Pelham, by grants of land to disbanded soldiers and sailors, laid the foundation of Halifax. French jealousies plunged us into a war at first adverse to our colonial possessions, but which eventually led to our acquisition of Canada. While American states were thus springing up under a variety of influences, the introduction of the sugar cane and the coffee plant was developing the West India islands into commercial importance. While our soldiers and their Sepoy mercenaries were expelling Dupleix, with his French troops and traders from India, our sailors were wresting island after island from every colonial power in Europe. The Treaty of Paris, in 1763, effected some changes, but still most of her conquests were retained by England. And now the embarrassments of the imperial exchequer suggested the introduction of the excise and customs into the colonies. The Stamp Act of 1764 revealed the energies of a people we had brought into existence only to tax. The first American Congress met at New York, in 1765, and Rockingham yielded the stamp duty, but maintained the right to tax the colonies. In assertion of this right, Lord North taxed glass, paper, and tea. The colonists began to think that persons who can write the affirmative to the proposition before us, were to be resisted to the death, and forced the repeal of the tax on glass and paper; the tax on tea was retained by our statesmen on the ground that a permanent connec tion of British colonies ought to be maintained at all hazards. The colonists, however, had wealth, and could pay the imposts; but the colonists had left England in assertion of the great principles of religious and civil freedom, and would not concede the right of taxation. Edmund Burke exhausted his eloquence in vain on behalf of the colonial right to self-taxation. Opposition and revolt in Massachusetts, and war in New England, soon proved that we had overrated colonial forbearance, and underrated the colonial power of resistance. The delegates of thirteen provinces met in 1776, and once more the history of the world declared, in the year 1782, that the permanent connection of the colonies with the mother country was not desirable. This important revolution should be judged by three great results. First, in relation to America. One of the first acts of the Congress was to organize into a state some thirty thousand persons, who were denied the rights of colonists by the parent state. From a selfish and restrictive commercial policy, settlements in the interior were discouraged, and fostered only on the sea-coasts. "Squatting," with all its social inconveniences, was the result of this system. The Congress legalized the extension of civilization into the back settlements, and from that moment emigration steadily advanced westward. Leaving behind the Alleghany mountains, the stream of population spread on, and placed under civilization the splendid valley of the Mississippi. Along the borders of the states, some twelve hundred miles in length, the European population advanced, according to De Tocqueville's estimate, at the mean rate of seventeen miles per annum! The states of New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, and California, have rapidly extended the dominions of the republic from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. During their connection with the mother country, the states were hampered, and vast and fertile fields were abandoned to savages. No sooner had that connection been dissolved, than the United States began to develop their greatness. Secondly, in relation to the mother country, this dissolution was equally beneficial. Compelled to find some fresh outlet for her stream of convicts, England turned from America to Australia, and formed, in 1787, the penal settlements of New South Wales. An island of continental dimensions was long overlooked, and our first attempts at colonization in Australia consisted of a temporary encampment of nine hundred souls in Port Jackson. The city of Sydney soon rose into existence,-the capital of New South Wales with its twenty-one counties, and the germ of some eighty cities. Three other great colonies-South Australia, Tasmania, and Victoria-have rapidly followed each other, leaving Western Australia, and Port Essington in the north out of our calculation. Where, but eighty years ago, the silence of trackless forests was broken only by the footsteps of a most degraded specimen of humanity, stage coaches now rattle, on macadamised roads, from town to town, and omnibuses ply in streets lined with shops glittering with plate-glass and gas-jets. The steam-engine, with its chronic cough and shrill whistle, scare the emu and kangaroo; and the electric telegraph diffuses information on wings of lightning. The bark huts of the savage, more simple and less ornate than the Australian bower birds' nests, have been displaced by frowning forts, graceful spires,. lofty warehouses, and classic banks; insurance, newspaper, and printing offices; cathedrals, churches, and chapels; market-places, exchanges, commodious hotels, theatres, and demoralizing ginpalaces. Paddle-wheels and screws have taken the place of the paddles of the frail canoe; clippers laden with gold and copper, wool and tallow, and Great Britain steamers, with vessels of every flag, crowd the harbours of a country which two centuries ago was looked upon with "superstitious dread, as a stranded comet upon the verge of the earth." Such was the result of that American revolution which made the permanent connection of certain British colonies with the mother-country a simple impossibility. Such grand results, to both England and America, arose from dissolving. the political ties between parent and offspring. But, thirdly, had our statesmen recognized the principle that there is a time in the history of nations, as well as of individuals, when tutelage is as undesirable as it is offensive, the American States had parted from England as powerful allies and generous rivals. Unhappily, our short-sightedness enforced what ought to have been conceded. Land, abundant and productive, would for ages yet have confined Americans chiefly to agricultural pursuits; our despotic policy has forced a Lowell into hostile rivalry with our Manchester. Our ungraceful concessions, and our own absurd corn laws, have created American protection tariffs, forcing into unnecessary existence the manufacturing interests of the New England States. The position of the old country makes her of necessity a manufacturer of raw materials; and the condition of the new country, with an almost unlimited supply of uncleared and untilled land, would have made it the producer of that raw material. Indefinitely remote would have been the period when American capital could be forced out of the field into the factory. Our determination to maintain a permanent connection between the colony and the mother country has converted friendly Republicans into fiercely hostile Democrats; often turned American ships into dangerous privateers; and thrown our great natural ally into the arms of France and Russia. Had we, in noble generosity and Saxon selfreliance, let America rule herself, England and the late United States had, ere long, driven every despot, political and religious, from Europe; planted the cross over the crescent of fallen mosques, and banished idols from every heathen temple in the world. Arm in arm, Saxon England and Saxon America would have enfranchised Europe, and christianized the world. But the bitterness of parting has continued to rankle in the breasts of brothers on the opposite sides of the Atlantic, retarded civilization by a century, and deferred the realization of the most glorious dreams and visions of Hebrew prophets and Christian apostles. CADMUS. EVIL EFFECTS OF CIVIL WAR.