely to arise in the practical workings of our system, will result from an excessive centripetal, rather than centrifugal tendency, and the annexation of new States is, therefore, one of the best correctives of the vice.

But be that as it may, it is clear that we must maintain some relations to the

other nations of the world, either under the existing international law, or by treaty, or else by regular constitutional agreement. Now, which of the three is the best? International law, as we all know, is the merest figment in practice, proverbially uncertain in its principles, without sanctions or penalties, and wholly ineffective when it conflicts with the will of powerful states, of which fact the whole continent of Europe is witness. Treaties of amity and commerce are often only temporary, and may be abrogated at the option of the parties to them, or openly violated, when one of the parties is strong and unscrupulous. But a constitutional union, an eternal and brotherly league of independent and equal sovereignties, is the most permanent, peaceful, and unoppressive in which states can be joined, the wisest, strongest, and happiest relation that can be instituted among civilized nations. We are, therefore, decidedly in favor of its adoption in settling the terms of our intercourse with all the people who are around and about us; carrying our faith in its efficacy and beneficence so far, in fact, that we expect to behold, at no distant day, the whole earth encompassed, not by warring tribes and jealous nationalities, but by a glorious hierarchy of free and independent republics.

The fears, therefore, that some express at our assumed velocity and breadth of expansion, would, if they were well-founded, be ungenerous, as well as unmanly and un-American. They are petty, unreasoning, and extra-timid. If we ever had swept, or were likely to sweep over the earth, sirocco-wise, drinking the dews, withering the grass, blearing the eyes of men, or blistering their bodies, there would then be some excuse for such apprehensions; or, if in the might and intensity of the centrifugal impulse there were danger of dislocating our own system, whirling the fragments off into measureless space, it would become the character of every patriot to shout an earnest halt. But Caucasians as we are, carrying the best blood of time in our veins,-Anglo-Saxons, the inheritors of the richest and profoundest civilizations: Puritans, whose religion is their most imperishable conviction: native Yankees of indomitable enterprise, and a capacity for government and selfgovernment, which masters every element -the effeminacy of climate, the madness of gold-hunting, the spite and rage of seas and winds,-we go forth as a beneficent, not a destructive agency; as the bearers of life, not death, to the prostrate nations to the over-ripe or the under-ripe

-to all who lie on the margins of Bethesda, waiting for the good strong arm to thrust them in the invigorating pool.

Precisely, however, because this tendency to the assimilation of foreign ingredients, or to the putting forth of new members, is an inevitable incident of our growth, because too, of the manifest advantages to all concerned,-there is no need that it should be specially fostered or stimulated. It will thrive of itself: it will supply the fuel of its own fires: it requires only a wise direction. A masterly inactivity is here emphatically the rule, for it will better secure us the desired result than the noisy, proselytizing, buccaneering zeal of over hasty demagogues. The fruit will fall into our hands, when it is ripe, without an officious shaking of the tree. Cuba will be ours, and Canada and Mexico, too,-if we want them, in due season, and without the wicked impertinence of a war. Industry, commerce, silent migrations, the winning example of high prosperity joined to a Freedom which sports like the winds around an Order which is as firm as the Pyramids, are grappling them by unseen ties, and drawing them closer each day, and binding them in a unity of intercourse, of interest and of friendship, from which they will soon find it impossible to break, if they would, and from which, also, very soon, they would not break if they could. Let us then await patiently the dowries of time, whose promises are so complacent and decided,

"Nor weave with bloody hands the tissue of our line."

It should be, moreover, always borne in mind, as the truth most certain of all the truths that have been demonstrated by the experience of nations, that their home policy, their domestic relations, their internal development, the concentration, not the dispersion, of their energies, are the objects to which they should devote their first and last, most earnest and best regards. It is the most miserable and ruinous of all ambitions, which leads nations into dreams of external domination and power. The wars they engender, deadly as they may be, are comparatively nothing to the sapping, undermining, exhausting drains and sluices they open in the whole body and every limb and member of the state. "Ships, colonies, and commerce," has been the cry of the old world cabinets, and the effects are seen in bankruptcies, in Pelion-upon-Ossas of debt, in rotten courts, in degraded and impoverished peoples, and in oppressed and decaying neighbor-nations. Thus, France, instead

