One more distinction of our times has been, that effect which missionary and other philanthropic societies have had, to render familiar to common knowledge, by means of their meetings and publications, a great number of such interesting and important facts, in the state of other countries and our own, as were formerly quite beyond the sphere of ordinary information. In aid of all these means at work in the trial to raise the people from the condition in which they had been so many ages sunk and immovable, there has been of late years the unpretending but important ministration of an incessant multifarious inventiveness in making almost every sort of information offer itself in brief, familiar, and attractive forms, adapted to youth or to adult ignorance; so that knowledge, which was formerly a thing to be searched and dug for "as for hid treasures," has seemed at last beginning to effloresce through the surface of the ground on all sides of us. The statement of what recent times have produced for effecting an alteration among the people, must include the prodigious excitement in the political world. It were absurd, it is true, to name this in the simple character of a _cause_, when we speak of the rousing of the popular mind from a long stagnation; it being itself a proof and result of some preceding cause beginning to pervade and disturb that stagnation. But whatever may be assigned as the true and sufficient explanation of its origin, we have to look on the mighty operation of its progress, forcing a restlessness, instability, and tendency to change, into almost every part of the social economy. In the whole compass of time there has been no train of events, that has within so short a period stirred to the very bottom the mind of so vast a portion of the race. And the power of this great commotion has less consisted in what may be termed its physical energy, evinced in grand exploits and catastrophes, than in its being an intense activity of _principles_. It was as different from other convulsions in the moral world, as would be a tempest attributed to the direct intervention of a mighty spirit, whether believed celestial or infernal, from one raised in the elements by mere natural causes. The people were not, as in other instances of battles, revolutions, and striking alternations of fortune, gazing a at mere show of wonderful events, but regarded these events as the course of a great practical debate of questions affecting their own interests. And now, when we have put all these things together, we may well pause to indulge again our wonder what _could_ have been the mental situation of a majority of the inhabitants of this country, antecedently to this creation and conjunction of so many means and influences for awaking them to something of an intelligent existence. Section III.