supposing a hook drawn up and down one's entrails. Very recently she had a fever, and lay for some days apparently dead. Her little black girl was the only one who had the courage to approach her; she opened her mistress's eyes with her fingers, and discovered life remaining. When recovered, she found that her domestics had made division of all her furniture, and carried a portion of it away. Of twenty pairs of sheets, only one and a half remained. It seems the holy brotherhood of bedlamites beset her from every quarter, by visits or letters, and some, too, who have method in their madness. A certain French astrologer is now an idle dependent at her winter residence, near Sidon. He proves from prophecy that he is to marry her; here, says he, is the very name in the Bible. They frequently quarrel about future events. There was another man came to see her; he could not be persuaded that he had not known and been attached to her all his life. Her servants repelling him by force, he took horse, put him to the run, and did not draw bridle for eighteen hours. She did not seem to relish our incredulity of this equestrian feat.

Another man thought himself the Messiah, but after much study became convinced, and very happy was he to have even that station, that he was only to be a second or one of the chief ministers of the Messiah.

She professed to tell my character. "You are ambitious." True, was the reply; it was a weakness of youth that would yield to a few autumns. "Why should you subdue it ?—did God give it to you to subdue? No; but for some great purpose. The blood of the Koreish cannot be controlled." This alluded to her conviction that the Scotch and Koreish, the family of Mahomet, were of the same lineage, the details of which she promised on condition of my return from Greece, she would dictate, and permit me to publish

it.

She had previously been told of my Scottish original. "Do you tell me that by way of information; I knew it the moment I saw you, your oval cheek and high instep, are sure marks of the family. You have a warm temper," she continued. To a fault, was the answer. "No, there is not a particle of badness in your temper; it is just as warm as it ought to be,

you cannot deceive me, I knew your disposition the moment I heard your voice."

Several parts of her wall and many of her buildings are in a tumble-down condition, said to be partly the effects of slight earthquakes; but the whole forms a picturesque coup-d'œil, animated by jovial parties of Albanians, in their snowy camese and silver mounted arms, either caroling their native airs through the neighboring woods, or seated at cards, or puffing the chibouck as if grouped by the hand of an artist.

Lady Hester had received all the Albanians who chose to seek her protection at the reduction of St. Jean d'Acre by Ibrahim Pacha. She merely supplied their wants, and frequently balanced the expediency of sending them home by ship from Beyroot, but they were happy to remain, and she to maintain them in silent treaty of mutual protection. Truly their lines had fallen to them in pleasant places, if we compare them with their filth-covered brethren at home.

She repudiates, however, the idea of personal insecurity. She had passed the desert to Palmyra, mounted and armed as a warrior; the sons of Ishmael, so fatal to the traveller, gave her their unasked escort and hailed her Queen of Palmyra.

Except the merchants of Beyroot, who have bought her protested drafts, all love her, Druses and Franks, Arabs and Maronites; even the cruelty and insolence of Ibrahim Pacha, though she bids him defiance by giving shelter to his enemies, has never dared to invade the sanctity which oriental superstition attaches to an unsettled brain, or to question the impunity which Syrian usage accords to a female.

She resorted to every art to induce us to stay; she had her horse to show us, on condition we stayed one day longer, but our party had been doing penance some days at Beyroot.

Adieus exchanged-with allusion to the grand gathering. We found Antonio gloating over the bottles of wine, cheese and choice fruits with which her servants were storing our baggagemule; with the resolution of martyrs, they rejected our proffered piastres, but with a casuistry not peculiar to Syria, each one unseen by his fellows, suffered 'quelque compliments' to be slid into his pockets with ill-disguised satisfaction.

THERE is at least one satisfaction in the present position of our national politics, for which, in its contrast with the state of things existing at the time of the last great contest of parties, we are duly grateful, whatever may be the result yet veiled within the bosom of the future. We refer to the distinctness of the general issue on which we are about to go to trial-to go before "the country," in the good old phrase of the institution of the Jury. We have at least that light of open day for which the Grecian hero prayed. We have a fair field, and we ask no favor. All that we have to do, and do it we will, is our duty there; nor fear to trust the event to that higher and better wisdom than human forethought, of whose purposes all of us, with all our infinite variety of purposes and points of departure, are but the unconscious instruments. "Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra!" is the noble motto of a noble house, which be it also ours to adopt and obey; and whether we return with our shields or upon them, from the great battle of the day whose dawn now illumines the plain, let us at least secure the consolation of the French King at Pavia, and preserve our honor, even if nothing else.

