It is, indeed, a melancholy fact, that nations partake much more frequently of the bad than the good features of the individuals composing them, and it requires no small amount of virtue to flavour the great caldron of a people, and make its incense rise gratefully to heaven. For this reason, we are ever ready to accept with enthusiasm anything like a national tribute to high principle and honour. Such glorious bursts are a source of pride to human nature itself, and we hail with acclamation these evidences of exalted feeling, which make men “come nearer to the gods.” The greater the sacrifice to selfish interests and prejudices, the more do we prize the effort. Think for a moment what a sensation of surprise and admiration, wonderment, awe, and approbation it would excite throughout Europe, if, by the next arrival from Boston, came the news that “the Americans had determined to pay their debts!” That at some great congress of the States, resolutions were carried to the effect, “that roguery and cheating will occasionally lower a people in the estimation of others, and that the indulgences of such national practices may be, in the end, prejudicial to national honour;” “that honesty, if not the best, may be good policy, even in a go-a-head state of society;” “that smart men, however a source of well-founded pride to a people, are now and then inconvenient from the very excess of their smartness;” “that seeing these things, and feeling all the unhappy results which mistrust and suspicion by foreign countries must bring upon their com-merce, they have determined to pay something in the pound, and go a-head once more.” I am sure that such an announcement would be hailed with illuminations from Hamburg to Leghorn. American citizens would be cheered wherever they were found; pumpkin pie would figure at royal tables, and twist and cocktail be handed round with the coffee; our exquisites would take to chewing and its consequences; and our belles, banishing Rossini and Donizetti, would make the air vocal with the sweet sounds of Yankee Doodle. One cannot at a moment contemplate what excesses our enthusiasm might not carry us to; and I should not wonder in the least if some great publisher of respectable standing might not start a pirated reprint of the _New York Herald_. Let me now go back and explain, if my excitement will permit me, how I have been led into such extravagant imaginings. I have already remarked, that nations seldom gave evidence of noble bursts of feeling; still more rarely, I regret to say, do they evince any sorrow for past misconduct--any penitence for by-gone evil. This would be, indeed, the severest ordeal of a people's greatness; this, the brightest evidence of national purity. Happy am I to say such an instance is before us; proud am I to be the man to direct public attention to the feet. The following paragraph I copy verbatim from the _Times_.