a salutary influence, the effect will be ruinous. It is true, we are an intelligent people, and by no means blind to our own immediate interests; but it is also indisputably certain, that the deliberate judgment and profound thought of our predecessors have been, in some measure, supplanted by a mere smattering of other men’s ideas. Precocious demagogues and priests are taking the places of grave statesmen and a sound, revered clergy. It is an idea instilled into us in our childhood, and which we carry with us throughout our career, that the present is an age far more effulgent than any that has before dawned upon the world; and we therefore think ourselves warranted in laying aside all past experience, and forming our conclusions upon our own notions of expediency. The course of reasoning, which led to the establishment of the noble institutions and customs which have been handed down to us, is not at once comprehended, and we resolve immediately to demolish, and substitute the frail creations of our own fancy, which past experience and further reflection show to be ruinous. In short, we have enjoyed the blessings of our government just long enough to lose sight of the evils of others, and are just wise enough to detect the imperfections of our own system, without being able, from a deep sense of the injuries under which every other people groans, to appreciate its excellence. It becomes, then, every lover of his country, and, especially, him who, in the prime of youth, is looking forward to it as the scene of a happy life, with high hopes of honor and power, to beware how he lends his aid to alienate public sentiment from this parent of his present joys and future hopes, and to enlist heart and hand in support of a government which has certainly, for more than half a century, secured to this community a greater amount of happiness than was ever before enjoyed by any portion of the earth’s population. The popular judgment will be sufficiently severe under the most favorable circumstances. When that is passed, and the people are satisfied from their own examination, that the regulations which govern them are the most perfect in existence, then, or at least not till then, may we esteem the crisis past, and our country safe. L. SONNET.