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upon their neighbours; and not very prudish as to the means of aggrandizement. The United States look wistfully towards the British provinces on our NorthAmerican continent; and the unwise act of Lord Grenville, passed through parliament in the year 1784, permitting the people of lower Canada to conduct their pleadings, and promulgate their laws, in the French language, has prevented them from ever becoming British; and so far weakened the colony as an outwork of the mother country. It has always been the policy of able conquerors, as soon as possible, to incorporate their vanquished subjects with their own citizens, by giving them their own language and laws, and not suffering them to retain those of their pristine dominion. These were among the most efficient means by which ancient Rome built up, and established her empire over the whole world; and these were the most efficient aids by which modern France spread her dominion so rapidly over the continent of Europe. While lower Canada continues to be French in language, religion, law, habits, and manners, it is obvious that her people will not make good British subjects; and Britain may most assuredly look to the speedy loss of her North-American colonies, unless she immediately sets about the establishment of an able statesmanlike government there, and the direction thitherward of that tide of emigration from her own loins, which now swells the strength and resources of the United States. Her North-American colonies gone, her West-India Islands will soon follow.

Indeed, it is now well understood, that if the American government had been long-sighted and wise, the United States might have been a great West India power at this moment. For Britain, during her late conflict with revolutionary France, offered either Cuba, or St. Domingo to this country; but Mr. Jefferson suffered his own little personal feelings towards France, and against England, to prompt him to decline the offer; and thus let slip an opportunity of aggrandizing the United States, which may never again occur under such favourable circumstances. The dominion of either of those

unable and unfit to live in a state of orderly and wellregulated society, can flock thither, and evaporate, in reclaiming the wilderness, that factious violence, and discontented disposition, which would be much more destructively employed in plundering the property and cutting the throats of their more sober-minded fellowcitizens. M. Talleyrand was greatly surprised to find that in the United States, some few years after the close of the revolutionary war, the ordinary effects of a revolution were not visible in the condition of the community; and he philosophizes on it thus: every change lays the foundation for another, says Machiavelli; and, in fact, without speaking of the hatreds which they perpetuate, and of the motives for vengeance which they leave in the minds of men, revolutions that have shaken every thing, and in which the whole community has taken part, create a general restlessness of mind, a craving after change, an indefinite eagerness for hazardous enterprises, a vague and turbulent ambition, whose tendencies are unceasingly to alter and destroy every thing

that is.

This is more emphatically true, when the revolution has been made in the name of liberty;-a free government, says Montesquieu; that is, one always agitated; and it being impossible to stop the agitation, it must be regulated so as to exercise itself, not at the expense, but for the promotion of the public happiness. After the crisis of revolutions, there are always many men worn out and made old under the impression of misfortune: such men are not apt to love their country, in which they have experienced nothing but misery; and their hatred must be guarded against, and, if possible, rendered impotent. Time and good laws, indeed, will do much; but establishments and outlets for such dangerous beings are necessary. In America, after a revolution, very dissimilar doubtless to that of France, there remained only slight traces of ancient animosities; buț little agitation and inquietude; few, or none, of those symptoms which, in general, threaten every moment the

tranquillity of states newly bursting into freedom. One great cause of this strange appearance deserves consideration.

No doubt the American, like other revolutions, had left in the minds of men dispositions to excite or receive new troubles; but this need of agitation had been able to find a different satisfaction in a vast and new country, where adventurous projects allure the mind; where immense tracts of uncultivated lands give men a facility of employing a fresh activity, far from the scene of their first dissensions; of placing their hopes and fears in fresh speculations; of plunging themselves at once into the midst of a crowd of new schemes; of amusing them-selves by frequent change of place; and eventually extinguishing, within their bosoms, the flame of the revolutionary passions.

This very facility, however, of emigration into the western country, raises another very important question for the contemplation of the American statesman. The direct tendency of such emigration is to enable the western territory, in the course of a few years, to outnumber, both in the senate and in the House of Representatives, the Atlantic States; which being done, the Western States, as great inland nations, and erroneously considering that the commercial policy of the Atlantic seaboard is opposed to their agricultural interests, will be apt to sacrifice that commercial policy to their own mistaken views of territorial aggrandizement. Such an alteration in the system of government would be most pernicious to New-England, the cradle of the revolution, and the efficient founder of American independence. The soil of New-England does not raise a sufficient quantity of provisions to maintain a crowded population, but its long line of sea and river coast, its numerous harbours, and the habitual enterprise of its people, give it a commercial capability, certainly never surpassed, if ever equalled by any other nation. Hence Mr. Pickering, one of the most enlightened and intrepid of her statesmen, said, in reference to his New-England fellow citizens, that their farms were on the ocean,

Great as was once the weight of New-England in the American councils, her influence of late has been borne down by the preponderance of the west. New-Eng land, including Massachusetts and Maine, New-Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode-Island, and Connecticut, covers only a surface of little more than sixty thousand square miles, and contains a population of about one million and a half; whereas, the western country already counts a greater number of states-ás Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiani, and Louisiana, which give it a preponderance in the senate of the United States;-in addition to which there is an immense extent of surplus territory, out of which new states without number may be carved in the lapse of a few years. Its population already reaches between two and three millions, which enables it to vote down New-England in the House of Representatives; and it covers a surface of more than one million five hundred thousand square miles; that is to say, more than fifteen times as large as the British Isles, England, Ireland, and Scotland, put together, and averages a fertile soil, admirably adapted to sustain a very full and numerous population; a population abundantly sufficient to outvote not only the NewEngland, but all the other Atlantic States, all the states that composed the old Union which converted America from a British colony into an independent empire.

The commercial policy is necessary to the very existence of New-England, whose depopulation must follow as an inevitable result from its destruction or restriction, and its tide of emigration augments the numbers and resources of that western country, which is inclined to strike a deathblow to the prosperity of the Atlantic seaboard. There cannot well be a more erroneous political theory, than that the interests of agriculture are opposed to those of commerce, and conversely; for the facts and proofs that merely agricultural nations can never become either prosperous or powerful, and that commerce most materially forwards the improvement. of agriculture itself, and of national wealth and civiliza

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tion, see "the Resources of the British Empire," pp. 383, 398, 487, 490. If the western and agricultural policy should prevail, the Atlantic States will suffer, in the following order; New-England most, then NewYork, New-Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, then Pennsylvania, which being a great manufacturing state, depends less upon foreign commerce; then Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, which are great planting states, their staples being tobacco, rice, and

cotton.

The tendency of all this, beyond a peradventure, is either to break up the Federal Union, and entail a perpetuity of anarchy and civil broils throughout the whole continent, or to crush the Atlantic States beneath the enormous hoofs of the western mammoth.

If however, from these, or from any other causes, the British government should suppose that the United States are destitute of resources, and the people reluctant to engage in a new war, on account of the events of the recent conflict, it is egregiously mistaken. The resources, territorial, intellectual, and moral, of this country, are immense and various, and widening on all sides with inconceivable rapidity; and the settled conviction of the American people, arising out of the cir cumstances of the last war is, that they are decidedly superior to the British, and can always beat them man to man, ship to ship, gun to gun, bayonet to bayonet, both on the flood, and in the field. And uncounted myriads of American hearts now beat high and quick, in cager aspirations for another contest with Britain; a spirit which the government carefully cherishes, by newspaper effusions, by public toasts and orations, by congressional and state legislative speeches and resolu tions; the great objects of American ambition being to annex to their already too gigantic dominion the British North-American colonies on the continent, and the West-India Islands; and also the Spanish colonies bordering on the southern states.

The general government, indeed, was itself broken down during the last war; it fled at Bladensburgh;