It may be supposed that this subject has little application to a country so enlightened as ours, and so accustomed to submit every thing to the scrutiny of unbiassed reason. When we consider that our institutions derive their origin from the most profound minds our country has ever produced, and that they have prospered, for more than half a century, beyond the most sanguine expectations of their founders, we are apt to forget that the prosperity of all institutions depends upon the attachment of the people, and to imagine that ours are inherently secure. It would be Natural also to suppose, that the discrepancies between different portions of the country would gradually wear away by continual contact and free intercourse, and that the longer we existed in our present condition, the more consolidated and unanimous we should become. But the crisis has not yet arrived. We have received these institutions upon the faith of our fathers, and, hitherto, been engaged, not in fairly discussing, but in eulogizing and defending them, without ever allowing ourselves to doubt their excellence and superiority over all others. These venerable fathers have now gone down to their graves; our enemies have become our friends; the distorting medium of prejudice through which we have hitherto viewed the world is removed, and we are left to scrutinize at our leisure the fair fabric which has been committed to us. Were this investigation to be candid and serious, we should be safe. But he who has the least acquaintance with human nature is aware, that when our complacency proceeds from an influence prepossessing us in favor of an object, there is a re-action in sentiment when that influence is removed: complacency becomes disgust, and the more extravagant it has been, the more powerful is the opposite bias. Upon this principle, we may account for that complete change in the means by which power and influence are sought from the people. Formerly, the only method of finding favor with the multitude, was to enlist heart and hand in supporting and extolling our glorious institutions; but he who would succeed in pursuit of the same object, at the present day, must find some real or imaginary imperfection, and by a torrent of ranting eloquence, display, on every occasion, his superior sagacity in detecting the errors of our fathers. Besides, the greater this blind confidence we have acquired in our institutions, the more negligent shall we be in support of them, and the more severe in exposing and decrying their imperfections. Already we begin to hear, on the one hand, the sneering taunt at the fickleness, inefficiency, and illiberality of our proceedings, and the high encomium upon aristocracy and its concomitant advantages, and on the other, the expression of envy towards rising wealth and power, and utter contempt towards law and all wholesome restraint. These floating insinuations are the seeds of future public sentiment, and unless counteracted by