The lightning-line did not exist at the period of which we are writing. It is our good fortune to be an intimate acquaintance of the distinguished citizen who has bestowed this great gift on his own country--one that will transmit his name to posterity, side by side with that of Fulton. In his case, as in that of the last-named inventor, attempts have been made to rob him equally of the honours and the profits of his very ingenious invention. As respects the last, we hold that it is every hour becoming less and less possible for any American to maintain his rights against numbers. There is no question that the government of this great Republic was intended to be one of well-considered and upright principles, in which certain questions are to be referred periodically to majorities, as the wisest and most natural, as well as the most just mode of disposing of them. Such a government, well administered, and with an accurate observance of its governing principles, would probably be the best that human infirmity will allow men to administer; but when the capital mistake is made of supposing that mere numbers are to control all things, regardless of those great fundamental laws that the state has adopted for its own restraint, it may be questioned if so loose, and capricious, and selfish a system, is not in great danger of becoming the very worst scheme of polity that cupidity ever set in motion. The tendency--not the _spirit_ of the institutions, the two things being the very antipodes of each other, though common minds are so apt to confound them--the _tendency_ of the institutions of this country, in flagrant opposition to their _spirit_ or _intentions_, which were devised expressly to restrain the disposition of men to innovate, is out of all question to foster this great abuse, and to place numbers above principles, even when the principles were solemnly adopted expressly to bring numbers under the control of a sound fundamental law. This influence of numbers, this dire mistake of the very nature of liberty, by placing men and their passions above those great laws of right which come direct from God himself, is increasing in force, and threatens consequences which may set at naught all the well-devised schemes of the last generation for the security of the state, and the happiness of that very people, who can never know either security or even peace, until they learn to submit themselves, without a thought of resistance, to those great rules of right which in truth form the _spirit_ of their institutions, and which are only too often in opposition to their own impulses and motives.