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reason than the argument of physical force. "Fear the Lord, and the King, the Thunderer, and the Thunderer's Vicegerent,' hath ever been its language, that thus the blood-stained banner of the Church might staff itself upon the sceptre of the tyrant. Thus

"Superstition lent the tyrant aid,

And Gods of conquerors, slaves of subjects made."-POPE. Under the prevalence of such systems, the problem of political absurdities is solved; and the mind inconsciously concedes the desolation of all sentiments of patriotism and public virtue among ourselves, by turning immediately, on the suggestion of such an idea as that of the love of our country, to the best examples to be fonnd of it in the Philopamens, Aristides, and Leonidases of ancient Greece-in the Camilli, Fabricii, Tully, and Brutus, of ⚫ Rome.

We have, indeed, enow of men to talk of serving their king and country, and to sell themselves to serve in the wars; and of unprincipled demagogues, clamorous and loud in insolence against their superiors, to fill our world with noisy broils and windy boasts but the calm advocate of a people's rights, the fearless but yet offenceless devoter of fortune, of ease, and of life itself to his country's service, is to be found too often rather in the infinitely suspicious legend on some superb piece of plate on the rich man's sideboard, than in the unequivocal evidence of an impression on the poor man's heart. Yet it is certain, that in the virtue of a genuine patriotism, even in the most trying and awful sacrifices that patriotism was ever called on to perform, there is a scope for the display of moral excellence, and a field for greatness of soul, in which the asserter of his country's freedom shines forth the admiration of the universe, the undisputed paragon of nature! The poet of imagination, in his fervid apostrophe of the most tremendous deed of patriotism which the world ever saw, hardly outruns the admission of eternal justice as to the glory of that deed

"Look abroad through Nature to the range
Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres,
Wheeling unshaken through the void immense,
And say, O Man, does this capacious scene,
With half that kindling majesty dilate
Thy large conceptions, as when Brutus rose,
Refulgent from the stroke of Cæsar's fate,
Amid the crowd of patriots, and his arm
Aloft extending, like Almighty Jove,

When Guilt brings down his thunder,

Call'd aloud on Tully's name, and shook his crimson steel,

And bade the Father of his country, Hail!

For lo! the tyrant, prostrate in the dust,

And Rome again is free!"

AKENSIDE.

To the discharge of a duty so tremendously and awfully just, no situations of probable life can ever call the patriot of a country free, and possessed of every guarantee for the continuance of

that freedom, as our own. The fitness and propriety of the sentiment which authorized that deed, and has consecrated its commendation, in the judgment of noble-minded men, to the days of remotest generations, is more, even much more, than there is any necessity of our undertaking to prove-in order to ensure the mind's conviction of the fitness and propriety of that milder and more philosophical love of our country, which will neither suggest nor sanction the meditation of any act of violence which may call the patriot to resist, but will never lead him to commit outrages.

The propriety of loving our country more than any other country, is but an extension of the just feeling and natural sentiment which leads us to love our own immediate relations and the family of which we are members, either as parents or children, more than any other family. And to this extent, maintaining ever the condition, that no sort of wrong, neglect, or indifference to the prosperity and welfare of other nations, either direct or consequential, be involved-the partiality and preference for our own is provided for by Nature, approved by Reason, and enjoined by Justice.

It is provided for by Nature, that is, by the implanted force of a sort of natural suggestion, as almost all essential fitnesses and proprieties of moral sentiment are-in that strong and unconquerable attachment to the scenes of our earliest associations, which winds itself about the heart without asking its leave of our philosophy; and seems to be made up of a sort of economy of the affections, by which a great many little and indistinctive tendernesses and agreeable remembrances, putting together their accumulated impression, should make up oue grand and commanding passion, which is felt wherever mankind exist, from Zembla to the Line, from the cold regions of the frozen north to Numidia's burning sands.

It is a partiality approved by Reason, in that the good-will and community of interest and sympathy, which a man owes, by the law and charter of his existence, to all other men, can by no possibility be paid to all other men; and would so die away and be lost in an inane and useless conceit of the imagination, if it were not to be realized and brought into effective liquidation by being paid to those who come within the sphere of each man's particular associations, and are therefore to him the representatives of all other men, whom if he loves and serves not, he must necessarily fail of the great and only end for which the Almighty made him a man, which is, to love and serve mankind.

Attachment to our country is a partiality enjoined by Justice, in the strict fitness of the reciprocation of benefits, and the eternal and everlasting propriety which demands that all reasonable expectations should be reasonably realized. Those therefore with whom we immediately live and act, who concur with us in support of the commonwealth, have a reasonable expectation upon us of a return of a preference and consideration of their interests above

those of foreigners-foreigners in a like manner having the same reasonable expectation of experiencing a like preference from their own countrymen, and generally having the good sense to shew it, by which the scales of Justice are held equally between all parties, and wrong is done to none.

And the same eternal and immutable principles of justice in the case of any citizen or number of citizens of a State wilfully and pertinaciously withholding that degree of partiality and preference to which their countrymen were entitled, by choosing to expend in foreign lands the wealth which had been originated and created in their own-the injured State would acquire thereby a just right to seize and to reclaim to itself and to its own uses, all the property they had left at home, with so little good will to their country, as only because they could not take it with them.* As all property is created by the State, and naturally exists only for its uses, and dead men have no property at all-so men who of their own most unnatural and suicidal misanthropy render themselves virtually dead to their country's great interests, and worse than dead by continuing to absorb her means without continuing to subserve her ends; hold the estates which they call theirs by stealth, and not by right, their right ceased when their sense of the correlative obligations attached to that right had ceased; the state of stealth and fraudulent occupation commenced when they became insensible to the covenant of humanity, and indifferent to their country's claims upon them.

