One certain effect of our great systems of improvement must be the rearing up of large towns throughout our country. I know full well that great cities are cursed with great vices. The worst specimens of the human character, squalid poverty, gorgeous, thoughtless luxury, misery and anxiety, are all to be found in them. But we find, at the same time, the noblest and most virtuous specimens of our race on the same busy, bustling theatre. Mind is here brought into collision with mind--intellect whets up intellect--the energy of one stimulates the energy of another--and thus we find all the great improvements originate here. It is the cities which constitute the great moving power of society; the country population is much more tardy in its action, and thus becomes the regulator to the machinery. It is the cities which have hurried forward the great revolutions of modern times, "whether for weal or woe." It is the cities which have made the great improvements and inventions in mechanics and the arts. It is the great cities which have pushed every department of literature to the highest pitch of perfection. It is the great cities alone which can build up and sustain hospitals, asylums, dispensaries--which can gather together large and splendid libraries, form literary and philosophical associations, assemble together bands of literati, who stimulate and encourage each other. In fine, it is the large cities alone which can rear up and sustain a mere literary class. When there shall arise in this country, as there surely will, some eight or ten cities of the first magnitude, we shall then find the opprobrium which now attaches to us, of having no national literature, wiped away; and there are no doubt some branches of science which we are destined to carry to a pitch of perfection which can be reached no where else. Where, for example, can the great moral, political, and economical sciences be studied so successfully as here? And this leads me at once to the consideration of the operation of the state or federative system of government, which I regard as the most beautiful feature in our political system, and that which is calculated to produce the most beneficial influence both on the progress of science, and on the development of character.