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lation enough, and wealth, character, and civilization enough in each to make a respectable nation or empire; all this we may do, and all this we are going to do, if the policy and designs of the present Administration are carried out to their consummation; and when it is done, and fully completed, we shall no longer have a Constitution, or an American Republican Union. IV. But two or three other topics claim a passing notice before we bring this article to a close. We have spoken of the duty of the government in regard to Internal Improvements, and have laid it down as an undoubted principle that it is bound, in the exercise of its necessary powers, to do what can be done, within the limits of a wise discretion, to give protection, security, encouragement and facility, by means of these improvements, to the operations and movements of internal trade, travel and transportation. The first Congress that sat under the Constitution, by a formal enactment, recognized the duty of performing all necessary and proper acts, and making all necessary and proper provisions "within any bay, inlet, harbor, or port of the United States, for rendering the navigation thereof safe and easy;" and it was then declared that all the expenses of such necessary works should be defrayed out of the Treasury of the United States. This was in 1789. The wants of commerce, in this respect, were satisfied, at that day, with "light-houses, beacons, buoys and public piers," constructed and placed in the bays and harbors of the Atlantic coast. Soon afterwards the works necessary for rendering these bays and harbors "safe and easy" were increased in number and variety; and as early as 1798, Congress set the example of a law for improving the channel of a river in the interior of a State. From this time forward the legislation of Congress went on, strictly within the limits of the Constitutional authority under which the first light-house was constructed, or the first buoy planted, but extending and multiplying the means of rendering navigation safe and easy, as the country itself expanded, and the wants and necessities of trade and transportation, internal and external, increased. Appropriations for harbor and river improvements were made under every administration, from Mr. Jefferson to Mr. Tyler, both inclusive, amounting altogether to more than seven

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teen millions of dollars. Under Gen. Jackson's administration alone ten and a half millions were appropriated for these objects. It is only in comparatively recent times that it has become a matter of prime importance and paramount interest that the care and consideration of the Government in the matter of these improvements, should be extended to the great lakes and to the Western rivers. A trade of three hundred millions of dollars annually, which has already sprung up in these quarters, renders attention to these lakes and rivers, with a view to increasing the security and facility of their navigation, an indispensable duty, unless the whole system of harbor and river improvements, everywhere, on the Atlantic as well as in the West, is to be abandoned. It is, indeed, the utter abandonment of the whole system and policy everywhere, which is recommended to the country, and insisted on by Mr. Polk in one of the most earnest and elaborate State papers which has ever emanated from the Executive Government. In his Veto Message of Dec. 15, 1847, an appeal is taken from Congress to the people against this whole policy. "In view," he says, "not only of the Constitutional difficulty, but as a question of policy, I am clearly of opinion that the whole subject should be left to the States." Gen. Jackson undertook to draw certain arbitrary distinctions with a view to limit the objects to which appropriation should be made. Other Presidents also have desired to restrict these appropriations to objects of a particular character or class. But this is the first time, we think, that a President has formally proposed and insisted on the utter abandonment of the whole subject by the National Government-to go back, in this particular, to the Confederation, and charge the States with the care and control of all works and operations designed to make navigation "safe and easy," not only in all rivers, but in all bays and harbors, within their respective limits. We do not much wonder that Mr. Polk should become sick of the ungracious task of attempting to cut off the lakes and the great rivers of the interior from the beneficent care and action of the Government, with all the vast commerce which belongs to them, daily growing as it is in magnitude, and involving pretty directly the interests and the business of fully one half the population of the

