"One of the most reasonable advocates of immediate emancipation whom I met with in the North, said to me, 'You are like many of our politicians, who can look on one side only of a great millions of colored people, or even twelve millions question. Grant the possibility of these three of them fifty years hence, being capable of amalgamating with the whites, such a result might be to you perhaps, as a philanthropist or physiologist, a very interesting experiment; but would not the progress of the whites be retarded, and our race deteriorated, nearly in the same proportion as the nearly six-sevenths of our whole population. As negroes would gain? a philanthropist you are bound to look to the greatest good of the two races collectively, or the advantage of the whole population of the Union."'" The whites constitute better state of feeling between the two races. By an unfortunate schism, called the "Northern and Southern split," the black Methodist churches are severed from the great and powerful communities with whom it might have been to their pride as well as to their advantage to have been in close union. Still, likewise, in many parts there is a stern and jealous resistance to their education; a resistance which was dying away, but which has been provoked into life by the imprudent and fanatic crusade of the Abolitionists. Sir C. Lyell gives the barbarous law of Georgia, which we should read with more righteous indignation but for the compunctious remembrance of certain Irish penal statutes, abro-vol. ii. p. 101. gated only in latter days. Yet even in Geor- From Alabama we arrrive at New Orgia Sunday-schools arise in Christian defiance leans, a provincial Paris in the midst of this of the law. There is still almost every- land of Anglo-Saxondom, with its Roman Cawhere the indelible antipathy of the races; tholic religion, its carnival, its theatres open the inextinguishable attainder of blood, on Sundays, its hotels with Louis XIV. furon which M. de Beaumont founded his ro- niture, its brilliant shops, its life and gaiety, mance, and Miss Martineau her tale, which but with its black slaves, its voluptuous we wish that we could believe, like many of quadroon beauties. This must contrast her tales, to be romance. Still the thumb- strangely with the sober, busy, thriving cities nail without its white crescent, still the heel of the North, the pale and fever-worn betrays the lingering drops of black blood; "crackers," in the new provinces, the restthose drops which annul marriage, even if less pioneers of society pressing on towards fruitful in children; which drive back the Texas. From New Orleans Sir Charles most amiable, virtuous, intelligent, accom- makes his excursion to the delta of the Misplished persons into the proscribed caste. sissippi-perhaps the most important of his Still slaves are carried openly about for sale; geological chapters. The delta he estimates may be stolen like other objects of trade; at 14,000 square miles; the level alluvial may be shot by passionate overseers, with- plain to the north, which stretches above the out the overseer suffering in social estima-junction of the Ohio, is 16,000 square miles; tion, (p. 92;) are advertised when runaways exactly like stray horses or dogs here; still, they are either, when free, prohibited by law from acting as mechanics, (they are very clever and ingenious in some arts,) or by the jealousy of the whites, who will not admit them of their guild. Still writers of the calm humanity of Sir Charles Lyell are obliged to waver and hesitate; at one time eagerly to look forward; at another, for the sake of the blacks themselves, to tremble at their immediate—even their speedy emancipation. The number of negroes in the Union is now three millions; and according to their present rate of increase may, by the close of the century, amount to twelve millions. But for "disturbing causes," he would cherish sanguine hopes of their ultimate fusion and amalgamation. But by his own account, are those disturbing causes likely to become less powerful as the two races show a broader front towards each other? The following passage seems to us to give a most impressive view of the difficulties of the question: being reached by so gradual a slope that the junction of the Ohio is but 200 feet above the level of the bay of Mexico. He calculates by various processes, and from certain data furnished to him by skillful engineers and philosophic observers of the country, that the delta must have taken 67,000 years, the plain above-assuming a certain depth of alluvial matter-37,000 years more, to accumulate. These vast periods of time, like those of space in astronomy, alternately depress us with the most humiliating sense of our insignificance; and next awaken something like proud gratitude to our Divine Maker for the gift of those faculties which enable us thus, as it were, to gauge this overwhelming, this almost boundless time and space. As regards the Deity, while astronomy vindicates the majesty of space, so does geology that of time. What a comment on the scriptural phrase, that to Him a thousand years are but as a day! And all this time and space, so measured, is but a brief fragment of His eternity and infinity! Our traveller's return is up the vast