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MORAL DESOLATION.-N. E. W. Review.

WAR may stride over the land with the crushing step of a giant-Pestilence may steal over it like an invisible curse -reaching its victims silently and unseen-unpeopling here a village and there a city-until every dwelling is a sepulchre. Famine may brood over it with a long and weary visitation, until the sky itself is brazen, and the beautiful greenness gives place to a parched desert-a wide waste of unproductive desolation. But these are only physical evils. The wild flower will bloom in peace on the field of battle and above the crushed skeleton.-The destroying angel of the pestilence will retire when his errand is done, and the nation will again breathe freely—and the barrenness of famine will cease at last-the cloud will be prodigal of its hoarded rain-and the wilderness will blossom.

But for moral desolation there is no reviving spring. Let the moral and republican principles of our country be abandoned our representatives bow in conditional obsequiousness to individual dictation-Let impudence and intrigue and corruption triumph over honesty and intellect, and our liberties and strength will depart forever. Of these there can be no resuscitation. The abomination of desolation' will be fixed and perpetual; and as the mighty fabric of our glory totters into ruins, the nations of the earth will mock us in our overthrow, like the powers of darkness, when the thronged one of Babylon became even as themselves-and the glory of the Chaldee's excellency' had gone down forever.

EXTRACT FROM MR JEFFREY'S SPEECH AT A PUBLIC DIN

NER IN EDINBURGH,

How absurd are the sophisms and predictions, by which the advocates of existing abuses have at all times endeavoured to create a jealousy and apprehension of reform? You cannot touch the most corrupt and imbecile government, without unsettling the principles and unhinging the frame of society-you cannot give the people political rights, without encouraging them to be disobedient to lawful authority, and sowing the seeds of continual rebellion and perpetual discontent; nor recognize popular pretensions in any shape, without coming ultimately to the abolition of

all distinctions, and the division and destruction of all property-without involving society, in short, in disorders at once frightful and contemptible, and reducing all things to the level of an insecure, and ignoble, and bloody equality.

Such are the reasonings by which we are now to be persuaded, that liberty is incompatible with private happiness or national prosperity, and that the despotic governments of the world ought to be maintained, if it were only to protect the people from the consequences, of allowing them any control over the conduct of their rulers! To these we need not now answer in words, or by reference to past and questionable examples, but we put them down at once, and trample them contemptuously to the earth, by a short appeal to the existence and condition of America!

What is the country of the universe, I would now ask, in which property is most sacred, or industry most sure of its reward? Where is the authority of law most omnipotent? Where is intelligence and wealth most widely dif fused, and most rapidly progressive? Where is society, in its general description, most peaceable, and orderly, and moral, and contented? Where are popular tumults least known, and the spirit and existence, and almost the name of a mob, least heard of? Where, in short, is political animosity least heard prevalent, faction subdued, and at this moment, even party nearly extinguished in a prevailing feeling of national pride and satisfaction? Where, but in America?

America, that laid the foundation of her republican constitution in a violent, radical, sanguinary revolution,America, with her fundamental democracy, made more unmanageable, and apparently more hazardous, by being broken up into I do not know how many confederated and independent democracies,-America, with universal suffrage, and yearly elections-with a free and unlicensed press-without an established priesthood, an hereditary nobility, or a permanent executive-with all that is combustible, in short, and pregnant with danger, on the hypothesis of tyranny, and without one of the checks or safeguards, by which alone, they contend, the benefits or the very being of society can be maintained!

There is something at once audacious and ridiculous in maintaining such doctrines in the face of such experience. Nor can anything be founded on the novelty of these institutions, on the pretence that they have not yet been put fairly on their trial. America has gone on prospering un

der them for forty years, and has exhibited a picture of uninterrupted, rapid, unprecedented advances in wealth, population, intelligence, and concord; while all the arbitrary governments of the old world have been overrun with bankruptcies, conspiracies, rebellions, and revolutions; and are at this moment trembling in the conciousness of their insecurity, and vainly endeavouring to repress irrepressible discontents, by confederated violence and terrour.

MISSIONARY OBJECTS.-Wayland.

Extract from a Sermon delivered before the Boston Baptist Missionary Society.

INTELLECT, everywhere, under the dominion of idolatry, is prostrated; beyond the boundaries of Christendom, on every side, the dark places of the earth are filled with the habitations of cruelty. We have mourned over the savage ferocity of the Indians of our western wilderness. We have turned to Africa, and seen almost the whole continent a prey to lawless banditti, or else bowing down in the most revolting idolatry. We have descended along her coast, and beheld villages burnt or depopulated, fields laid waste, and her people, who have escaped destruction, naked and famishing, flee to their forests at the sight of a stranger.

