Perhaps the most certain proof that any people can give of a high moral condition, is in the administration of justice. Absolute infallibility is unattainable to men; but there are wide chasms in right and wrong, between the legal justice of one state of society and that of another. As the descendants of Englishmen, we in this country are apt to ascribe a higher tone of purity to the courts of the mother country, than to those of any other European nation. In this we may be right, without inferring the necessity of believing that even the ermine of England is spotless; for it can never be forgotten that Bacon and Jeffries once filled her highest judicial seats, to say nothing of many others, whose abuses of their trusts have doubtless been lost in their comparative obscurity. Passing from the parent to its offspring, the condition of American justice, so far as it is dependent on the bench, is a profound moral anomaly. It would seem that every known expedient of man has been resorted to, to render it corrupt, feeble, and ignorant; yet he would be a hardy, not to say an audacious commentator, who should presume to affirm that it is not entitled to stand in the very foremost ranks of human integrity. Ill paid, without retiring pensions, with nothing to expect in the way of family and hereditary honours and dignities; with little, in short, either in possession or in prospect, to give any particular inducement to be honest, it is certain that, as a whole, the judges of this great republic may lay claim to be classed among the most upright of which history furnishes any account. Unhappily, popular caprice, and popular ignorance, have been brought to bear on the selection of the magistrates, of late; and it is easy to predict the result, which, like that on the militia, is soon to pull down even this all-important machinery of society to the level of the common mind.