May we not then, judging even from the past, form the most brilliant conceptions of the future? When our wide spread territory shall be filled up with a denser population--when larger cities shall be erected within our borders, the necessary nurseries of a literary class--when physical and mental labor shall be more subdivided, then will the intellectual level of our country begin to rise; the increasing competition in every department of industry will call for greater labor, greater energy, and more learning on the part of the successful candidates for distinction. And then may we expect that every branch of literature will be cultivated, and every art be practiced by the matured and invigorated genius of the country. But although in the progress of time we may expect that literature in all its forms and varieties will be successfully cultivated here, yet we must still acknowledge that the character of our political system will give a most decided bias towards moral and political science. Under a system of republics like ours, where the sovereignty resides _de jure_ and _de facto_ in the people, the business of politics is the business of every man. Men in power, in every age and country, are disposed to grasp at more than has been confided to them; they have always developed wolfish propensities. To guard against these dangerous propensities in a republic, it is necessary that the people in whom the sovereignty resides, should always be on the watch-tower; they should never be caught slumbering at their posts; they should take the alarm not only against the palpable and open usurpations of power, but against those gradual, secret, imperceptible changes, which silently dig away the very foundations of our constitution, and create no alarm until they are ready to shake down the whole fabric of our liberties. Under these circumstances, it is the business of every man--it is more, it is the duty of every man--to think, to reflect, to instruct himself, that he may be prepared to perform that part at least which must necessarily devolve on each freeman in the great political drama of our country. He must recollect that the great experiment of a free government depends upon the intelligence and the virtue of the people. It is this knowledge and this virtue which constitute at once their power and their safety. It is in the reliance on this power, resulting from the intelligence and virtue of the people alone, that the honest patriot may well exclaim in the glowing language of Sheridan on a different subject, "I will give to the minister a venal house of peers--I will give him a corrupt and servile house of commons--I will give him the full swing of the patronage of his office--I will give him all the power that place can confer, to overawe resistance and purchase up submission; and yet armed, with this mighty power of the people, I will shake down from