with Jefferson and French politics at the beginning of the present century. It has become dominant, but by no means triumphant; and its great obstacle has been the constitution. In the several states it has changed the constitutions one after the other, introducing universal suffrage, and other democratic features. But the national constitution has not been so easily reached; and it is the strength of the great party with which Clay and Webster are identified, and which is a constant check on the popular party. It is republican, but not simply democratic. The executive magistracy is elective; but the electors are not the people, directly, but electoral colleges, appointed by the several states; and the office itself is endowed with prerogatives, some of which are more unlimited than the corresponding rights of the British crown. Our senate is a mere modification of the House of Lords: it is a body more select than the lower house, and not so immediately responsible to constituents; and its practical working shows the great importance of such a balance-wheel in any government. There is no working without it, in spite of what your Roebucks may say. The House of Commons reappears in our House of Representatives, which, like its great original, is the safety-valve of popular feeling, and gives sonorous vent to a mighty pressure of steam and vapour, which would otherwise blow us to atoms, with a much less endurable noise. The whole fabric of our law is a precious patrimony derived, with our blood, from England. Our new states are filling up with emigrants from the continent of Europe, but they all adopt the law of their older sisters; and thus the institutions of the immortal Alfred may be found among the Swedes and Danes of Wisconsin. These, then, are the elements of our strength; and you observe they partake of the strength of the British empire, which has been legitimately and naturally imparted to us, like the mother's life-blood to the daughter of her womb. We have indeed characteristic peculiarities. We have tried some new experiments; but let not France suppose she can imitate them. We are a new country, a sparse population, and our people have their heads full of subduing the soil, and setting water-wheels in streams, and making roads and canals. We have no natural taste for insurrection and confusion, for we have nobody that is idle enough to want such work. Our new wine, then, has been put into new bottles; and the fool that attempts to decant it into the old vessels of Europe, will ruin it and them together.