THAT some of the leaders of the hostile party in America acted upon liberal and patriotic views, cannot be doubted. There were many, indeed, of whom the public good was the leading principle; and to these the cause was a noble one: yet even these little foresaw the result. Had they known what a cold selfish character, what a dereliction of religious principle, what furious factions, and wild unsettled notions of government, were to be the consequence of this utter alienation from the parent state, they would have shrunk back from the prospect. Those fine minds who, nurtured in the love of science and of elegance, looked back to the land of their forefathers for models of excellence, and drank inspiration from the production of the British muse, could not but feel this rupture as “a wrench from all we love, from all we are.” They, too, might wish, when time had ripened their growing empire, to assert that independence which, when mature in strength and knowledge, we claim even of the parents we love and honour. But to snatch it, with a rude and bloody grasp, outraged the feelings of those gentler children of the common parent. Mildness of manners, refinement of mind, and all the softer virtues that spring up in the cultivated paths of social life, nurtured by generous affections, were undoubtedly to be found on the side of the unhappy royalists; whatever superiority in vigour and intrepidity might be claimed by their persecutors. Certainly, however necessary the ruling powers might find it to carry their system of exile into execution, it has occasioned to the country an irreparable privation. When the edict of Nantz gave the scattering blow to the protestants of France, they carried with them their arts, their frugal regular habits, and that portable mine of wealth which is the portion of patient industry. The chasm produced in France, by the departure of so much humble virtue, and so many useful arts, has never been filled. What the loss of the Huguenots was to commerce and manufactures in France, that of the loyalists was to religion, literature, and amenity, in America. The silken threads were drawn out of the mixed web of society, which has ever since been comparatively coarse and homely. The dawning light of elegant science was quenched in universal dullness. No ray has broke through the general gloom except the phosphoric lightnings of her cold-blooded philosophers, the deistical Franklin, the legitimate father of the American ‘age of calculation.’ So well have “the children of his soul” profited by the frugal lessons of this apostle of Plutus, that we see a new empire blest in its infancy with all the saving virtues which are the usual portion of cautious and feeble age; and we behold it with the same complacent surprise which fills our minds at the sight of a young miser.