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pursuit in life; and having the ability, he should exert it to guard against and arrest the numerous impositions of the age. There have always been, and we have reason to believe always will be, those who subsist upon the darkness of the human intellect, and traffic in the credulity of mankind. No sooner is one delusion exhausted, or imposture exposed, than another, if possible more impudent and shameless still, is substituted in its stead, and ignorance and superstition vie with each other in swelling the train of its votaries. In the old world, the genuine clippings from the toe nails of St. Peter, which have been sold at enormous prices to the devout at various times, would probably load a camel; and the wood which is preserved and cherished as sacred relics, and exhibited for gain, as fragments of the true cross, in every country of Europe, would build a ship of the line. In the new, it finds amusement in exhuming the fossil remains of a golden revelation, whose cabalistic words are more occult and mysterious than the Sibylline leaves of mythology; and anon it finds indemnity for the omissions of the past in a supplementary revelation, which, in view of the subject, is more appropriately upon brass. It penetrates the future at its own convenience, and calculates the final conflagration as an astronomer calculates an eclipse; and animal magnetism, fixing her mental eye upon physical objects, sets credulity agape, and snores the last sad requiem. In medicine it seeks relief in vermifuges, pain extractors and elixirs of life, which, if applied in proper quantities and at appropriate periods, would not only enable man to clothe himself with perpetual youth, and laugh at the infirmities of age, but to conquer his last great enemy, and cheat the grave of its victim. It robs political economy of its simplicity and truth, and invests it with the recondite mysteries which enveloped heathen philosophy, and benevolently discovers panaceas and restoratives which are to correct all the imperfections of our nature, and avert the thousand complicated ills to which poor frail humanity is heir.

All impostures have one feature in common-that of first providing for themselves, in pretending to care for others; in heralding their own purity and benevolence, and in recommending to the world, in the true language of the craft, to submit to the prescription, and "beware of counterfeits." Ig

norance is the meat upon which imposture feeds, and it is deprived of aliment in proportion as knowledge is increased. And the same standard of intelligence which renders labor attractive-which teaches that it is honorable, and inculcates lessons of virtue and economy in domestic and social life, will dispel the remnants of superstition and bigotry which the dark ages have left behind them, unmask and expose the charlatan and the impostor, and inspire sentiments of virtuous patriotism, the most elevated and enduring. But this standard, whether designed to govern public or private morals-the social or political relations--the economy of the fireside or that of the legislative hall, must be raised and maintained by the authority of opinion alone, and not by sumptuary laws or restrictive enactments. It must be enforced by the moral, and not the penal code--by the schoolmaster, and not by the government official. It must be engraved upon the tablet of the heart, and not written upon the pages of the statute.

The British statesman, hugging his peevish conceits, and cherishing that most impious of dogmas, the "divine right of kings," is unable to conceive how personal safety or the wellbeing of society can be preserved by opinion; or how a government can contain the elements of strength and duration which rests alone upon popular intelligence, and thrills with every fibre of its frame; and hence his belief in the necessity of placing the government beyond the reach of the "lawless multitude." But a purer and sublimer creed has established the welcome truth, that there is both strength and duration in a government of opinion, and that it is wise to reject the principles of a physical for those of an intellectual age. Liberty is the price and the reward of eternal vigilance, and its lamp burns with a brighter and purer glow when surrounded by intelligence and self-control, than when nursed by a restrictive policy of artificial morals, which lights its farthing candle to aid the meridian splendor. Our government is our peopleour people our government. Our institutions, domestic, social and political, are founded in freedom, and he who aids in forming the first code of restrictions, however specious the pretence, or by whatever name it may be dignified, will have aided in forging one link in the great chain of despotism, which, if riveted upon us, will load down the energies of the people like

the limbs of a Trenck in the dungeons of Galtz and Magdeburg. Xerxes cast fetters into the sea to restrain the dashing of its waves, and Canute stretched out his puny sceptre to prescribe the limits of their flow; but the mighty waters rolled on in mockery of their power: and he who essays to restrict the moral elements within the boundaries established by his own conceits, will see his weakness derided and his impotence laughed to scorn. They may at times be lashed by the fury of the tempest, the waves run mountains high, and threaten danger and destruction; but anon, they will be purified by their own agitations, and return again to a repose serene and beautiful.

If our republic endures, as it must and will, its elements of strength must be freedom and intelligence. So long as men in public or private life are virtuous for virtue's sake--for the rewards it bestows-there will be an earnest of safety and abiding hope;-but when they shall become virtuous from necessity, honest upon compulsion, and frugal pursuant to statute, we may listen for the knell of departing liberty and glory. We are now struggling with the mighty experiment, whether perfect freedom will ensure duration, and endeavoring to establish as truth, that the whole are as virtuous as a part. The agricultural population form the sheet anchor of the republic—the Christian's consolation-the patriot's hope. It is for them to foster and preserve that pure and elevated standard of morals and intelligence with the mass, which will enable us to outride the storm that has overwhelmed and blotted from existence the governments of the old world. The grandeur and beauty of Egypt, mistress of the arts, has vanished from the earth like the foot prints of the traveller in the desert. She is illustrious only in her lofty pyramids; and, apt emblem of herself, her gloomy repositories for the dead. Humbled and despairing, she lies manacled at the foot of the barbarian, and hugs her chains in silence. Greece, once the light of the world in science and learning, marred and despoiled, is struggling to prolong a degraded existence, with the foot of the conqueror upon her neck. And Rome, whose victorious banner waved triumphantly over a vanquished world, has degenerated to a land of fiddlers and dancers. They fell, too, in the moment of their haughtiness and pride. The faded

monuments of their existence and greatness stand as beacons to mankind to warn them of the dangers of war, luxury and ambition. In pleasing contrast the moral grandeur of our republic rises up, blooming with perennial beauty and smiling above the ruin, like flowers of spring succeeding the desolations of winter. The land of the free--the home of the brave-the asylum of the oppressed. Its foundation freedom-its structure virtue and intelligence, and its strength, equality. Proclaiming to the world the gratifying truth, that man is capable of self-government; and that the path of virtue for governments, as well as individuals, is the path of happiness and peace.

ADDRESS

OF THE ALBANY REPEAL ASSOCIATION TO THE PEOPLE OF

IRELAND, January 3, 1844.

[The meeting of the Association for which this brief address was prepared, and at which it was adopted, was held in the Capitol of the State, (which was splendidly illuminated for the occasion,) and presided over by ex-Governor Seward, who made an elaborate and able speech on taking the chair, and letters expressing sympathy with the objects of the Association were read from ex-President Van Buren, Governor Bouck, Michael Hoffman and other prominent public men of the day.]

TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND.

THE members of the Albany Repeal Association, and other friends of civil and religious freedom, at the Capitol of the State of New York, uniting their voices in concert with other friends of equality and the rights of man throughout North America, on this day, consecrated to the cause of Irish emancipation, tender to you, and to the friends of freedom throughout the civilized world, their sympathetic congratulations: and, by virtue of the great charter of human rights vouchsafed by the Almighty to the whole family of man, and in the name of Eternal Justice, demand for you and for your children the blessings of civil and religious liberty.

We have witnessed with deep emotion the degrading vassalage which has paralyzed your energies-which has wrung from your labor its wonted reward-dimmed the bright passages in the life of your youth-extinguished the light and beauty of childhood-and added grief and heaviness to years.

We have beheld, with sentiments of the liveliest admiration, the strong evidences you have manifested of a capacity for self-government, in expelling from your borders the vampire Intemperance, which was gnawing like an adder's tooth at

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