We have asked, what fearful visitation of Heaven has laid these settlements in ruins? What destroying pestilence has swept over this land, consigning to oblivion almost its entire population? What mean the smoking ruins of so many habitations? And why is yon fresh sod crimsoned and slippery with the traces of recent murder? We have been pointed to the dark slave-ship hovering over her coast, and have been told that two hundred thousand defenceless beings are annually stolen away, to be murdered on their passage, or consigned for life to a captivity more terrible than death!

We have turned to Asia, and beheld how the demon of her idolatry has worse than debased, has brutalized the mind of man. Everywhere his despotism has been grievous: here, with merciless tyranny, he has exulted in the misery of his victims. He has rent from the human heart all that was endearing in the charities of life. He has

taught the mother to tear away the infant as it smiled in her bosom, and cast it, the shrieking prey, to contending alligators. He has taught the son to light the funeral pile, and to witness unmoved, the dying agonies of his widowed, murdered mother!

We have looked upon all this; and our object is, to purify the whole earth from these abominations. Our object will not have been accomplished till the tomahawk shall be buried forever, and the tree of peace spread its broad branches from the Atlantic to the Pacific; until a thousand smiling villages shall be reflected from the waves of the Missouri, and the distant valleys of the West echo with the song of the reaper; till the wilderness and the solitary place shall have been glad for us, and the desert has rejoiced and blossomed as the rose.

Our labours are not to cease, until the last slave-ship shall have visited the coast of Africa, and the nations of Europe and America having long since redressed her aggravated wrongs, Ethiopia, from the Mediterranean to the Cape, shall have stretched forth her hand unto God.

How changed will then be the face of Asia! Bramins, and sooders, and castes, and shasters, will have passed away, like the mist which rolls up the mountain's side, before the rising glories of a summer's morning, while the land on which it rested, shining forth in all its loveliness, shall, from its numberless habitations, send forth the high praises of God and the Lamb. The Hindoo mother will gaze upon her infant with the same tenderness, which throbs in the breast of any one of you who now hears me, and the Hindoo son will pour into the wounded bosom of his widowed parent, the oil of peace and consolation.

In a word, point us to the loveliest village that smiles upon a Scottish or New-England landscape, and compare it with the filthiness and brutality of a Caffrarian kraal, and we tell you that our object is, to render that Caffrarian kraal as happy and as gladsome as that Scottish or NewEngland village. Point us to the spot on the face of the earth, where liberty is best understood and most perfectly enjoyed, where intellect shoots forth in its richest luxuriance, and where all the kindlier feelings of the heart are constantly seen in their most graceful exercise; point us to the loveliest and happiest neighbourhood in the world on which we dwell; and we tell you that our object is, to render this whole earth, with all its nations and kindreds and tongues and people, as happy, nay, happier than that neighbourhood.

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EXTRACT FROM AN ADDRESS TO THE CITIZENS OF BOSTON, AT
THE CLOSE OF THE SECOND CENTURY FROM THE FIRST

SETTLEMENT OF THE CITY. BY JOSIAH QUINCY, LL.D.

As our thoughts course along the events of past times, from the hour of the first settlement of Boston to that in which we are now assembled, they trace the strong features of its character, indelibly impressed upon its acts and in its history;-clear conceptions of duty; bold vindications of right; readiness to incur dangers and meet sacrifices, in the maintenance of liberty, civil and religious.

Early selected as the place of the chief settlement of New England, it has, through every subsequent period, maintained its relative ascendancy. In the arts of peace and in the energies of war, in the virtues of prosperity and adversity, in wisdom to plan and vigour to execute, in extensiveness of enterprise, success in accumulating wealth, and liberality in its distribution, its inhabitants, if not unrivalled, have not been surpassed, by any similar society of

men.

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Amidst perils and obstructions, on the bleak side of the mountain on which it was first cast, the seedling oak, selfrooted, shot upward with a determined vigour. Now slighted and now assailed; amidst alternating sunshine and storm; with the axe of a native foe at its root, and the lightning of a foreign power, at times, scathing its top, or withering its branches, it grew, it flourished, it stands,may it forever stand!-the honour of the field.

On this occasion, it is proper to speak of the founders of our city, and of their glory. Now in its true acceptation, the term glory expresses the splendour, which emanates from virtue in the act of producing general and permanent good. Right conceptions then of the glory of our ancestors are alone to be attained by analyzing their virtues. These virtues, indeed, are not seen charactered in breathing bronze, or in living marble. Our ancestors have left no Corinthian temples on our hills, no Gothic cathedrals on our plains, no proud pyramid, no storied obelisk, in our cities. But Mind is there. Sagacious Enterprise is there. An active, vigorous, intelligent, moral

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