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Union, while that care and action should | He was no sooner in place than his vagrant still be extended to all the wants of com- eye struck out for Queen Charlotte's merce on our Atlantic border. We are Island, and San Francisco, and Santa Fé, free to say that justice and fair dealing, and Tehuantepec, and the Dead Sea. and the plainest dictates of duty under the dreams were about an American ContiConstitution, require the total abandonment nental System," and he threw out a defiof this policy in all quarters, or else that ance to Russia and England, if they should it shall be applied with an equal hand in dare attempt to plant their subjects in any whatever quarter urgent demands for its uninhabited part of their own undisputed exercise may arise; but we think, at the possessions on the American Continent! same time, that until the Government is The government of Mexico happened not prepared to go quite back to the plan of to be in hands to suit him, and he sent an the Confederation, to give up its whole juris- army into that country, proclaiming that diction over commerce, foreign and domes- a principal object was to revolutionize the tic, and over all navigable waters-not to government, and place the power in other build or to maintain a light-house, or plant hands. A hundred millions spent in this a buoy no longer to fill its treasury from object, and in persuading Mexico, by arguduties imposed on imported merchandise- ments spoken in the thunder of cannon no longer to maintain ships of war at home and written in blood, to spare to us, who or abroad for the protection and safeguard are so straightened for room, the half of of our commercial marine, and no longer her empire a debt of a hundred millions to employ consuls and ministers in watching saddled on the country for objects so in foreign ports and countries, the interests worthy, so indispensable, and in such and concerns of commerce- until the Gov- harmony with the designs of the Constituernment is prepared to go thus far in a tion, and the character and genius of this movement backward, like a crab, we hold, Republic; this is nothing (the money, we and shall hold, that it is bound, by the same mean,) in the estimation of Mr. Polk— constitutional authority and duty under hardly worth considering-while a million, which it acts in any of the particulars here or half a million, or a tenth part of that referred to, to adopt and prosecute a wise sum even, spent in works of necessary imand discreet system of harbor and river provement at home-spent for the benefit improvements which shall not slight or of his peace-loving and industrious counneglect the urgent wants of commerce and trymen at home-seems to strike him with navigation wherever they exist, or shall be alarm, as tending to the overthrow of the found to arise. Constitution, or at least to national bankruptcy and ruin.

It is a little curious, certainly, to see a President, who finds no constitutional difficulty in the way of paying money out of the national treasury for the construction or use of a canal or railway from ocean to ocean, across Mexican territory, or of sending out ships of war on an expedition to explore the Dead Sea, setting up his doctrines of "strict construction,' and his grave doubts, against all propositions for improving harbors and rivers at home. But Mr. Polk is used to looking abroad, instead of taking care of the interests of the nation at home. Oregon, up to "fifty-four forty," at one time was dearer to him, apparently, than the whole country he was appointed to preside over, from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean; and so New Mexico and California seem to be now. All his policy and all his energies have been directed to objects at a distance, and out of his own country.

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V. We are not, of course, permitted to wonder, after what we know of the manner in which the attention of the President has been engaged and absorbed in objects outside of the limits of his own country, that he should think it a matter of very trifling importance-if, indeed, he should think of such a matter at all-how the interests and affairs of the business community, how the interests of property, of industry and of labor, may be affected by the measures which the Government shall adopt for the supply of its own exchequer, and for the management of its funds and its fiscal affairs. Everybody knows, upon the slightest reflection, that such considerable operations as those referred to-the imposition of taxes in the shape of duties on imports, and the gathering in of revenue from them to the amount of twenty-five or thirty millions a year; the

national industry, or we must soon sink into overwhelming indebtedness. Our resort is necessarily to agriculture; we can go nowhere but to the soil. But those from whom we take our supplies of mer

lack of hands to work it; and except in case of a general failure of crops, and the very rare occurrence of a threatened famine, they want, and they will take, very little, almost nothing, comparatively, of the edible productions of our fields. The balance of trade of course runs against us; when we cannot pay in the productions of our industry, in kind, we must pay in gold and silver so long as we have it; and when that fails, as fail it must, since, in the operations of trade, its only legitimate and reliable use is to pay casual balances, then the last stage of national folly, distress and disgrace is reached. But what is all this to the President, so he but gets, in the mean time, his ample returns of revenue? And as little does it seem to concern him, that this is wholy a gratuitous mischief and ruin, which his tariff policy is bringing on the country. It admits of the clearest demonstration, that a tariff, arranged on the principles and general basis of that of 1842, and affording ample and equal protection to all the leading objects of our national industry, is a better tariff for revenue, if we would only give it steadiness and permanence, than Mr. Polk's tariff of 1846.

