affecting a high conscientious principle would be apt to incur ridicule, as a man foolishly divesting himself of a privilege;--unless, indeed, he let them understand that hypocrisy was his way of maintaining that privilege, and turning it to account. The people are thus, by their ignorance, and what inseparably attends it, far removed and estranged from the more cultivated part of their fellow-countrymen; and consequently from every beneficial influence under which a state of friendly contiguity, if we may so express it, would have placed them. Let us now see what, in this abandonment to themselves, are their growing dispositions toward the superior orders and the existing arrangements of the community; dispositions which are promoted by causes more definite than this estrangement considered merely as the negation of benevolent intercourse, but to which it mightily contributes. Times may have been when the great mass, while placed in such decided separation from the upper orders, combined such a quietude with their ignorance, that they had little other than submissive feelings toward these superiors, whose property, almost, for all service and obsequiousness, they were accustomed to consider themselves; when no question would occur to them why there should be so vast a difference of condition between beings of the same race; when no other proof was required of the right appointment of their lot, however humble it might be, than their being, and their forefathers having been, actually in it; and when they did not presume, hardly in thought, to make any inferences from the fact of the immense disproportion of numbers and consequent physical strength between them and their superiors. [Footnote: Here, however, it should be observed that in the former age, when there was far less of jealous invidious feeling between the upper and lower classes than has latterly intervened, there was a more amicable manner of intercommunication. The settled and perfectly recognized state of subordination precluded on the one side, all apprehension of encroachment, and on the other the disposition to it.] But the times of this perfect, unquestioning, unmurmuring succumbency under the actual allotment have passed away; except in such regions as the Russian empire, where they have yet long to continue. In other states of Europe, but especially in our own, the ignorance of the people has nowhere prevented them from acquiring a sense of their strength and importance; with a certain ill-conceived, but stimulant notion, of some change which they think ought to take place in their condition. How, indeed, should it have been possible for them to remain unaware of this strength and importance, while the whole civilized world was shaken with a practical and tremendous controversy between the two grand opposed orders of society, concerning their respective rights; or that they should not have taken a strong, and from the rudeness of