Mississippi, after an excursion to Grenville, in Missouri, upon the Ohio, and so across the Alleghany Mountains, back to the land of the older cities, to Philadelphia and New York. We must leave our readers to complete this immense circuit, feeling confident that, having once set forth with Sir Charles Lyell, they will not abandon him from weariness, from want of interest, or of gratitude for his varied and valuable communications. The conclusion at which we arrive, which has never been forced upon us so strongly by former tour in America as by these manany ly, sensible, and fearless volumes, is still grow ng astonishment at the resources of this great country. Here is an immense continent, not like old Asia, at times overshadowed into a seeming unity by some one Assyrian, or Babylonian, or Persian, or Mahometan empire, and at the death of the great conqueror, or the expiration at least of his dynasty, breaking up again into conflicting kingdoms, or almost reduced to the primitive anarchy of hostile tribes not like Europe, attaining something like unity, first by the consolidating and annealing power of the Roman Empire, and afterwards in a wider but less rigorous form by the Church; in later times by the balance of power among the great monarchies-a balance only maintained by perpetual wars and by immense military establishments in times of peace. The New World is born as it were one; a federation with much of the vigor of separate independent states, with no necessary, no herediitary, principles of hostility, but rather bound together by the strongest community of interests; one in descent, at least with one race so predominant that the rest either melt away into it, or, if they remain without, are each, even the colored population, so small comparatively in numbers, that they may continue insulated and outlying sections of society, with no great danger to the general harmony; one in language, and that our noble, manly Anglo-Saxon, the language of Shakspeare, Milton, Bacon, and Locke, now spoken over portions of the globe infinitely more extensive than ever was any other tongue; one in religion, for from the multiplicity of sects, as we have observed, must result a certain unity—at least, religious difference, spread equably over all the land, cannot endanger the political unity. The means of communication throughout this immense continent are absolutely unexampled, both from the natural distribution of the lakes, and seas, and rivers, and from the discoveries of mod | ern science, which are seized, adapted and appropriated with the restless eagerness of a people fettered by no ancient hereditary prejudices, active even to the overworking of their physical constitutions, speculative so as hazard everything-even, in the case of repudiation, that good-faith which is the foundation of credit-for rapid advantage. There are no local attachments, at least in the masses, to check that adventurous passion for bettering their condition, which turns the faces of men westward with a resolute uniformity; (Sir Charles Lyell met one man moving eastward and that one only from a temporary motive of curiosity.) Along the whole range of coast there is steam navigation, from New England to Georgia. West of the Alleghany ridge, besides the noble rivers, also crowded with steamboats, which are so many splendid high roads for travel and for commerce, there is a line of railroads and electric telegraphs, branching off and bringing into intimate relation with the rest every considerable city. These railroads are not wild enterprises, destined, like too many of our own, to swallow up irretrievable capital-framed with no sober calculation of the necessities of the land-magnificent, luxurious, and proportionately wasteful; but prudently conceived, and at first, at least, economically managed, only allowing greater speed, comfort, luxury, on such lines as those between New York and Boston. Behind the Alleghanies to the east, nature has achieved that which, on a small scale, magnificent monarchs have attempted in Europe-a system of internal navigation unrivalled in its extent, and of which even American enterprise has far from approached the limits. Instead of running up singly into the central land—as in the old continents the Ganges, the Indus, the Volga, the Nile, the Niger, the Danube, the Rhine, each divided from other great rivers by ridges of impenetrable mountains-the Mississippi receives her countless and immense tributaries, ramifying and intersecting the whole region from the borders of Canada, from the Alleghanies to within a certain distance of the Pacific. She is carrying up the population almost of cities at once to every convenient fork, to every situation which may become an emporium; and then receiving back into her spacious bosom and conveying to the ocean the accumulating produce, the corn, the cotton, even the peltries of the West. Almost in the centre of this empire is a coal-field, or rather two coal-fields, of which we believe the boundaries are not yet ascertained-but in Sir Charles's geological map (in his former vol umes) they blacken a space which, according to the scale, might furnish out several great kingdoms in the Old World. By a singular provision the clear-burning and smokeless