receipt of thirty, fifty, or sixty millions a year, by loans or otherwise, into the treasury, and the keeping, management, and disbursement of such vast sums by the Government that operations like these cannot be carried on at all without pro-chandise have a soil of their own, and no ducing a strong effect, one way or another, on the business and industry of the country, and on the monetary affairs of the community. Production in every department must be affected by them; currency must be affected by them; employment and prices must be affected by them. The occupations in which whole communities shall engage, the channels into which the industry of the whole country shall be turned, may, and must, to a considerable extent, depend on the action and policy of the Government in the particulars here referred to. To Mr. Polk, however, all this seems a matter of the most perfect indifference. Having certain foreign objects of ambition or particular desire to accomplish, requiring a heavy expenditure of money, he must have a tariff adjusted exclusively to the production of the greatest possible amount of revenue, regardless of the certain and inevitable destruction which it must bring, sooner or later, on particular occupations and forms of national industry, and on the general prosperity of the country. A tariff framed with a view to encourage and secure the largest possible amount of importations, for the sake of reaping the largest possible amount of revenue from the duties on them-this, and nothing less, can satisfy the President, though it be certain to the plainest comprehension that the result must be the depression of all kinds of business, the utter ruin of many, and, if the experiment be continued long enough, inevitable national bankruptcy. If the country must have its full supplies of manufactured goods from abroad-its woolens, cottons, iron, and a hundred other things-in order that the Government may tax the imports for revenue, then the production of such articles at home must be given up; and this involves necessarily the ruin of all interests engaged in such production at home. And if these supplies must be received from abroad, and not produced at home at all, or to any considerable extent, the importations must be enormously great, and they must be paid for, at some rate or other, by the current avails of our

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The policy of the President in regard to the tariff is of the same character as that which he has adopted in his plan for the management of the fiscal affairs of the government. So far as the Sub-treasury is not a great government cheat-in John Bull's language, an unmitigated humbugit is a cumbrous machine, giving no facilities or honest advantages whatever to the government, but bearing all the while with the weight of an incubus on the community, and ready at any moment of pecuniary difficulty, to become an instrument of intolerable distress to the whole country. In a country, where the established and universal currency is paper, issued on the basis of gold and silver, and immediately convertible into it, the Government undertakes or professes to repudiate that currency, and to take the gold and silver exclusively for its use as money. It goes to the basis, the foundation, on which the

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currency of the country-the universal money of current trade and business— rests, and saps and drains it away for its own selfish and exclusive use. In our apprehension, there could not well be exhibited in any other form, a more wanton disregard of the wants, the convenience, and the interests of the business community. We believe the time is not distant when the practical deformity and evils of this monstrous system will be seen and felt to a degree which the country will find utterly unendurable; unless, indeed, the Administration shall wholly fail, under the dispensing power of the Executive, to carry it into effect according to the letter and spirit of the enactment under which it exists.

VI. But this topic of the Sub-treasury, and that of the tariff, we must now leave, without even an attempt to discuss them on their merits. We have done what we promised-which was to indicate the leading subjects, or at least many of them, which we suppose must occupy the attention of the country, and especially of parties and political men, in the approaching canvass. In the merits of President Polk and his administration, whether he shall be a candidate for re-election or not, are necessarily involved the pretensions of the party that supports him, to have its domination perpetuated. In referring to those merits we may, in conclusion, mention one other comprehensive topic, deserving the fullest consideration at the hands of a community, where public virtue forms the whole foundation on which the institutions of the country rest. Has the administration of Mr. Polk been a virtuous administration? Has not its public policy, and its most prominent acts, been, in the main, destitute of all moral unction? Have they not to a great extent been positively unprincipled, and even profligate? We know there are those, seeming to be of amiable and correct deportment in private life, who hold the commission of the grossest political immoralities a very light matter. Mr. Polk may be of that number; we are not. The virtues of no people, under a republican and elective system, can stand before the infectious corruptions and immoralities of the government. As the government, so will the people be, in this respect. We are constrained to declare that we see in the con

