Regarding Asia, on the whole, we perceive its great inferiority to Europe in every thing which civilization boasts of. For the causes of this we must look to the circumstances of sun and soil—the latter, especially. Europe, unlike Asia, is broken into many distinct territories by mountain chains, seas, straits, rivers, etc. Nature, in laying out portions of her domain, as it were, prepared those divisions, segregations, and isolations which fostered national independence, and left to the European families of men leisure to entertain the more humanizing and elevating thoughts of life. Europe became crowded with nationalities in which the federal principle grew up, perilously shaken by blows, to be sure, and nourished with human gore, but still struggling forward; by degrees, into more assured vitality; while flowing around and through all, the civilizing sea with its breezes fanned into strength the warm blood in the arteries of enterprise, toil and progress. The Asian continent, on the contrary, is comparatively a vast, unwatered, sun-baked extent of solid ground, open, for the most part, to the wild winds and the wilder hordes of barbarians and semi-barbarians. If, by some convulsion of Nature, the Caspian Sea could have been widened and prolonged eastward for fifteen hundred miles or so, the history of Asia, and, perhaps, of the world, would certainly have been different from that we now peruse. Freedom and national prosperity are hard to locate. They have never seemed to thrive, as yet, (we don’t know how it may be in the future) in the soft and sunny places of the world. They require hard conditions of the sun and soil to bring them to a valid and permanent state of existence. They seem to have succeeded best in presence of a difficulty—proving apparently, the truth of the saying, that the price of independence is eternal vigilance. The perfection of the human race belongs to the temperate zones and to the necessity of energy imposed by their elemental conditions. The civilization of warm, fertile, spontaneous countries is not that by which the progress of the world is accelerated. Switzerland has been kept free by her barren ground and her keen winds, which have invigorated the souls of her people; and they have also, probably, dissuaded the ambition of her neighbors. But it is certain that she has shown herself courageous and determined to be free. The Hollowland, south of the Baltic, lying half in the ocean, and subject to its overflows, was not very vehemently regarded by the rulers of men, and therefore, for a long time, served as a refuge for the peaceful and industrious. Labor built up their energies in that place, and their spirit of independence along with the dykes, and they at last learned to love and die for “their new-catched miles” taken from under the trident of Poseidon; and so they made that land the asylum of liberty, toleration, enlightenment and commercial prosperity. Venice,