anthracite on the east side of the Apalachian ridge furnishes its inexhaustible fuel for the hearths and manufactures of the more polished and stately cities, for the gayer steamboats on the Hudson and the Delaware; the heavier and more opaque, that of the Illinois, seems destined to adumbrate the manufactu as in Great Britain; nor need we wonder at this, when we consider that day laborers in an American village often purchase a novel by Scott, Bulwer, or Dickens, or a popular history, such as England and sixteen shillings in America,) and Alison's Europe, (published at thirteen pounds in read it at spare moments, while persons in a much higher station in England are debarred from a similar intellectual treat by considerations of economy. "It might have been apprehended that, where a daily newspaper can be bought for a half-penny, be so taken up with politics and light reading, and a novel for sixpence, the public mind would that no time would be left for the study of history, divinity, and the graver periodical literature. But, on the contrary, experience has proved that, when the habit and facility of reading has been acquir a steady increase in the number of those who that, in proportion as the reading public augments enter on deeper subjects. I was glad to hear annually, the quality of the books read is decidedly improving. About four years ago, 40,000 copies were printed of the ordinary commonplace novels published in England, of which sort they now only sell about 8000. ring towns on the Ohio. Those treasure-fields, quarries as they are at present rather than mines, require hardly any expense to work them. If steam is still to be, as no doubt it must be, the great creator of wealth, of comfort, of commerce, this fact might alone al-ed by the perusal even of trashy writings, there is most justify our boldest visions as to the expansion and duration of American civilization. In California the United States may appear to have acquired the more doubtful and dangerous command of the precious minerals to an unexampled extent. And over this progressive world, this world which, even at its present gigantic strides, will not for an immense period have reached its actual boundary, which—even if it swallow up no more Texas, no more of Mexico, if it merely absorb into itself its own prairies and forests, if it people only its half of Oregon--will still have "ample space and verge enough "--some elements of civilization seem to spread, if not with equable, with unlimited advance. There is no bound to the appetite, if not for intellectual improvement, for intellectual entertainment. With Sir Charles Lyell we have full confidence in the palled craving for one leading to the sober and wholesome demand for the other: once awaken the imagination and the feelings, the reason will rarely remain in torpid slumber. This almost passion for reading appears to be universal: newspapers perhaps first, (and newspapers are compelled to become books,) and then books accompany man into the remotest squattings in the backwoods, are conveyed in every steamboat, spring up with spontaneous growth in every settlement, are sold at prices which all can afford. From later intelligence than that of Sir Charles Lyell, we are assured that the sale of Mr. Macaulay's History has reached As some drawback to this we must subjoin the at least 100,000. We recommend our author's following sentence-" Many are of opinion that the small print of cheap editions in the United States statements on these subjects, of which we will seriously injure the eyesight of the rising genhave room but for a fragment, to the consideration, especially as they often read in railway eration especially of our men of letters: "Of the best English works of fiction, published at thirty-one shillings in England, and for about sixpence here, it is estimated that about ten times as many copies are sold in the United States "It might also have been feared that the cheapwould have made it impossible for native authors ness of foreign works unprotected by copyright, to obtain a price capable of remunerating them highly, as well as their publishers. But such is not the case. Very large editions of Prescott's "Ferdinand and Isabella," and of his "Mexico," and "Peru," have been sold at a high price; and when Mr. Harper stated to me his estimate of the works, it appeared to me that an English author original value of the copyright of these popular could hardly have obtained as much in his own country. The comparative cheapness of American books, the best editions of which are by no means in small print, seems at first unintelligible, when we consider the dearness of labor, which and binding. But, first, the number of readers, enters so largely into the price of printing, paper, thanks to the free-schools, is prodigiously great, and always augmenting in a higher ratio even than the population; and, secondly, there is a fixed determination on the part of the people at large to endure any taxation, rather than that which would place books and newspapers beyond their reach. Several politicians declared to me would be preferred; and this last,' said they, that not only an income tax, but a window tax, 'would scarcely shut out the light from a greater number of individuals.'" *—vol. ii. pp. 336-338. cars, devouring whole novels, printed in newspapers, in very inferior type. Mr. Everett, speaking of this literature, in an address to the students of Harvard College, said, 'If cheap it can be called, which begins by costing a man his eyes, and ends by perverting his taste and morals.'"