To what is the difference of national character due? Is it to climate? Is the Negro a barbarian by a law of nature? Do his fiery sunshine and his luxuriant soil, his magnificent forest shades, or his mighty rivers, hiding their heads in inaccessible solitudes, and winding for thousands of miles through fields of the plantain and the sugar-cane, condemn him to perpetual inferiority of intellect? Was the brilliancy of the ancient Greek only an emanation from the land of bright skies and balmy airs?--was it the spirit of the sounding cataracts, and the impulse of the vine-covered hills? Was the northern tempest the creator of the northern character? and the perpetual dash of the ocean on the Scandinavian shore, or the roar of the thunder and the sweep of the whirlwind over the Tartar steppe, the training of the tribes which burst in upon the iron frontier of the Great Empire, and left it clay? The controversy has never yet been settled. Yet, on the whole, we are strongly inclined to think that the mightier impression is due to the operation of man on the mind of man. To our idea, "the globe, with all that it inherits," is but a vast school-room, with its scholars. The nations may enter with different propensities and capacities, but the purpose of the discipline is, to train all in the use of their original powers, to modify the rougher faculties, to invigorate the weaker; and perhaps, in some remoter period of the world and its completion, to educate a universal mind for the duties of a universal family. What education is to the individual, institutions are to the nation. Why was it that the ancient Roman was the conqueror, the legislator, the man of stern determination, and the example of patriot virtue? Why was he the man of an ambition to be satisfied with nothing narrower than the supremacy of the globe--the defier of the desert, the master of the ocean, the ruler of all the diadems of all mankind?