Away with all simulations or dissimulations in this matter! With full due respect for the prudential counsels of those friends who have deemed the tone of our last article, on the Baltimore Convention," unwisely discouraging to our friends and cheering to our foes, we shall still speak out to both, with small care for small consequences, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth-or at least what we honestly believe to be such. If we think that we-that is, our Party and our Principles-are in a position of very momentous peril, we shall still beg, or rather take leave, to say so; and to say so in such frank fashion of phrase as shall seem most direct and effective for the object we have in view, namely to dispel the danger by disclosing it,-in the Irish baronet's

style, to get out of its way by meeting it straight in the face.

There is indeed no doubt that the Democratic Cause is in this position. All the further developments of evidence since those on which we before urged the point combine to confirm it. Great efforts-perhaps great sacrifices

are necessary for its safety; and as it is for so great an object, surely there can none be found among us so unworthy of all their professions of principle as to be unwilling to make themeven though some of those necessary sacrifices should prove to be of great men,-of them perchance, and perchance by them. The Whigs are in admirable condition for the coming engagement-in strong force, strongly organized eager in hope, bold in confidence, zealous in enthusiasm-abounding in all the ways and means of preparation, and harmonized to the most efficient degree of combined and concentrated unity of action. This time four years ago we despised them as an enemy; it is now not to be dissembled that they are very seriously to be dreaded. To be dreaded, indeed-no one will suppose us to mean with any of that unmanly fear which shrinks from the shock of conflict, or is either paralyzed into inactivity or agitated into confusion-but with that intelligent and courageous appreciation of the whole impartial truth, which not underrates danger, but examines it coolly and closely, to derive from it only redoubled incentive to that energy in exertion, and that wise skill in preparation, indispensable to triumph over it.

For ourselves, on the other hand, it is not to be denied that we are this fall in a moral condition, as a party, entirely unfit for the formidable encounter now so nigh at hand. We are, comparatively, as the crew of the Chesapeake when she went into her ill-starred action with the Shannon-let us not disregard the warning of the example. The fatal influence of the dissensions now distracting us dissensions about men and not about measures, about

persons and not about principles is written in characters unequivocal enough on the records of too many of the elections of the season. If these are not harmonized, and that thoroughly and soon-we may as well spare ourselves from the outset that fruitless struggle which will not have even hope to cheer it, and resign ourselves at once to that inevitable cup, of the mortification and grief of defeat, in whose bitter draught the worst ingredient will be the thought that it is by our own hands alone that it was drugged.

But our pen has led us somewhat aside from the line of thought we had designed to pursue in this Article. What it has written shall however stand, though we have to recall it from its wandering, to return to the point from which it started-which was the expression of a sincere satisfaction at the broad and open distinctness of the general issue about to be joined between the two great parties of the country. The false issues, the sectional duplicities of profession, the temporary excitements and delusions, which gave at once its character and direction to the election of 1840, no longer now mantle the country as in one vast cloud of mystification and midnight blindness. The Proteus who then could alternate with such bewildering variety through his countless resources of metamorphosis, stands up now confessed before our eyes in his own natural nakedness of form, and when once reduced at last to that point, if we are but true to ourselves, like the divinely taught shepherd boy of Tempe, we can have no difficulty in subduing him to our will. The cry of "CHANGE," which did the best, or rather the worst, part of the work of 1840, can no more be raised that magic horn has lost its power to set all who hear it awhirl in enchanted dance. If the people were tired of hearing Aristides always called "the Just," that passing impatience has fully exhausted itself, and they are ready enough to recall him with acclamation from his ostracism-provided he does not himself refuse to return. If they were tired of the long protracted ascendency of a party, even though it were their own and were willing to indulge that deep-seated instinct of human nature which is ever eager for variety, by making experiment, for at least a single term, whether there was

