circumstances may invincibly impose on their ability. Taken in this latter view, we acknowledge that their condition would be a subject for most melancholy contemplation,--if we did not hope for better times. The benevolent reflector, when sometimes led to survey in thought the endless myriads of beings with minds within the circuit of a country like this, will have a momentary vision of them as they would be if all improved to the highest mental condition to which it is _naturally possible_ for them to be exalted a magnificent spectacle; but it instantly fades and vanishes. And the sense is so powerfully upon him of the unchangeable economy of the world, which, even if the fairest visions of the millennium itself were realized, would still render such a thing _actually_ impossible, that he hardly regrets the bright scene was but a beautiful _mirage_, and melts away. His imagination then descends to view this immense tribe of rational beings in another, and comparatively moderate state of the cultivation of their faculties, a state not one-third part so lofty as that in which he had beheld all the individuals improved to the utmost of their natural capacity; and he thinks, that the condition of man's abode on earth _might_ admit of their being raised to _this_ elevation. But he soon sees that, till a mighty change shall come on the management of the affairs of nations, this too is impossible; and with regret he sees even this inferior ideal spectacle pass away, to rest on an age in distant prospect. At last he takes his imaginary stand on what he feels to be a very low level of the supposed improvement of the general popular mind; and he says, Thus much, at the least, should be a possibility allowed by the circumstances of the people under _any_ tolerable disposition of national interests;--and then he turns to look down on an actual condition in which care, and toil, and distress, render it impossible for a great proportion of the people to reach, or even approach, this his last and lowest conception of what the state of their minds ought to be. In spite of all the optimists, it _is_ a grievous reflection, after the race has had on earth so many thousands of years for attaining its most advantageous condition there, that all the experience, the philosophy, the science, the art, the power acquired by mind over matter,--that all the contributions of all departed and all present spirits and bodies, yes, and all religion too, should have come but to this;--to this, that in what is self-adulated as the most favored and improved nation of all terrestrial space and time, a vast proportion of the people are found in a condition which confines them, with all the rigor of necessity, to a mere childhood of intelligent existence, without its innocence.