and the happiness of man. Diversified as are the interests of communities and of individuals, the whole are under the guardianship of this invisible but powerful protector. It secures to every man, the humblest citizen equally with the highest, the enjoyment of his personal security, his personal liberty, and his private property. All the natural and absolute rights of individuals are held in its safe-keeping. It, moreover, regulates and protects all their relative rights, whether public or private. Magistrates, whether supreme or subordinate; people, whether natives or aliens; officials, whether legislative or executive, civil or military; the domestic relations; bodies politic; rights concerning property; crimes and their punishment, are severally embraced in this branch of the common law, which is defined as "a rule of civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong." The words of Demosthenes may also be added: "It is proclaimed as a general ordinance, equal and impartial to all."

If the great body of the common law, combined with the statutes of our land, touching, as they do, the dearest relations and the most cherished interests, were not pervaded by the principles of natural justice, equity, and morality, they would never have received for so long a time the unwavering homage and respect of all classes of citizens. The wise and the good would have contemned them, and the vicious have trampled them under foot. Intelligent men would have found some more delightful employment than the devotion of years to the study of such a science. Mental cultivation would have sought out other channels of progress to the neglect of that found in the law. The competency of the human faculties to discover the truth on all matters within the range of their conception would not have failed in this particular; and there would not have been wanting many minds of sufficient daring to exhort the people to throw off the oppressive yoke of servitude to an unjust and debasing system.

But, in the history of the human race, no better system of law than our own ever ruled the conduct of men. We look back through ages of oppression, and over lands blasted by injustice and tyranny, and turn again to our own time and country with rational joy. We have embraced and continued to hold fast the grand principles of morality, of equity, and of justice, that have been eliminated from other systems and adopted into the common law; and, breathing upon them the spirit of our free institutions, have harmonized them to a completer fitness to the wants of humanity; so that there is no system of laws so perfect as that which now gives method and

direction to the complicated affairs of the greatest nation of freemen that ever lived!

The enforcement of law by one man over another, or by one class of officials—the judges—over other men, is the greatest exercise of superiority tolerated in a free country. The judge utters from the bench but a few words, yet they are fraught with the greatest consequence. If that utterance respect the estates of suitors before the tribunal of that judge, those estates are secured to the possession or pass from the enjoyment of the claimant. If they respect the life or liberty of the trembling culprit at the bar, those potent words set him free, or they immure him in prison walls or swing him from a gibbet. Yet the province of the judge is only jus discere, and not jus dare. He cannot add one jot or tittle to what has been already written, and his judgment must rest on acknowledged maxims or established principles. Never was there power of such importance wielded by human hands in this confederacy, that was distinguished by a loftier morality or more incorruptible integrity, than that of our judiciary. From the infancy of the republic to the present day, it has held the scales of justice even and steady. It has presided over the complicated affairs of society with consummate ability and rectitude. The weak have never been too insignificant to invoke and receive its aid, nor the mighty too powerful to avert its mandates of justice. We are informed that the Jewish lawgiver was renowned for being learned in the wisdom of the Egyptians, and that ancient Egypt, by some mysterious art, subsisted in much glory during a period of fifteen or sixteen centuries. One secret of that art is disclosed, while we read of a justice so impartial that their kings obliged the judges to take an oath that they would never do anything against their own consciences, though they, the kings themselves, should command them. With a like impartiality and rectitude our own judges have been distinguished. Their decisions have been regarded as expositions of equity and morality, and so consonant with justice as to secure unwavering respect and obediBut the rules that have guided their judgments and illuminated their opinions are those golden-linked principles of law that have been worked out by the genius and illustrated by the learning of the world's great masters of ethical lore. So that it cannot be said of our free republic that "Themis stands by the throne of Alexander to stamp with right and justice whatever he does;" but the supremacy of the law and the independence of the judiciary are powers that rise above the highest official or personal influence, and shine, like the sun, with equal effulgence upon all.

ence.

It is because the common law which we have adopted is general

in its application, and contains that organic arrangement and excellence which blends substantial justice with all the forms of its administration, while regulating civil rights, that it is regarded as the great protector of individual interests and the conservator of civil liberty. A late writer on civil government has remarked, that if we had not brought here the common law, "and should have brought from England all else, and had adopted the civil law, our liberty would have had a very precarious existence." And it is related of the elder Adams, when Blount's conspiracy was before the Senate, and the question whether the common law was to be adopted was discussed, he exclaimed “that if he had ever imagined that the common law had not by the Revolution become the law of the United States under the new government, he never would have drawn his sword in the contest." So dear to him-a great lawyer-were the privileges which that system recognized and enforced. In this land of freedom we live in the enjoyment of those liberties, secured to us by law, which Algernon Sidney referred to when he said, "The liberties of nations are from God and nature, not from kings;" for our federal and state polity, and our system of laws, are well adapted, not to protect kings or to pamper aristocracies, but to secure society, the domestic relations, and the rights of individuals. One of the most cherished of these individual privileges is the primordial right of liberty of conscience; for the genius of our laws wisely dictates that conscience lies beyond the reach of government or the power of prelate or law-maker. Here, therefore, every citizen is at liberty to pursue his own true and substantial happiness, restrained only by those checks which are found to be the necessary guarantees of that individual liberty, and which, as all experience shows, conduce to the best interests of order, morality, and justice.

