To the question, "What have the People ever gained but by Revolution?" I answer, boldly, If by revolution be understood the law of the sword, Liberty has lost far more than she ever gained by it. The sword was the destroyer of the Lycian Confederacy and the Achæan League. The sword alternately enslaved and disenthralled Thebes and Athens, Sparta, Syracuse, and Corinth. The sword of Rome conquered every other free State, and finished the murder of Liberty in the ancient world, by destroying herself. What but the sword, in modern times, annihilated the Republics of Italy, the Hanseatic Towns, and the primitive independence of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland? What but the sword partitioned Poland, assassinated the rising liberty of Spain, banished the Huguenots from France, and made Cromwell the master, not the servant, of the People? And what but the sword of Republican France destroyed the independence of half of Europe, deluged the continent with tears, devoured its millions upon millions, and closed the long catalogue of guilt, by founding and defending to the last, the most powerful, selfish, and insatiable of military despotisms? The sword, indeed, delivered Greece from the Persian invader, expelled the Tarquins from Rome, emancipated Switzerland and Holland, restored the Prince to his throne, and brought Charles to the scaffold. And the sword redeemed the pledge of the Congress of '76 when they plighted to each other "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor." And yet, what would the redemption of that pledge have availed towards the establishment of our present government, if the spirit of American institutions had not been both the birthright and the birth-blessing of the Colonies? The Indians, the French, the Spaniards, and even England herself, warred in vain against a people, born and bred in the household, at the domestic altar of Liberty herself They had never been slaves, for they were born free. The sword was a herald to proclaim their freedom, but it neither created nor preserved it. A century and a half had already beheld them free in infancy, free in youth, free in early manhood. Theirs was already the spirit of American institutions; the spirit of Christian freedom of a temperate, regulated freedom, of a rational civil obedience. For such a people the sword, the law of violence, did and could do nothing but sever the bonds which bound her colonial wards to their unnatural guardian. They redeemed their pledge, sword in hand; but the sword left them as it found them, unchanged in character, freemen in thought and in deed, instinct with the immortal spirit of American institutions. T. S Grimké. VI. DUTY OF LITERARY MEN TO THEIR COUNTRY.