-vol. ii. p. 139. The great cities, it is true, can never be as the ancient capitals of Europe. America, perhaps the world, will hardly see again a new Cologne, or a new Strasbourg, a new St. Peter's, or a new St. Paul's, any more than new Pyramids, a new Parthenon, or a new Coliseum. Yet we cannot but think that peace and wealth may beyond the Atlantic achieve great things, though of a different character; and this assuredly should be the aim of her artists, especially of her architects. Whether Trinity Church, now the pride of the Broadway in New York, will bear the rigorous judgment of our Gothic Purists, or stand as high even as our best modern churches, may, notwithstanding Sir Charles Lyell's opinion, admit of doubt. But we have heard only one opinion of the great Croton aqueduct; a work which for magnificence, ingenuity, science, and utility, (as pouring pure and wholesome water, even to the luxury of noble fountains and waterworks, throughout the whole city of New York,) most nearly approaches the days of old Roman greatness. The expenditure of almost the whole of the great Girard bequest, (half a million sterling,) on building alone, leaving hardly anything for the endowment of the college, may in one sense have been very unwise, and indeed wrong; but as showing at least a noble ambition for architectural grandeur, even if not in this respect successful, may not be without its use. But so long as we hear of such legacies as those of Mr. Lowell, £70,000 sterling; of Mr. Astor for a public library, of a much larger amount—and we believe that those publicspirited acts of generosity do not stand alone -there can be no room for despair. Though the Capitol at Washington be but a cold and feeble attempt to domiciliate classic formsthough bold and creative originality be more difficult of attainment to those born late into the world in art even than in letters; the great transatlantic cities will gradually have their great, we trust, characteristic American monuments. If we had believed the story for an instant, we certainly should have shared in the alarm-we perhaps should not have been without some jealousy, if brother Jonathan had bought and carried off the Apollo Belvidere. On the other hand, we most cordially rejoice in the place which the young American sculptor, Powers, has taken even in Italy. That such statues as his exquisite Greek Slave should be set up in American halls by American hands would be to us a source of unfeigned satisfaction, not merely for the gratification of the present, but as an omen of the future. For, as the future of America, to be a glorious future, must be a future of peace, so we would hope that it may be fruitful in all which embellishes, and occupies, and hallows, and glorifies peace. Sir Charles Lyell must excuse us, if with these wonderful prospects of centuries to come, "expanding their cloudy wings before us," we have been less willing to look back to those ages behind ages, which are the study and the revelation of his important science. Interesting as it may be, under his sure guidance, to be told that a hundred thousand years must have passed in forming the land at the mouth of the Mississippi, we are more absorbed in the thought of the few years which have beheld on the banks of that wide river and its affluents, cities arising beyond cities, and those cities peopled with thousands on thousands of free, industrious, in many respects, as far as is given to man, happy human beings; province after province yielding to possession, to cultivation, to production-the production of harvests now poured without stint, and we suppose destined to be still more profusely poured, upon our shores. The Indian corn, we ought to have observed, appears by no means one of the least precious gifts of this region. The aboriginal tribes so wither away before the invader, that his occupation of the land can hardly be called usurpation. Instructive as it is to be initiated in the growth of those 63,000 square miles of coal, (First Tour, p. 88,) the gradual transformation of terrestrial plants into this store of fuel, garnered up it might seem for endless generations, with the vegetable texture still apparent throughout under the microscope; and flattened trunks of trees, now transmuted into pure coal, and erect fossil trees in the overlying strata; instructive to trace all the geological and all the chemical processes in this immense laboratory;-yet to us there is something even more surprising in the application of those inexhaustible treasures by that race of beings for whom the Almighty Creator in his boundless Providence may seem to have entombed them in the earth. What can be more strange than their sudden revelation, as it were, in these enormous quantities, just when is most apparent the practical dependence of man, in his most crowded state of civilization, on powers which his ancestors, content to warm their hearths and to cook their provisions with