force in the case, important concessions to them, on the part of the superior orders. A people advanced to such a state, would make its moral power felt in a thousand ways, and every moment. This general augmentation of sense and right principle would send forth, against all arrangements and inveterate or more modern usages, of the nature of invidious exclusion, arbitrary repression, and the debasement of great public interests into a detestable private traffic, an energy, which could no more be resisted than the power of the sun, when he advances in the spring to annihilate the relics and vestiges of the winter. This plastic influence would modify the institutions of the national community, to a state better adapted to secure all the popular rights; and to convey the genuine, collective opinion, to bear directly on the counsel and transaction of national concerns. That opinion would be so unequivocally manifested, as to leave no pretence for a doubtful interpretation of its signs; and with such authority as to preclude any question whether to set it at defiance. That such effects _would_ be inseparable from a great general advancement of the people in knowledge and corrected character, must be freely acknowledged to its disapproves. And is it _because_ these would be the consequences, that they disapprove it? Then let them say, what it is that _they_ would expect from an opposite system. _What_ is it, that they could seriously promise themselves, from the conservative virtue of all the ignorance, that can henceforward be retained among the people of this part of the world? It is true, the remaining ignorance is so great that they cannot well overrate its _general_ amount; but how can they fail to perceive the importance of those _particulars_ in which its dominion has been broken up? There is indeed a hemisphere of "gross darkness over the people;" it may be possible to withhold from it long the illumination of the sun; but in the mean time it has been rent by portentous lights and flashes, which have excited a thought and agitation not to be stilled by the continuance of the gloom. There have come in on the popular mind some ideas, which the wisest of those who dread or hate their effect there, look around in vain for the means of expelling. And these glimpses of partial intelligence, these lights of dubious and possibly destructive direction amidst the night, will continue to prompt and lead that mind, with a hazard which can sease only with the opening upon it of the true daylight of knowledge. That knowledge should have been antecedent to the falling of these inflammatory ideal among the people; and if they have come before the proper time, that is to say, before the people were prepared to judge rationally of their rights, and to apprehend clearly the duties inseparable from them as a condition of their enjoyment, the calamitous consequences to the higher classes, as seen in the recent