The same analogy of demonstration convicts the moral error of sentiment which would shelter the entire absence of all patriotic feeling in a pretended indifference to politics. A man indeed has a sort of a right to be indifferent to politics; but supposing him to enjoy a competent share of leisure and means for the study of them, his right to be indifferent to the interests of his country is of no other sort, than his right to die, which he who would live so stupidly, so selfishly, and so wickedly, had perhaps better do.

All good and virtuous Governors, and such at this time it is England's pride to boast of, would have every man in the empire a politician; would have their measures freely and publicly canvassed; and in the noble consciousness of their unsullied integrity, they invite and court the scrutiny of an inquiring and intelligent people.

They only who have guilty secrets to conceal, and who are conscious that the reckoning would run most horribly against themselves, on any calling to account, discourage political inquiry; and recommend as the highest virtue, that stupid submis

This, at any rate, is a moral that would make a man a prisoner in, or to, his country, and is founded upon an imperfect view of human welfare. If I travel into other countries, for instruction, profit, or pleasure, my expenditure is but exchanged in the visit of a foreigner to my country. Human welfare centres in such an exchange of knowledge and profits. R. C.

sion and passive obedience which gives the oppressor safety: faith in politics, as well as faith in religion, being the only guarantee for the everlasting continuance of a trade on which the market would close for ever, should the people by any sad accident leave off saying their prayers, and learn arithmetic instead, enough to find out the difference between the worth of a barber's block with a big wig upon it, and what they have been paying for it all the while.

No sentiment can be just or innocent in the bosom of an individual, which we should see at once to be unjust and criminal upon its becoming an universal sentiment. If it were compatible with the character of an honest man to be indifferent to the measures of the public servants, it would be honesty in every body; and what would be the consequence, but that no man inquiring, no man accusing, no man taxing them who tax every body, there would be a dead end of righteousness from among men, and insulted millions should lay their necks in the mire for Kings and Priests to tread on.

So in Rome's evil day, her tyrant Sylla calmly put to death 7,000 Roman citizens, assembled together in the public theatre; and no man ventured a murmur against the Royal clemency: but I have read, that when the virtuous Cato, who was then a child, was shown by his tutor the marks of slaughter in the tyrant's palace, he exclaimed, "Lend me a dagger, and I'll staunch this bleeding!" Alas! it was not so; and his most gracious and religious Majesty returned a few days afterwards to visit his loving subjects and cut the throats of 4,000 more of them! Who were the murderers-who the criminal party in this tyranny? Eternal Justice has past her sentence-Sylla NOT GUILTY! He robbed them first-he slew them afterwards-but they let him do it! ;

"Hear this, ye Senators! hear this truth sublime!

They who endure oppression, THEIR'S THE CRIME!"-DARWIN. Having thus demonstrated the eternal fitness and propriety of the sentiment of patriotism, on evidence commensurate to the making up of an absolute certainty, that no man would have a right to live at all, who should be wholly destitute of that sentiment-our method brings us now to the consideration of the proprieties and fitnesses of civil conduct which become the sentiment of patriotism.

In the setting forth of these, there needs not an improvement on the language in which the young persons hereafter to receive instruction in the Sunday School (which is to form as soon as conveniently may be, an important branch of this our Society of Universal Benevolence) shall answer to the question

"What duties do you owe to your native land?"

The answer being" I owe to my native land a participation of that partiality which is just and reasonable towards my brothers

and sisters, and which involves no wrong nor disrespect to other lands. I am bound to protect my country from all enemies abroad, and from all traitors at home; to lend my willing assistance to the administration of all just and righteous laws; to aid and honour with all my heart, and with all my power, all wise and faithful magistrates; and to be ready at all times to surrender my property and life for the destruction of tyrants and the putting down of oppression."

“Beyond, or Love's, or Friendship's sacred band,
Beyond myself I prize my native land.
On this foundation would I build my fame,
And emulate the Greek and Roman name!
Think England's peace, bought cheaply with
And die with pleasure for my country's good."

my

blood,

RowE.

1. Offences against this duty of patriotism are-1st., and more criminal than all, as the cause of all others, the being idly or wilfully ignorant of what the laws of our country are, and what' our obligations are in relation to those laws, in consequence of which criminal ignorance on our part, bad laws, and bad men, who are made such by the bad laws, come into domination; and that most stupid sentiment that ever disgraced the character of reason, the Nolumus Leges Angliæ mutari," we are unwilling that the laws of England should be changed, hath served to perpetuate the ignorance of our Goth and Vandal ancestors, and to give to the crude legislation of men who scarely knew their right hand from their left, the imaginary sanctity of infinite wisdom." It is by this culpable ignorance on the part of the citizens themselves that the just and benevolent spirit and intention of our glorious Constitution (and I sincerely hold it to be glorious) is defeated and rendered nugatory. For, in how many thousands who shall be summoned in this metropolis to act as jurymen, should you find a dozen who know what the duties and rights of a juryman are, or who would not be as ready as frightened children to surrender the liberty or life itself of a fellow citizen at the saucy shaking of a lawyer's curls. How many are there who know, that it is, at this day, the law of England; and here the law is on the King's own authority; I bought it myself of the. King's printer; whereby, Anno Regni Georgii Tertii Tricesimo Secundo, it became law in England, that the jury shall not be directed by the Judge; therefore, when the Court or Judge shall have directed them what verdict to find, it is competent in the jury to set the direction itself aside.

2. The next considerable offence against the duty of patriotism is our contributing by any means, direct or indirect, to the popu

Here the Act itself was exhibited.