nobody but Russia; and if pride, poverty, distance, false ambition, or fools in his cabinet persuade the Emperor Alexander to make a separate peace, France must be Rome, and Russia Parthia, invincible and insignificant. The second Punic war must terminate in that case, for aught I can see, in the ruin of England; and the world must bow its base neck to the yoke. It will sweat in servitude and grope in darkness perhaps another thousand years; for the emulation of the European states, extinguished by the establishment of one empire, will no longer sustain the arts. They and the sciences will soon become the corrupters of society. It is already doubtful whether the press is not their enemy.

I make no doubt Bonaparte will offer almost carte blanche to Russia and Austria, saving only his rights as master; and I greatly fear that Russia will be lured, as Austria will be forced, to abandon Great Britain. Another peace makes Bonaparte master of Europe.

Russia has soldiers, and they are brave enough; and I should think so vast an augmentation of the French empire would seem to Alexander to demand the exertion of all his vast energies. Without Pitt's gold this will be a slow and inadequate exertion; and how Pitt is to get money, if neutrals take this generous opportunity to quarrel with him, I cannot see.

It has never happened, I believe, for any great length of time, that our American politics have been much governed either by our policy or blunders. Events abroad have imposed both their character and result; and I see no reason to doubt that this is to be the case more than ever. If France dictates by land and sea, we fall without an effort. The wind of the cannon-ball that smashes John Bull's brains out will lay us on our backs, with all our tinsel honors in the dirt. Therefore I think I may, and feel that I must, return to European affairs.

Two obstacles, and only two, impede the establishment of universal monarchy — Russia and the British navy. The military means of the former are vast, her troops numerous and brave. Of money

she has little, but a little goes a great way, for everything is cheap. This is owing to the barbarism of her inhabitants. Now, for revenue a highly-civilized state is most favorable; but for arms, I beg leave to doubt whether men half savage are not best. Not because rude nations have more courage than those that are polished, but because they have not such an invincible aversion to a military life as the sons of luxury and pleasure, and the sons of labor too, in the latter. As society refines, greater freedom of the choice of life

is progressively allowed; and the endless variety of employments and arts of life attaches men, and almost all men, to the occupations of peace. To bring soldiers into the field, the prince must overbid the allurements of these occupations. He exhausts his treasury without filling his camp.

But in Russia men are yet cheap, as well as provisions. Little is left to the peasantry to choose, whether they will stand in the ranks or at a work-bench; and though the emperor may not incline absolutely to force men into the army, a sum of money, that John Bull would disdain to accept, would allure them in crowds.

I amuse myself with inquiring into the existence of physical means to resist France. I seem to forget, though in truth I do not forget, that means twice as great once existed in the hands of the fallen nations. They were divided in counsel, and taken unprepared. Russia, being a single power, and untainted with revolution mania, and plainly seeing her danger, ought to do more than all the rest. Yet, after all, I well know that if small minds preside on great occasions, they are sure to temporize when the worst of all things is to do nothing; and very possibly the Russian cabinet sages partake of this fatal blockheadship.

It also seems to me that the science, or at least the practice, of war has greatly changed since Marlborough's days. In 1702 to 1709, or 1710, he fought a great battle on a plain of six miles' extent. On gaining the victory, he besieged a fortress as big as an Indian trading post, mined, scaled, battered, and fought six weeks to take it, and then went into winter quarters. Thus the war went on, campaign after campaign, as slowly as the Middlesex Canal, which in eight years has been dug thirty miles.

The French have done with sieges and field battles. Posts are occupied along the whole frontier line of a country. If the line of defence be less extensive, they pass round it; if weakened by extent, through it. An immense artillery, light, yet powerful, rains such a horrible tempest on any part that is to be forced, that the defenders are driven back before the charge of the bayonet is resorted to. The lines once forced, the defending army falls back, takes new positions, and again loses them, as before. Thus a country is taken possession of without a battle, and a brave people wonder and blush to find they are slaves.

I have never believed the volunteers of England worth a day's rations of beef to the island, if invaded. With you, I have assumed it, as a thing absolutely certain, that they would be beaten and

dispersed by one hundred thousand invading Frenchmen. Improved as the military art now is, and, as I have supposed, far beyond what it was in the Duke of Marlborough's days, it is folly at all times, and infatuation in time of danger, to consider militia as capable of defending a country. My hope has been that England would array two hundred and fifty thousand regulars, and perfect their discipline without delay. Without a great land force, I now think, with you, she is in extreme danger.

After her fall, ours would not cost Bonaparte a blow. We are prostrate already, and of all men on earth the fittest to be slaves. Even our darling avarice would not make a week's resistance to tribute, if the name were disguised; and I much doubt whether, if France were lord of the navies of Europe, we should reluct at that, or even at the appellation and condition of Helot.

