ON THE PRACTICAL INFLUENCES OF POPULAR INSTITUTIONS. A LECTURE, WRITTEN FOR THE IRVING LITERARY INSTITUTE, OF ERIE, PA. ON THE PRACTICAL INFLUENCES OF POPULAR INSTIUTIONS. A LECTURE WRITTEN FOR THE IRVING LITERARY INSTITUTE, OF ERIE, PA. GENTLEMEN OF THE IRVING INSTITUTE: I owe you an apology for not rendering an earlier reply to the invitation with which you have honored me, to deliver a lecture before your Association. The delay bas arisen from a wish to render myself useful in some way, should I be compelled to decline that pointed out by yourselves. to you It was with much pleasure that I learned, soon after my arrival in your town, that such an institution as yours was in existence, affording to the young men of the place a stimul s to mental exertion and improvement; a theater and material for intellectual recreation, and a refuge from the worse than profitless employments, through which the activities of our nature will run riot, and retaliate for any neglect of their proper direction. I do not intrude upon you my opinions respecting your Association, from an assumption that they have any special value or claim to your attention. The impulses which have called you together the literary pursuits in which you are engaged, give assurance that you are incited by refined tastes, and governed by obligations which make you, to some extent, independent of the approbation of individuals; even of those not so humble as myself. But every citizen who properly values the institutions of our Republic must rejoice, and has a right to express his gratification at anything which tends to sustain and to advance those institutions. Their continued success and future advancement depend so much upon the direction given to the energies and faculties of our young men, that it becomes a source of the highest gratification to see any of them acting up to a sense of their responsibilities, by the aid of such associations as that you have organized; and I am invited by the reflections it has suggested, to address you this letter upon some |