history of Europe, may be regarded as a righteous judgment of heaven upon them, for having suffered it to be _possible_ for these new ideas of liberty and rights to come to the people in a state so unprepared. What were all their commanding authorities of government, their splendid ecclesiastical establishments, their great personal wealth and influence,--all their lofty powers and distinctions which even their basest sycophants, sacerdotal or poetical, told them, as one topic of adulation, that they were not entrusted with for their own sole gratification,--what were all these for, if the great body of the communities over which they presided were to be retained in a state in which they could not be touched by a few bold speculations in favor of popular rights, without exploding as with infernal fire? How appropriate a retribution of Sovereign Justice, that those who were wickedly the cause should be the victims of the effect. Where such a consequence has not followed, but where, nevertheless, these notions of popular rights have come into the minds of the people very much in precedence and disproportion to the general cultivation of their intelligence and moral sense, it is most important that all diligence should be given to bring up these neglected improvements to stand in rank with those too forward speculations. Whether this shall be done or not, these notions and feelings are not things come into life without an instinct of what they have to do. The disapproves of schemes for throwing the greatest practicable measure of sound corrective knowledge into the minds of the multitude, may take instruction or may decline it from seeing that, both in this country and other states of Europe, there has gone forth among the mass of the people a spirit of revolt from the obligation, which would retain their reverence to institutions on the strength simply of their being established or being ancient; a spirit that reacts, with deep and settled antipathy, against some of the arrangements and claims of the order into which the national community has been disposed by institutions and the course of events; a spirit which regards some of the appointments and requirements of that order, as little better than adaptations of the system to the will and gratification of the more fortunate divisions of the species. And it has shown itself in a very different character from that of a mere pining despondency, or the impotent resentment excited sometimes in timidity itself by severe grievance, but quelled by alarm at its own rashness. The element and the temperament of its nature, and the force of its action, have been displayed in the tremendous concussions attending its conflict with the power arrayed in behalf of the old order of things to crush it. And _is_ this spirit crushed? Is it subdued? Is it in the least degree reduced?--reduced, we mean, in its internal power, as a combination of the