really any relief to be found, in all the tempting promises and professions of the Whigs, from the maddening agonies resulting from a great national disease for which party was not responsiblethe trial has been made; and unless the Democratic party now justly forfeit, by their own misconduct, their own selfish and unpatriotic animosities, the old confidence to which the popular heart has reverted with renewed attachment, it will be long before they will be very anxious to make it again. If the Whigs could denounce the imputed greed of Democratic office-holders, and claim for themselves on that score a virtuous disinterestedness of patriotism which could not be disproved, however disbelieved, they can do so no longer, while the memory is yet unforgotten of those days when the earth fairly shook beneath the worn pavements of Pennsylvania Avenue, as the hungry legions of office-seekers shuffled along between the two white houses, to and fro-when they swarmed throughout Washington, not less numerous and more voracious than the locusts which were the last and worst plague of the land of Egypt-when the overtasked horses scarcely staggered on beneath the burthen of the mail-bags bursting with letters of application and entreaty and when the still more overtasked old man whom in an evil hour for himself they had succeeded in making a President of, was driven at last into the only asylum safe from the unsparing persecution. This prejudice at least against the party to which time had before seemed to have given almost a life monopoly of public office, was exploded within the first thirty days of the reformed régime; and not a few Whigs, at the spectacle then exhibited by their own party, already then expressed the disgust of which it was less graceful for us, the defeated, to be the interpreters. If they could denounce the Debt forced upon the Administration by causes no fault of its own, its huge progressive augmentation on their own hands turns all these weapons back against their own breasts. The whoop and the war rifle are now silent through the everglades, and that wildest of "Wild Cats" is now comfortably domesticated beyond the Father of Waters. The once terrible Standing Army has vanished like the ghostly legions which are said still on dark nights to muster on the Champ de

dity of this already gigantic growth; while in the small degree in which it may begin to operate in particularly thickly settled sections, it must be more than compensated by the increased relative productiveness, both of agriculture and all other branches of industry necessary to life-independent, too, of the beneficial influence of improved and improving hygiene, and general information on the laws of dietetics, on popular health. And if the increase from emigration may be, even while absolutely greater, yet relatively less, it would affect the ratio but in a very

1790

trifling degree, even if not covered by the opposite influences of the other causes favorable to still greater rapidity. There is reason, therefore, to anticipate a future continued growth of our population at about the same ratio, whose law is to be inferred from the past. The following table, then, carried back to the beginning of this wonderful progression and forward through its coming century, will show the condition in which this country will, in all probability, be witnessed by many an eye that has already opened to the light within its borders:

3,929,827 5,305,925

-Ratio of Increase

7,239,814

.36.45

9,654,596

re

.33.35

12,866,020

.33.26

17,069,453

.32.67

Who, we repeat, shall question the probability that the ratio of increase of our population will be, and must be, through an indefinite series of years, in the awful depths of which all imagination is bewildered and lost, that which we have assumed a ratio less than has heretofore marked our progress? What assignable cause is there that can arrest it? With a boundless expanse of fertile territory, within that region of the earth's surface most favorable to human life and the healthful development of all its faculties-a climate which must ever increase in salubrity, from time to time, with the extension of cultivation—an intelligence and enterprise of national character which will not fail to improve to the utmost every natural resource and advantage the gigantic steps which the science of the present age is daily taking in the development of all the arts of utility, by which the physical sustenance and enjoyment of life can be facilitated and enhanced-the exemption from all possible danger of war, and from the heavy superincumbent pressure of accumulated misgovernment by which the nations of Europe

VOL. XIII.-No. LXV.

have heretofore been depressed, and stunted even in the natural growth which their physical circumstances and national characters might otherwise have permitted-the perfect freedom, alike of the moral and the animal man, to grow to the full stature and capacity of his nature, with "ample room and verge enough" to spread freely in every direction-in such a state of things, what assignable cause is there, we repeat, that can arrest the progressive increase of our population at a similar rate to that which the past half century has witnessed?

It is in this anticipation that we find the chief reason for the deep, the intense solicitude, which every friend of American liberty and union ought to feel for the broad and strong establishment of sound principles, as the basis of that grand structure of political and civil society which we thus see rising upward toward the heavens before our eyes-such principles as will be adequate to sustain so colossal a fabric. It is for this that the patriot would struggle to reform every vicious institution, the operation of which is found, or is calculated, to exert a de