of giving a chance to her thirty-six millions of lively and industrious people, to recover and enrich their soils, to open roads, to make navigable their streams, and to build themselves up in knowledge and virtue, has ever been smitten with an insane love of foreign influence; but might rather have been smitten with the plague. She has overrun and ruined Lombardy; she has overrun and paralyzed, if not ruined, the Netherlands and Holland; she has overrun and arrested the civilization of Catalonia; she has overrun and deeply wounded Belgium; she has been the perpetual enemy of the free cities of Germany, stirring up thirty years wars, and assisting Austria in infamous schemes of destruction; she has invaded Genoa, Sicily, Venice, Corsica, Rome, suppressing them time and again with her armies; she hangs like a nightmare upon Algeria; she maintains penal colonies at Guianaand all with what gain to herself? With what gain? Heavens! Look at the semibarbarism of her almost feudal rural population; at the ignorance, licentiousness, and crime of her cities; at her vast agricultural resources, not only not developed, but laden with taxes and debt; at her unstable governments, shifting like the forms of a kaleidoscope; at her Jacqueries, her St. Bartholomews, her dragonades, her Coups d'Etat; her fusiladed legislators, and her exiled men of science and poets! France, under a true decentralized freedom, with the amazing talents of her quick-witted and amiable people, left to the construction of their own fortunes, might now have been a century in advance of where she is; but she followed the ignis fatuus of glory, of power abroad instead of industry and peace at home! England, too, in spite of her noble qualities and gigantic industry, has depopulated Ireland, starved India, ruined her West India islands, hamstrung the Canadas, in order to make distant markets for her trade,

and yet, her poor at home are imbruted, half-starved, earning only one tenth of what they might for her, while younger and freer nations are enticing away the commerce of the very dependencies which it has taken whole generations of wrong, torture, and bloodshed to create!

On the other hand, the United States, refraining from the spoliation of her neighbors, devoting herself steadily to the tasks of industry set before her, welcoming the people of all nations poor and rich, restricting government to its simplest duties, securing every man by equal laws, and giving to every citizen opportunities of honor, fortune, self-culture, has, in a short fifty years, overtaken the most advanced nations, has left the others far in the rear, and in less than ten years from the date at which we write, will take her stand as the first nation of the earth—without a rival-without a peer-as we hope without an enemy,-but, whether with or without enemies,-able, single-handed, to dictate her terms, on any question, to a leash of the self-seeking, and therefore decrepit, monarchies of Europe. By not aiming at foreign aggrandizement, of which she is so often recklessly accused, she has reached a position which puts it easily in her power. Her strength has been in her weakness; her ability to cope with the world has grown out of her unwillingness to make the attempt; and behold her now a magnificent example of the superior glory of peace, justice, good will and honest hard work. God grant that she may never find occasion to walk in the devious paths of intrigue, to raise the battle cry of invasion; and God grant too, we ask it with a double earnestness, that she may not, in her prosperity, forget those that are in adversity; that she may never take part with the oppressor, but give her free hand of sympathy to the oppressed, whenever they shall undertake the struggle for their rights!

WITH folded hands the lady lies

In flowing robes of white,
A globed lamp beside her couch,
A round of tender light.

With such a light above her head,
A little year ago,

She walked adown the shadowy vale,
Where the blood-red roses grow!

A shape, or shadow joined her there, To pluck the royal flower,

AT REST.

But stole the lily from her breast,

Which was her only dower.

That gone, all went: her false love first,

And then her peace of heart;

The hard world frowned, her friends grew cold, She hid in tears apart:

And now she lies upon her couch,

Amid the dying light,

Nor wakes to hear the little voice

That moans throughout the night!

THE MAYFLOWER.

DOWN in the bleak December bay
The ghostly vessel stands away;
Her spars and halyards white with ice,
Under the bleak December skies.
A hundred souls, in company,
Have left the vessel pensively-
Have touched the frosty desert there,
And touched it with the knees of prayer.
And now the day begins to dip,
The night begins to lower

Over the bay and over the ship
Mayflower.

Neither the desert, nor the sea
Imposes; and their prayers are free;
But sternly else, the wild imposes;
And thorns must grow before the roses.
And who are these ?-and what distress
The savage-acred wilderness

On mother, maid, and child, may bring,
Beseems them for a fearful thing;

For now the day begins to dip,
The night begins to lower

Over the bay, and over the ship
Mayflower.

But Carver leads (in heart and health
A hero of the commonwealth)
The axes that the camp requires,
To build the lodge, and heap the fires.
And Standish from his warlike store
Arrays his men along the shore-
Distributes weapons resonant,
And dons his harness militant;
For now the day begins to dip,
The night begins to lower
Over the bay, and over the ship
Mayflower;

And Rose, his wife, unlocks a chest-
She sees a Book, in vellum drest,
She drops a tear and kisses the tome,
Thinking of England and of home-
Might they-the Pilgrims, there and then
Ordained to do the work of men-
Have seen, in visions of the air,

While pillowed on the breast of prayer
(When now the day began to dip,
The night began to lower

Over the bay, and over the ship
Mayflower),

The Canaan of their wilderness

A boundless empire of success;

And seen the years of future nights
Jewelled with myriad household lights;
And seen the honey fill the hive;
And seen a thousand ships arrive;
And heard the wheels of travel go;

It would have cheered a thought of woe,
When now the day began to dip,

The night began to lower

Over the bay, and over the ship
Mayflower.

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