MY DEAR SIR: As soon as I learned where your salt speech could be found in print with any correctness, I took measures to get it republished. It is in the Repertory of this day, and is I say it without compliment- an ornament to its columns. I am as well satisfied with what you do not say, but only hint, as if you had said it in form. Your argument is sound, and the subject is presented in the right point of view. No man seldomer says flattering things to his friends than 1 do; and if I had waited a week after reading your speech, I should have been more stingy of praise. Having just read it, I cannot wholly suppress my warmth of approbation. Let me repeat that you should not be too modest about getting your speeches into print correctly. It is the public that is argued with; that public that always pronounces its judgment and seldom condescends to give its attention; that is almost always wrong in the hour of deliberation, and right in the day of repentance. Federalism is allowed to have little to do with deliberation; and I am far from certain that popular repentance is often accompanied with saving grace. We are not so truly sorry for the sin, as for its bad success. To get people to think right, therefore, either first or last, is not the most hopeful undertaking in the world. But Federal good sense is never to guide measures. Archimedes might calculate the force of the wind, but could not prevent its blowing. Now, though argument will never turn the weathercock, it may prove how it points. That power which your adversary can use in spite of you is checked by

your efforts.

If he exerts all his force, and you all yours, his force is reduced to the degree in which he surpasses you, and in that degree you may not be liable to very serious injury. Federalism is not a sword nor a gun; it is not wings, but a parachute. In this sense the good men in Congress should be on the alert.

I feel assured that we are to be subjugated by Bonaparte; and I have a curiosity to know how Randolph and the knowing ones can sit as easy as the fools do, and see him hastening to snatch from their hands the power they are so ready to contend among themselves about. I saw, in the Repertory of last week, a long piece, of five or six columns, on the causes of the French military superiority, and on the facility of their conquest of the United States, unless we prepare on a great scale. Whether such discussions produce any effect I know not; but if they do not produce any, it must be because our noisy liberty men are eager for power, and perfectly indifferent about the fall of the country from its boasted independence. J. R.'s boast that he never reads the newspapers is a shrewd sign that he studies them. I hope his real politics are better than Varnum's, whose ignorance blinds him, or than Jefferson's, whose fears make him a slave. But if J. R. was disposed ever so heartily to urge preparations, he could not prevail to have any made. The force of primary popular notions would control Lord Chatham, if he was our premier. I often dare to think our nation began selfgovernment without education for it. Like negroes, freed after having grown up to man's estate, we are incapable of learning and practising the great art of taking care of ourselves. We must be put to school again, I fear, and whipped into wisdom.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.

John Quincy Adams, son of President John Adams, was born in Braintree, July 11, 1767. He accompanied his father to Europe in his eleventh year, and thenceforward enjoyed such opportunities for education and travel as have fallen to the lot of but few American youth. He entered the junior class in Harvard College in 1786, and upon his graduation studied law with Chief Justice Parsons. He was admitted to the bar in 1791, but in 1794 he left the profession to begin a public career. His services as diplomatist, senator, cabinet minister, president, and afterwards representative in Congress, can only be alluded to, since few lives have been so marked by striking incidents, or so affected by the vicissitudes of fortune and the fickleness of popular favor. He died in Washington, at the Capitol, February 23, 1848. He was an industrious writer, and throughout his life kept a diary, from which, it is understood, ample selections are to be published by his grandson. His lectures on rhetoric, delivered while he was professor at Harvard College, had only a temporary success. Though far more learned and accomplished than his father, he was inferior to

him in native force and wit, as well as the simplicity and directness of his style. His reputation will rest mainly upon his speeches and state papers, and these are of more interest to students of political history than to lovers of letters. In his proper sphere his abilities were of a very high order, if not the highest. Had he possessed more imagination, a more refined taste, and more literary skill, he would probably have remained a professor, and the nation would have lost the services of one of its most able, courageous, and high-toned public men.

The selections here given are from a report made in the House of Representatives in 1833, which embodies the doctrines of the Whig party upon internal improvements, the tariff, and other questions then in controversy. It is probably the ablest statement of the view of public affairs taken by the Whig politicians of that day.

[From Mr. Adams's Report on Manufactures.]

IN descending from the general axiom, that in all countries the independent farmers, or wealthy landholders, cultivators of the soil, constitute the best part of the population, to the measures of legislation recommended to Congress for carrying out this principle in the administration of the government, four features are discernible as especially characteristic of the Message [of President Jackson]. First, the abandonment, for the future, of all appropriations of public moneys to purposes of internal improvement; second, the practically total dereliction of all protection to domestic industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or mechanical; third, the nullification of all future revenue from the public domains, by the bestowal of them in free donation to voluntary settlers upon them, from the privileged class of citizens, cultivators of the soil, to swell the numbers of the best part of the population at the expense of all the rest, or to the favored states in which this common property happens to be situated; fourth, the denunciation of the Bank of the United States, depreciating the value of the stock held in it by the nation, distressing the commercial community with suspicions of the solidity of its funds, and stimulating the profligacy of fraudulent gambling in its stock. In every one of these four particulars the recommendations of the Message are in diametrical opposition to the wellestablished, deliberately-adopted, and long-tried policy by which the Union has hitherto been governed, under the present Constitution of the United States - in diametrical opposition to the purposes for which it was formed to the principles upon which it has been administered, and, with the most painful but most undoubting conviction, the subscribers must add, to the solemn compacts and indefeasible obligations by which the nation is bound.

Although the plan of government marked out and delineated in the Message forms a whole system sufficiently consistent with itself, and all derivable from the fundamental position that the wealthy