taking the responsibility for the profit or the patronage, they dictating his conduct while they skulk in the dark. It is a compact equally dishonouring both the parties, and of which the country, whose best interests are sacrificed by it, has the most just right to complain.

Although Jefferson retired from public life at the close of his second presidency, in 1806, his days were prolonged for twenty years beyond that period, and these he passed on his estate in Virginia, superintending agricultural improvements, and watching over the university which he had founded and which he regarded with unceasing parental care. Like the other chief magistrates of the Republic, he retired without any fortune, and his property was at his decease found barely sufficient to pay his debts. It was a singular and affecting coincidence, that when the people were assembled in countless numbers to celebrate the Fiftieth anniversary of the American Independence, the passing-bell should toll of Adams, one of the last surviving patriots who had signed the memorable act of the Fourth of July. On that day he expired; but it was after a few days found, that at the same time another of the patriarchs of the New World had also rested from his labours; the author of that famous instrument had, on the same day, closed his earthly course, in his 84th year.

It is impossible to close the page of history which records the foundation of the Great Republic, without adverting to the singular change that seems of late years to have come over some friends of liberty in this country, inclining them against the popular institutions which that system consecrates, and upon which it reposes. Writers of ability, but scantily endowed with candour, observers of moderate circumspection, men labouring under the prejudices of European society, and viewing the social system of the New World through the medium of habits and associations peculiar to that of the Old, have brought back for our information a number of details, for which they needed hardly to cross the Atlantic, and have given us as discoveries a relation of matters necessarily existing under a very popular government, and in a very new community. As those travellers had pretty generally failed to make many converts among the friends of free institutions either in France or in England, there would have been little harm done to the cause of truth, and no great interruption given to the friendly relations which the highest interests of both countries require should be maintained unbroken between them. But unhappily some persons of a superior class appear, from party or from personal feelings, to have, without due reflection on the mischief they were doing, suffered their minds to be poisoned by the

same prejudices; and, a signal indiscretion having suffered their private letters, written under the influence of such prepossessions, to see the light, it becomes every one, whose general opinions coincide with those of the individuals in question, to protest against the inference that such sentiments are shared by the Liberal party in England. This becomes the more necessary, in consequence of the tendency which the most reprehensible conduct of some of the States in the Union towards their public creditors has to prepare the way for the reception of such unsound opinions-opinions which, if left to themselves, would probably soon sink into oblivion, how respectable soever the quarters which they may, without due reflection, have been suffered to reach. I allude more particularly to some letters lately published of Lord Sydenham, written confidentially to his late colleagues, while he was acting under them as Governor-General of British North Americaletters the publication of which has, to me, who knew their writer, and respected his generally sound principles, been a subject of much regret, which he appears to have written in a moment of some irritation, but which would do serious injury to the good understanding that happily has been restored between the two nations, if they were supposed to speak the sense of those among us who are most friendly to America.

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A great deal of vague and general abuse may be passed over, as that the Americans are a calculating people, and fight not for glory but plunder " —“such a set of braggadocios, that their public men must submit to the claims of their extravagant vanity and self-sufficiency "-that there is among them a "general debasement"-"that those who aim at place are corrupt and corrupters, and the masses who bestow preferment ignorant, prejudiced, dishonest, and utterly immoral." I fear me most if not all of this railing might be retorted upon a certain nation whose wars in China have been warmly eulogised by Lord Sydenham in another letter, though he is greatly scandalised that all the glory of his friends is not likely to prevent their seats "slipping from under them ;"* a nation whose general elections have of late years been found a scene of the most hateful corruption, although we should be guilty of a most gross and unpardonable exaggeration were we on this account to stigmatize the whole people as "utterly immoral" in the

* The naïveté of this passage is exceedingly great. "But what is the use of all this glory if your seats slip from under you?" Then, after a great abuse of John Bull, "I am afraid that the possession of power is making me terribly inclined to despotism, for I am thinking of planting my cabbages rather under the shade of Metternich or the Czar," &c., p. 326. To be sure; and this is exactly the consequence of being Governor-General with dictatorial power.

terms rashly applied to his neighbours by the Canadian Governor.

But the charges which he allows himself to lay, and which his relatives have thought it right to publish, are more specific. "The Government seems to me the worst of tyrannies, that of the mob supported by the most odious and profligate corruption. No man who aims at power dare avow an opinion of his own; he must pander to the lowest prejudices of the people, and in their parties (the two great ones which now divide the Union, the Loco-focos and the Whigs) the only subject of the leading men of either is to instil some wretchedly low sentiment into the people, and then explode it for their own advantage. There is scarcely a statesman of either who would not adopt the most violent or the basest doctrine however, if he thought that he could work it to advantage with the majority-peculation and jobbing are the only objects; delusion, and the basest flattery of the people, the means." "If," adds this discreet statesman," they drive us into a war, the Blacks in the South will soon settle all that part of the Union; and in the North I feel sure that we can lick them to their hearts' content."-" A Republic could answer in former times, in countries where was no people, or few; the bulk of the population Helots and slaves; but where there is a people, and they really have the power government is only