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duct of the President, a most melancholy lack of that sincerity, truthfulness, candor and moderation-that devotion to high principle and to strict justice-which ought to characterize the Chief Magistrate of this great Republic. Compare him, in these moral qualities, with the great model, Washington! Mr. Polk came into his office on the basis of two great falsehoods laid down by his party, and with the aid of great cheat put forth by himself in person. This last was his letter to Mr. Kane on the tariff. The falsehoods were, first, the declaration of his nominating Convention, that "our title to the whole of Oregon was clear and unquestionable;" and the second consisted in calling the proposed measure of annexing Texas to the United States, "Re-annexation "-as if the State or Republic of Texas had once belonged to our Union, and was only now to be re-united to it; or as if it was only so many square miles of uninhabited territory to which he had once set up a diplomatic pretension, which was now to be added to our national domain. This was a bad beginning, and worse has followed. The President has constantly set up pretences instead of facts to explain and justify his proceedings with Mexico; his real designs from the beginning towards that country were those of the Oppressor and the Spoiler. He has dragged the country after him in a bold career of rapacity and conquest. He has treated the army, which has so nobly fought his battles abroad, with the deepest injustice, and broken its spirit by his appointments, his promotions, and his system of favoritism. He has treated his commanding Generals in the field, from a feeling of petty jealousy, with bad faith, deceit, and gross indignity. The use he has made of the patronage of his office has been in many instances corrupting and degrading to the character and dignity of the nation. His disposition in this respect is shown in the effort he has made, even since he has believed that peace was already made certain, to secure to himself the appointment of officers for ten new regiments to be added to the army, besides the potent voice he would have in the nomination of officers for twenty new regiments more of volunteers. the theme is too prolific for this article, after the space we have already occupied, and for the present we rest here. D. D. B.

But

THOMAS MILLER.

"He that can discern the loveliness of things, we call him Poet, Painter, Man of Genius, gifted, loveable."-CARLYLE on Heroes and Hero Worship.

"Wherever the heart speaks, there is always eloquence, interest, and instruction."--SIR E. BRYDGES' Recollections of Foreign Travel.

"Everything I see in the fields is to me an object, and I can look at the same rivulet, or at an handsome tree, every day of my life, with new pleasure."-COWPER, (in a letter to the Rev. Wm. Unwin.)

THE return of Spring, with its "glad light green," is to most of us a renewal of our youth. The sunshine has a warm, golden look, and appears to cling to the brown earth, trees, and fences. It is happiness to feel its genial influence. We contrast it with

"The winter's drenching rain

And driving snow," (BEATTIE,)

farm house. Huge bowls of rich samp and milk are rapidly consumed and as rapidly replenished; and how soothing to weary limbs, to repose upon the fresh smelling bed in the large open garret, where we often heard the big drops pattering on the roof, or pouring down in torrents.

"O Lord! this is an hugè rain! This were a weather for to sleepin in." CHAUCER.

The quiet of the country undoubtedly deepens the religion of a thoughtful mind, for the current of life there glides along more calmly than in the city, where but little time is left for reflection. A stillness broods over the heart, and over the landscape, on a Sabbath morning. The Sunday last past made a most agreeable impression on us. Rain had fallen during the previous night, but the sun rose bright and clear on Sunday, and every tree, bush and blade of grass glittered in its rays.

and look forward to the deep and glowing beauty, "the lusty bravery of summer, and to autumn, with its russet stubble fields, transparent air and water, and gay shifting clouds. Nature is ever young, and it is no wonder that the "way of life" of her ardent and sincere admirers never falls "into the sere and yellow leaf." Recollections of our own youth are mingled with walks by the brook side, rambles through meadows and woods; with cool gushing springs, at which we have often knelt and slaked our thirst, and made cups of walnut leaves fastened together by their stems, which proved to be convenient and elegant. The harvest field also has afforded us many hours of heart-felt delight. The air was musical with birds; cows were Raking hay is a great sharpener of the appetite, and what meal can be more de-cropping the short, rich herbage beneath some magnificent elm trees on the common opposite the window where we were sit

licious than the one eaten under

"A fresher green the smelling leaves displayed." PARNELL

"Wide branching trees with dark green leaf ting; and over all was the "blue rejoicing

rich clad ?"

LAMB.

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sky." Soon, the church bell rang its peals, summoning the poor and the rich to God's house, some to return thanks for past blessings, and others to implore for strength to bear up under sorrows and afflictions, and fervently to exclaim, "Thy will be done." Oh, it was a cheering and lovely sight to view the old and the young, fathers, mothers, the young maiden with dancing ring

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