-At no time does a State menace other States so strongly with conquest, as when it is itself torn by the horrors of civil war. All classes of the people-nobles, merchants, artisans, and labourers-then take up arms; and when peace has reunited their strength, this nation of soldiers has an immense advantage over every nation of mere citizens. Besides, great men are commonly found in civil wars, as in the confusion superior ability makes itself known, and finds the place which naturally belongs to it, while in other times men are placed in stations the least suited for them.-Montesquieu. HISTORY.-The history of the world is one of God's own great poems.-Hare. PRIDE.-Pride is the serpent's egg, laid in the hearts of all, but hatched by none but fools.-Samuel Johnson's " Hurlothrumbo." AUTHORSHIP.— Never be in haste in writing. Let what thou utterest be of Nature's flow, Not Art's; a fountain's, not a pump's. But once About earth, lashing at it day and night; And leave the stamp of thine own soul in it, As thorough as the fossil flower in clay.-P. J. Bailey. The Essayist. IN MEMORIAM MDCCCLXII. THIS has been a busy year with Death. His shafts have been thrown broad-cast over the earth. Accident, war, famine, and storm, have been dread ministrants to his will. Graves have been made plentifully, and "the mourners go about the streets" in great numbers; for the haytime of the old reaper has been so active, that no one could refrain from the exclamation,-" Each passing moment that goes by us now is full of"-deaths! Life and its glories glide away, for time is life. The thread that links the moments is easily snapped, and the instant of the heart's surcease is marked only in the calendar of God. The solemnity of the trust of power, passion, activity, intellect, will, and opportunity, of which being is the sum, can be adequately felt only in the hour when the shadow of death is seen stealing over the dial-plate of the soul's unaccomplished aims, duties, and hopes; or the withering influences of disease have entered into the juices of the frame; or the chill of the ceaseless scythe has passed by a hair's breadth beside our little crop of joy, and, mayhap, touched in its ongoing the scanty freehold of a friend or neighbour. Then the worth of life flashes on our thought, and in the heart's pause of that time we realize the infinite issues of the fleeting moments. It is well, often and triumphantly, to recall to memory the achievements of men whose pulses, swiftened with life-tides such as those which course along the channels of our own being, and from their conquests over difficulty, inclination, and circumstance, learn to take courage in our warfare; but it is also well to look at the bridgeless chasm the grave interposes between aim and performance, that some may be stimulated to do diligently the work of life while energy is ours, and opportunity is with us. Life is a great lesson-book for humanity, and Death is a stern teacher. May we not only live to learn, but also so learn to live, that the lesson of Death may come to us fittingly, and reach us in full preparedness! The gloom of an "In Memoriam" paper may thus be effective in making the daydawn of new resolutions more gladsome and blessed. The "touch of change" has been manywheres; yet, if we look closely at the changes wrought, we shall perceive that all has been done indeed in furtherance of "One far-off Divine event, To which the whole creation moves;" and, therefore, we shall not grudge the lost, yet unlost; whom the messenger has led into another life. At least, however, much we may regret the emptying made in our own hearts' coffers of those whom peremptory and resistless destiny has taken thence, -thence in visible presence, not in memorialed love, respect, and sadness, we shall not repine at their outgoing from the press of ruddy, busy, earthly life, into that exceeding glory,-the life eternal. The most commonplace grave, which occupies the out-of-the-way nooks of the furrowed" God's acre," closes over a biography written in the dust-becoming heart, yet having everlasting issues. The tenant-soul has left its mortal tabernacle and laid aside its agent, but it can never dissever from itself the thoughts and acts of its earthly being. The body may remain, "Still dark, in a damp vault, and still alone," but the soul carries in its own essence the biography of its earthly life, and that biography is the very basis of the unending fate that constitutes its forever. Are we wrong, then, in regarding it as one of the uses of death to teach us the true uses of life? Do we err in believing that commonplace and everyday event,-a funeral,-as a God's monitor to the spared to work out the duty of each passing 'hour, in the faith that, when the Inevitable comes, he who has been dutiful and earnest, God-loving and man-befriending, will find eternity a palace of unspeakable delights, however sadsome the spot of earth in which the clay-clods cover the corpse? Surely, the sanctities of grief are not all felt in vain; surely, the sorrow of the hearts from whom the treasury of their affection has been reft is not a shadow cast without a causing light; surely, the hopes that pierce the stow up-rolling curtain of the future are not availless; surely, the well-remembered lives of an age's benefactors are not memories only, but real and existent entities, laid up in the garner-house of God! This view of life as a time of duty, and of death as the closing of the record of its doings, aims, neglects, and short-comings, should be wrought in each heart, and carried constantly in all our thoughts, that so we may each have a "well done" recorded in our favour in God's eternal In Memoriam. The record of the year includes no nation-grieving demise, such as cast a gloom over palace, mansion, household, and cottage in the drear December of 1861; in fact, has inscribed upon its death-scroll few names of world-wide interest, or European repute. In the annals of bye-gone times death could, and did, strike noble and great from the list of the living. Last year he has either given them pause, or has had a quarry of less celebrated lives to dash at |