The observer may obtain further light upon the moral ideas of a people by noting the degree of their Attachment to Kindred and Birth-place. This species of attachment is so natural, that none are absolutely without it; but it varies in degree, according as the moral taste of the people goes to enhance or to subdue it. The Swiss and the American parent both send their children abroad; but with what different feelings and views! The Swiss father dismisses his daughter to teach in a school at Paris or London, and his sons to commerce or war. He resigns himself to a hard necessity, and supports them with suggestions of the honour of virtuous independence, and of the delight of returning when it is achieved. They, in their exile, can never see a purple shade upon a mountain side, a gleaming sheet of water, or a nestling village, without a throb of the heart, and a sickening longing for home.--The New England mother, with her tribe of children around her on her hill-side farm, nourishes them with tales of the noble extent of their country,--how its boundary is ever shifting westwards, and what a wild life it is there in the forest, with the Red men for neighbours, and inexhaustible wealth in the soil, ready for the hand which shall have enterprise to work for it. She tells of one and another, but lately boys like her children, who are now judges and legislators,--founders of towns, or having counties named after them. As her young people grow up, they part off eagerly from the old farm,--one into a southern city, another into the western forest, a third to a prairie in a new territory; and the daughters marry, and go over the mountains too. The mother may have sighs to conceal, but she does conceal them; and the sons, so far from lingering,--are impatient till they are gone. Their idea of national honour,--both their patriotic and their personal ambition,--is concerned; and they welcome the hour of dispersion as the first step towards the great objects of their life. Some return to the old neighbourhood to take a wife; but they do not think of passing their second childhood where they spent their first,--any more than the Greek colonists who swarmed from their narrow native districts. The settlers of the west go there, not to obtain a certain amount of personal property, but land, station, and power.--How different again are the Scotch--the people of the strongest family attachments! In the modified and elevated feudalism of clanship, pride and love of kindred constitute the animating social principle. Their clan-music is to them what the Ranz de Vaches is to the Swiss: the one echoing the harmonics of social intercourses, as the other revives the melodies of mountain life. Through the love of kindred, the love of birth-place flourishes among the Scotch. The Highland emigrants in Canada not only clasp hands when they hear played the march of their clan, but wept when they found that heather would not grow in their newly-adopted soil.