but the reverse, which, by producing a community of interest and feeling, serve to unite in one brotherhood those who might otherwise be at constant enmity with each other. But we will let Mr. Wilkeson state the case in his own words:

"This, our national war debt, should be held forever in place as the political tie of the states and the bond forever of a fraternal nationality. It will give a common interest in the Union that nothing else can give. It will impart to a copartnership between thirty-five millions of people the unity of feeling arising from a community of interest in a copartnership capital of three thousand millions of dollars. Tied to the Union by the Union debt, nor Western States, nor Southern States-states beyond the Rocky Mountains, nor states by the Atlantic Sea-states that plant, nor states that weave-states that mine, nor states that smelt and hammer, can ever find inducement in sectional interest to draw asunder from each other. The proprietary interest of the voters of the several states in the national debt will be sufficient forever to ensure the prompt stamping out of life of all the politics that may dare a second experiment in disrupting the United States of America. Had we possessed a huge Union debt in 1860, and had as much of it been diffused among the mountaineers and planters of South Carolina as is now held in Rhode Island, as much in Alabama as now in Indiana, as much in Georgia as now in Minnesota, as much in Virginia as now in Connecticut, the war for slavery had never been waged. While holding the Union bonds, the South would never have made war upon the Union. No practical means could have got at those bonds and taken them out of the South, and sent them here or to Europe to be cashed, so as to have brought the fighting men of the slave states to a willingness to make war on the government on whose perpetuity the payment of the bonds depended. And for the future, there can be no better gage and pledge for the harmonious and co-operative life of the returned Southern States, and for the permanence of the restored Union, than the national diffusion of the national debt. The bond of interest is the bond of concord. We already feel its contracting pressure from Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, where the sale of the seven-thirty loan has been established."-p. 10.

We are willing not only to admit the truth of this, but also that it is a valuable truth, one worth millions of dollars. Supposing that the country were about to be dismembered -to-morrow, who would not vote to pay hundreds of millions more to unite the different sections together, so that instead of dismemberment the integrity of the republic would be guaranteed for at least another generation? It is because several of the propositions of Mr. Wilkeson are of this character that we have been induced to treat even the grossest of his fallacies with much more lenity than we usually do such things. We also agree with our author that the national debt is a good basis for national banking; and that national banking is a great convenience, if not a substantial service, to the country, few will deny :

"The bonds of the United States, accepted throughout the United States as the highest security, and having a uniform value in every one of

the states, are the only real and safe equivalent for gold and silver, and the only available basis for a uniform banknote currency that shall be money all over the republic. Commerce demands this uniform currency. Politics requires it. The money that is at once current in Massachusetts and Alabaina, that has par value in Nebraska and South Carolina, in Virginia and New York, that is taken and passed without scrutiny or suspicion by the advocates of slave labor and the advocates of free labor, by extremists in the South and extremists in the North, by the people of the two seaboards and the people of the Mississippi valley, has the mission to wear down the sectional barriers which the doctrine of states rights and the partisanship of politics have, for three-quarters of a century, been building up into fortified camps of division and civil war. And the uniform national banking currency will perform this misison."

Among the suggestions made by our author, which show that he means well, although rather ambitious in his style as well as illogical in his statements, is that in reference to a revision of our excise system. The following two paragraphs are in the right spirit:

"Revise the excise system itself. Knock the inquisitorial and annoying features out of it. Quit counting the teaspoons of the people. Stop feeling in pockets for watches to tax. Cease this inspection of buggywheels and counting of harnesses, and the spectacled peeking into the work and incomes of tailors, shoemakers, and smiths. Quit this counting off on masculine fingers that should be hoeing corn, the bonnets made by milliners, and the manufacture of rainbow wrappage for our dear girls. Quit taxing the matches with which the people light their candles. A great nation should scorn such sources of revenue. A free people should be freed from inquisition into domestic life by salaried officials. The pride of a nation, its truthfulness, its reasonable right of privacy in conducting its business, should be sacredly shielded by law. Petty sources of income to the United States of America should be flung away. To the utmost possible extent personal annoyance should be avoided in gathering this income.

"The revenues that are collected on the hearthstones and in the barnyards-all those that irritate in the gathering, and, consequently, demor alize, should be scornfully abandoned by us, and that, too, right speedily and forever. DIRECT AND NOT INDIRECT TAXATION SHOULD

BE

THE ORDER OF THE DAY. The English have no trouble in raising the immense amount of yearly revenue required to carry on their government and to keep down the interest on their debt. They, wiser that we, get it almost wholly out of six articles-spirits, wine, tobacco, sugar, tea, and coffee. After two hundred years of experiment in raising public income, the English have finally set up their principal machinery for its collection in custom houses and distilleries. Let us imitate their proven wisdom."-pp. 16-17.

If our author had reasoned throughout his pamphlet so correctly and sensibly as he has in these two paragraphs, we should not have had a word to say against him. And who will not agree with him that our present arduous revenue system ought to be modified as soon as possible? for it is un worthy of a fifth-rate nation, not to mention the great Republic of the West. We imagine that there is but one class who would object to this, namely, the lazy drones, good for nothing

else, who are engaged as assessors and collectors, and who would not endanger their precious lives if the nation were torn to pieces, whether by foreign or domestic foe.

