In our own God-given faculties lie both the '_Procul, procul, este profani!_' and the 'Tread not on me, or I bite,' which in all ages have constituted so-called national honor and pride, and which will be to us the broad aegis of protection when the storm-cloud of war darkens the horizon of the world. If this fail, the fault will be our own; we shall be unworthy custodians of the treasure; our downfall will be merited as it is sudden and sure, and few will be found to mourn over us. As the effervescence of new wine brings all impurities to the surface, casting off those noxious superfluities whose presence is pollution to the liquid and disease and death to the partaker, so the present war is but the effervescence of our as yet new and unpurified political system, whereby all errors and impurities are thrown to the surface of society, ready to be skimmed off by the hand of the people, who are themselves the vintners and the rectifiers. No system of government is without radical defects, and it was not to be expected that our own would be free from error, founded as it is upon a principle new to the world, or only known as having totally failed in the past through the clumsiness of its originators and subsequent custodians--a system which had little aid from the experiences of the past, and must necessarily grope in the darkness which surrounds all new experiments of this kind, lighted only by the few, meagre, _a priori_ truths of deductive reasoning. Our ancestors, hampered as they were by the lack of this great experience of social life, legislated for the men and circumstances of their time; and though they had ever an eye to the future, yet, conscious of the fallibility of human wisdom and foresight, they themselves did not expect their work to stand unchanged for all time. New circumstances would arise--the people themselves would change with time, and with them must necessarily change the laws that govern their actions. Law and government must keep pace with the progress of humanity, else the nation itself becomes effete, superannuated, deteriorated. Many errors there doubtless are in our system, taking their rise as well in the very commencement of our existence as from the fluctuations of society. Of these, some have hitherto lain inert and concealed, from the very lack of circumstances to induce their development, and from the lack of a field of action. Others have worked so slowly and insidiously as to have remained totally concealed from our view, as well from the fact of their never having as yet been productive of any decided and palpable evil effect, as from our becoming gradually accustomed to them and their workings, and from the preoccupation of the public mind with more exciting questions. But in all times of popular excitement and tumult, of revolutionary ideas and attempted violent reform, errors spring forth in dazzling brightness from the darkness of the past, like Minerva from