self-interest; whether they entertain a respect for learning and a taste for art,--bringing the one from abroad, and cherishing the other at home;--whether, in short, the merchants are the princes or the money-grubbers of the community. The spirit of this class will determine that of their subordinates. If the masters of commerce are liberal and enlightened, their servants will be thriving, and will have the virtues which wait upon self-respect: if the contrary, they will be debased. A Jewish money-lender is no more like a merchant of Salem or Bourdeaux than Malay porters at Macao are like the clerk class of Amsterdam. In the mercantile orders of society may be found the extremes of honour, generosity, diligence, and accuracy,--and of treachery, meanness, and selfish carelessness. It is the traveller's business to note the tendencies to the one or the other,--from the vexatious hog and yam traffic of the islands of the South Sea, to the magnificent transactions of the traders of Hamburgh. * * * * * The Health of a community is an almost unfailing index of its morals. No one can wonder at this who considers how physical suffering irritates the temper, depresses energy, deadens hope, induces recklessness, and, in short, poisons life. The domestic affections, too, are apt to languish through disappointment in countries where the average of death is very high. There is least marriage in unhealthy countries, and most in healthy ones,--other circumstances being equal. The same kind of spirit (however largely diluted) prevails in sickly regions as in societies which are visited by a pestilence. Study the tempers of the people who are subject to goîtres, of those who live in marshes, of those who encounter an annual tropical fever; and contrast it with that of dwellers on mountains, and in dry prairies, and in well-ventilated towns. What selfishness, apathy, and discontent in the one class! and what kindliness, briskness, and cheerfulness in the other! In the United States, wide spreading as the country is, and comprehending every variety of people, and almost of climate, the common deficiency of health produces moral effects which must strike the most careless traveller. The epicurean temper of the south, and the puritanic mood of the north, are alike stimulated by this. In the south, the overseers, whose business it is to encounter the fever, seem to be always practically saying, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." There is a recklessness among the trading classes there, a heathen levity and grossness, which are doubtless in a great degree owing to the presence of slavery, but also in part to the certainty of a very large annual mortality. Not the purest Christianity itself could preserve a people so placed from a more or less modified fatalism. The richer members of society leave their homes for some months of every year, and go northwards; and this perpetual unsettling of their families has a bad