Another of our author's statements in which we concur is, that "increase of population and increased manufactures will lighten the debt by diffusing it." "Organize emigration," he says; "remove to the United States the cotton manufacture of England-bring here a large part of the silk and muslin manufacture of France-the iron-make and cutlery manufacture of Britain-lift up and bring here a large portion of the mining population of Europe-set it down in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and that farther imperial mineral domain which extends through seventeen degrees of longi.tude, and sixteen degrees of latitude, and contains an area of more than a million square miles, literally crammed with gold, silver, copper, iron, coal, lead, tin, salt, quicksilver, gypsum, asphaltum, and marble, and which asks only an amount of labor relatively equal to that expended on California, to yield four hundred millions per annum out of two millions alone-gold and silver."

This view of the case is somewhat exaggerated ex more. It is not so easy to remove the cotton manufacture of England, the silk and muslin manufacture of France, &c., but it is perfectly true that there would be work for all in the United States for a century to come. This increase of labor would enrich the country much more readily and more certainly than any amount of national debt.

The conclusion of the pamphlet is devoted to the needless task of proving that the "payment of the national debt by subscription is wholly impracticable." As already observed, this was proved in England more than a half century ago, when it would have been much easier to pay the British debt than it would be now to pay the United States debt. There was no harm, however, in making the proposition; and the journalist of the present day had just as good a right to do so as the divine of sixty years ago, even though the former merely wanted to perpetrate a joke while the latter was not more serious in the most elaborate or most pious of his sermons. To this we need only add that, let Mr. Wilkeson blunder as he may, and misrepresent in certain particulars the views of the Secretary of the Treasury and the Government Agents, however unintentionally, as long as our loans and funding system are so skilfully and honestly managed as they are at present, our debt, large as it is, need be no cause of alarm to the nation.

ART. VII. 1. The Works of Sir William Jones. London. 2. Institutiones Linguæ Persicae cum' sanscrita et zendica comparatæ. J. A. VILLIERS. Giessen. 1840.

3. Grammatik der lebenden Persischen Sprache. Leipsick. 1847. 4. A Grammar of the Persian Language. By DUNCAN FORBES. London.

IN tracing the history of a nation a double sequence of events must be kept in view, the one logical, the other chronological; the former having for its object to connect the events narrated by the chain of cause and effect, the latter to assign facts to their proper period in time. A history con structed in violation of this principle has no value as a source of instruction, since it is a knowledge of the causes of events, more than of the events themselves, which teaches us what to avoid and what to imitate. The absence of correct chronological sequence entails a confusion which renders a narrative completely worthless, and at the same time seriously impairs logical sequence, since contemporary events often bear the mutual relation of cause and effect, a relation which could not be appreciated apart from a knowledge of the fact that they are contemporary.

Starting with this principle, which lies at the very basis of history, and applying it to the country whose name heads this article, we are stopped in limine by a serious lack of both conditions. Notwithstanding the numerous and laborious researches of the archæologists of the last and the present centuries, but comparatively little has been discovered serving' to throw light on the ancient history of Persia. True, the untiring zeal and profound scholarship of Sir William Jones, Sir William Ousely, and M. d'Herbelot, have opened the way to discovery, and have developed many interesting points, although none of the latter have been entirely rescued from the mazes of doubt. This appears all the stranger to us on reflecting that Persia occupies a central position in Asia, and that both profane and sacred writings are replete with allusions to the greatness of the early Persian princes. But the reason of this anomaly may be discovered in certain peculiarities of the Persian religion, peculiarities to which we will now merely allude, as we intend dwelling on them at greater length hereafter. If we accept, with M, Cousin, that every age and nation has its

fixed, dominant idea, which influences each existing institution, and gives tone to religion, politics, social economy, literature, science and art, we shall find therein the key to the problem before us. We shall find that the prevailing thought of early Persian times was such precisely as to detract from the importance usually bestowed on the means and conditions of constructing sound history.

In examining the annals of the Persian religion we discover that the earliest form was based on the metaphysical idea of dualism, to wit: that an eternal struggle is going on between the principle of light and the principle of darkness; and that compared to this interminable strife, the wars of princes are but trifles. According to the Zoroasterian idea, Ahriman the principle of darkness and Ormuzd the principle of light are two abstract powers, without shape or visible form, all reaching, ever-existing, though dependent on the supreme god Mithra, and compelled by the nature of things to fight incessantly till victory shall fall to the side of Ormuzd. Having no idea of a deity beyond these twin-conflicting powers, the Persians worshiped no idols-"Neither image, nor temple, nor altar," says Herodotus, "have ever been erected in Persia, and the Persians have no such anthropological views of the divinity as the Greeks."

The effect of this devotion to an idea was to exalt the universal, the invisible, the divine; to regard it, as the only reality; to deem it alone deserving of profound contemplation, and to spurn the merely human as illusory and unreal. We, as men, according to Zoroaster, are but mere phantasmagoria, the only reality being the dual principle which is neither seen, nor felt, nor heard. In consequence of this forced alienation of the human soul from God, and the substitution of a double, universal, thinking substance, which is inappreciable as far as it is real, mere human works sink into insignificance, and a forced subjection to and exaltation of blind necessity become the first duty of man. Hence, we see art vainly endeavoring to reproduce in Persian sculpture and hieroglyphics, this strange conception of the human intellect. We find vast misshapen figures striving to eliminate humanity, and to embody the idea of invisible, necessary power. On the other hand, human events are of dwindled importance, being considered but as the product of unreality. Wars are waged, empires and dynasties pass away, and neither poet nor historian, neither child of Melpomene, nor of Clio, springs up to chant or narrate the valor of kings and heroes.