which govern this world, that in every country there should be a penalty of social wretchedness and degradation attached to the use of that particular food which its climate and soil are best suited to produce. Can it be supposed that the blessings of nature are only a moral snare for us, and that, while she has given to the American the maize plant--oats to the Scotch Highlander--rice to the Hindoo--the banana to the inhabitant of Brazil--a regard for their social well-being requires each of them to renounce these gifts, and to spend their labour in extorting from the unwilling soil some less congenial kind of subsistence? Virgil has warned the husbandman-- "Pater ipse colendi Haud facilem esse viam voluit." But it were surely a dire aggravation of the difficulties of his task if his most plentiful harvest were also the most injurious to his advancement and true happiness. We cannot now, however, examine the grounds of a doctrine so paradoxical, and have adverted to it only to remark that it seems destined to meet with a most direct practical refutation in North America, where we find the habitual use of what we choose to consider the coarser grains associated with the highest intelligence and the most rapid development of social progress. There can be no doubt that the nature of the food generally used in any nation must exert an important influence on its prosperity; but it is difficult to understand how that prosperity should be promoted by the universal use of that variety which costs most labour. At all events, it is certainly a subject of very interesting inquiry, in reference to the increasing consumption among ourselves of wheat--the dearest and most precarious species of grain, much of it imported from other countries--and its gradual abandonment in North America, what effect these opposite courses may have on the future destinies of the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. [5] Vol. i. p. 80.