We have lingered on these details, which to many will be dry and uninteresting, because they supply a kind of guide to the changes which must ultimately take place in the tax laws of this country, and because, further, they furnish an answer to all those objections which periodically disturb the minds of the timid and doubtfully patriotic in our midst. But these lessons we must leave the reader to extract for himself. We close simply with saying that, while excessive and undiscriminating taxation is always a curse, yet taxation, properly imposed, although severe and long continued, may be far from disadvantageous. We have seen the English people slowly arising, through two centuries, from a nation comparatively free from taxation and without a national debt, to one bearing an annual tax of three hundred and fifty million dollars, and holding absorbed in its midst a national debt of nearly four thousand million dollars. We have seen it during this period constantly advancing in prosperity and greatness--the national debt adding stability to the Government, and taxation giving caution and stability to the transactions of private life. APHORISMS. NO. I. One of the most sublime of all facts beneath that of the Divine Being, appears in the existence of an immortal soul. There it stands--once for all, once forever. The earth might be wasted away, at the rate of a single grain in a century, without passing the very infancy of our spirit's life. How insignificant, in the comparison, a world like our own, in all its temporal aspects. What the future duration of the earth may be, we have no means of knowing; but if less than endless, it is of little moment in the presence of the least capacious human soul. THE LOVE LUCIFER. CHAPTER II.