In the full enjoyment of the greatest blessings that heaven has ever bestowed upon any people, the Anglo-Saxon race are pursuing their brilliant career. Upon their extended empires the sun never sets. All abroad throughout their vast domains order, peace, and security reign. Whitening fields, burdened with ripening grain, lie unmolested, until their owners gather in their rich harvests. The law stands like a sentinel over that unprotected treasure, and watches it still when in storehouse and barn. From the ports of great cities all manner of naval structures depart with precious freights, and return again laden with the products of distant lands. Over the lonely pathways of ocean and along the thronged piers of the metropolis those cargoes are safe and they who own them. Those cities themselves, that seem like Babels, have no habitation whose very boundaries are not guarded, and whose inmates are not protected by the

law. It is there, as everywhere, a shield to the innocent and an avenger of the wronged. Science and art, invention and industry, bring forth their contributions to the general good, and are sure of their rewards. Religion rears her temples without restraint, and dedicates them for all time to the service of the one living and true God. Civilization puts on a new light, and seems fast approaching the reflection of heavenly things. Christianity holds on her bright and widening way, and when the impartial historian shall hereafter from his serene throne trace the causes that led that wonderful race up the stupendous heights of their brilliant culture, intelligence, morality, and freedom, chief among the sources of their greatness will be marked the wisdom and beneficence of their systems of law. And while that historian, touching the people of these United States, shall speak of their national greatness and security, their civil liberty, and the tranquillity of their society; of the protection afforded among them to private rights; of the increase and diffusion among them of intelligence and wealth, and of the manly tone of their moral sentiment and energy, he will admit that these were the grand elements moved and influenced by their forms of polity and their principles of law; and that the definite standards of right which those principles established, coinciding with the dictates of Christianity, taught them, as a people, to ascend from the grosser inducements of natural inclination to that rectitude and morality which have exalted the American nation to the highest rank of the civilized world.

ART. V.-ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT AND HIS COSMOS. Cosmos a Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe. By ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. Translated from the German by E. C. OTTE, B. H. PAUL, and W. S. DALLAS. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1850-1859. THE conflict between natural science and the Christian faith is waning. Meeting on the basis of a compromise obtained on the one hand by a corrected Scripture philology, and on the other by an abatement of some scientific pretensions and conclusions which had been carried too far, particularly in geology, these two are now found to be essentially in unison. The one is a complement of the other; each wrong in excluding, and only just to itself in affirming the other. Faith can lend to science its sweet trust and hopes, and science in return can give its clear insight and its truths to faith, and both thus find their appropriate place and function in the life of

the individual no less than in institutions. This concord is the outgrowth of two ideas, which are to-day too firmly established in the Christian consciousness ever to be other than important factors in existing as well as all future culture. One of these ideas is, that nature and revelation, or God in his works and in his word, must harmonize, and hence, that the purely scientific conclusions of the one, fairly though independently reached, must be in accord with a fair interpretation of the other. The second idea is, that the world was made for man; in which, still further, two things are implied: first, that all the uses of nature are servants of man's physical, intellectual, and moral needs; secondly, that it is mainly by means of the mathematical and physical sciences that man is to pass from his present severe bondage to the labor of supplying his natural necessities, up to that lordship of nature which the steady progress of science and the useful arts now assure us of as the fulfillment of the primal command given to the race at the beginning, to subdue the world and have dominion over it. In this view, physics and theology touch each sympathetically in the sphere of the religious life, which as ever, and to-day more than ever, serves itself from the empiric sciences.

Humboldt was the representative man of the age in the department of the natural sciences. He was empiricist and philosopher in one. He loved the solid facts; from them he strove to read the law, and then to ground both law and fact in some higher, more comprehensive unity of law or fact. He was unsurpassed for careful, thorough observation, power of combination, range of scholarship, a keen faculty for noting resemblances and differences; which qualifications place him beyond all question as a representative man in natural science, whose business is with matter in its forms and laws, and not with its genesis nor with the moral and religious aspects of natural truths. Analytic, like Aristotle and Bacon, he tends to the individual, the phenomenal, and develops the ideas in them; then, sympathetically and poetically, he seeks from them to build up an organic whole; not reconstructing nature as the rational cosmologists have been trying to do, with only small success as yet, but describing nature in its own coherence, transcribing it according to the chapters and subdivisions found written in itself. He studied nature after the method of Bacon, but was far superior to him in scholarship, and in the reach and precision of his investigations. From Thales to Leibnitz, and later still, facts have often been used as a sort of spring-board for mental gymnastics, as an arena for a metaphysical pirouetting. Theories of the world-formation, and of the on-goings of nature, have been constructed from a narrow basis