bright and useful fuel, dreamed not to be latent in this coarse and ordinary product of the earth? Who shall conjecture the incalculable results of the use, perhaps the improvement of steam-power in a country where railroads are of such comparatively easy construction, and the spreading network of rivers might seem providentially designed for steam-navigation? Intellectually delightful as it may be to follow out such a beautiful piece of philosophical reasoning as that in Sir C. Lyell's second volume, (p. 304,) where, from certain footmarks on slabs of sandstone, which could only have been made by air-breathing animals, (all others being too light to make such deep impressions even when the stones were in the state of fluid mud,) the date of the primal existence of this class of animals is ascertained;-nevertheless, we are more inclined to lose ourselves in wondering speculations as to the short time which must elapse before the first footprints of man, at least of civilized man, in the lands west of the Mississippi, will be utterly untraceable through the broad strata of culture and population which even one century will spread perhaps to the Pacific. We seem irresistibly compelled to look onward; we are seized, as it were, and carried away by the advancing tide to the still receding haven, till we are lost in a boundless ocean. That clouds, heavy, blackening, awful thunder-clouds loom over this wide horizon of the future, who that knows the mutability of human things, the wild work which fortune or fate, or rather divine Providence, makes of the most sagacious conjectures, what wise and reflective American will attempt to disguise from himself? There is surely enough to check and subdue the overweening national pride, which prevails among the vulgar. We must in justice to ourselves touch on some of these dangers. One of them, though we do not know how far it extends over the Union, is the effect of the climate. In New England especially, there seems a a certain delicacy of health, a general, "careworn" expression, a kind of premature old age, which, with other circumstances, shows that our Anglo-Saxon race is not perfectly acclimated. This may be aggravated, but is not entirely caused, by the busy, exhausting, restless life of the great body of Americans. The fevers and agues of the back settlements will probably disappear, with the swamps and marshes, before cultivation and drainage; the vigorous health of Kentucky and some other of the back settlements may eventually renew the youth, if renewal be necessary, of the earlier race, which seems to want the robust look, the clear and ruddy complexion of the Englishman. (See Lyell, vol. i. pp. 154-5.) But this danger will probably bring its own cure; every succeeding century will adapt the race more completely to their climate. Their political dangers are more serious and inevitable. That which is their strength and pride, their independence, is their greatest peril. There is no great repressive, no controlling power, nothing to drag the wheel of popular rule, either in the constitution of the Federation or in the States. In each the Senates must obey the mighty will of the masses. But separate interests may grow up, in the nature of things cannot but grow up; the North and the South, the West and the East, may be arrayed against each other. The ruder, the more tumultuous, the more uneducated West, may be able to dictate at Washington not the soundest policy, policy which may be fatal, but which must be adopted from fear of separation, and the consequence of separation. In each State there is the same danger: the predominance of the of the turbulent many, or those who, selfmultiplied by their noise and activity, represent themselves, and are believed to be the many-over the quiet, the wise, the educated. We have great faith, we need hardly say, in the effects of true and real education; but here is the rub-can sound political education travel as fast as population? That which, to all appearance, is most feared by the calmer immediate speculators, is indeed too much in human nature not to justify serious apprehension-the quiescence of those who ought from their superior intelligence to govern, but are too easy and happy to strive and wrestle for their proper influence. This applies equally to the States and to individuals: Kentucky and Illinois may lord it over New England and New York; and if Kentucky and Illinois become more civilized, States yet unnamed, unsettled, still farther West, may lord it in their turn over Kentucky and Illinois. So long as the subjects of collision are but the election of a President or even a Tariff, this predominance may be comparatively innocuous; but when it comes to war or peace-war, not with Texas or Mexico, but with European nations, or even with Canada, if Canada should grow up into a rival power-then may the United States be exposed, at least, to the chances of loss and defeat, or, escaping them, to the proverbial consequences of military glory and success. We have the most sovereign contempt for Mr. Cobden and his international arbitration-for the European peace societies, which have the most fatal effect, that of casting ridicule on what is in itself a righteous cause; but, if Americans, we should |