generation, be found free from the record of personal, official, and political infirmities, from which an friendly censor might have drawn inferences hostile to the integrity of the tribunals of England, if not to the soundness of her public sentiment. But he would have erred. The character of governments and of in stitutions is not to be judged of from individual men or exceptional occurrences, but must be gathered from a large experience, from general results, from the testimony of ages. A thousand years, and a revolution in almost every century, have been necessary to build up the constitutional fabric of England to its present proportions and strength. Let her not play the uncharitable censor, if portions of our newly constructed state machinery are sometimes heard to grate and jar.

With respect to the great two-edged sword, with which Justice smites the unfaithful public servant, the present Lord Chancellor (late Chief Justice) of England, observes, of the acquittal of Lord Melville, in 1806, that "it showed that Impeachment can no longer be relied upon for the conviction of state offences, and can only be considered as a test of party strength;" while of the standard of professional literature, the same venerable magistrate, who unites the vigor of youth to the experience and authority of fourscore years, remarks, with a candor, it is true, not very flattering to the United States, in the form of the expres

sion, that down to the end of the reign of George the Third (A. D. 1820), "England was excelled by contemporary juridical authors, not only in France, Italy, and Germany, but even America." I will only add, that, of the very great number of judges of our Federal and State Courts, although frugal salaries, short terms of office, and the elective tenure may sometimes have called incompetent men to the bench, it is not within. my recollection, that a single individual has been suspected even of pecuniary corruption.

Next in importance to the integrity of the courts, in a well-governed state, is the honesty of the legislature. A remarkable instance of wholesale corruption, in one of the new States of the West, consisting of the alleged bribery of a considerable number of the members of the legislature, by a distribution of Railroad bonds, is quoted by Lord Grey, as a specimen of the corruption which has infected the legislation both of Congress and of the States, and as showing "the state of things which has arisen in that country." It was a very discreditable occurrence certainly, (if truly reported, and of that I know nothing,) illustrative I hope, not of "a state of things," which has arisen in America, but of the degree to which large bodies of men, of whom better things might have been expected, may sometimes become so infected, when the mania of speculation is epidemic, that principle, prudence, and common

sense give way, in the eagerness to clutch at sudden wealth. In a bubble season, the ordinary rules of morality lose their controlling power for a while, under the temptation of the day. The main current of public and private morality in England, probably flowed as deep and strong as ever, both before and after the South Sea frauds, when Cabinet ministers. and Court ladies, and some of the highest personages in the realm ran mad after dishonest gains, and this in England's Augustan age. Lord Granville in reply observed that the "early legislation of England, in such matters, [Railways,] was not so free from reproach, as to justify us in attributing the bribery in America solely to the democratic character of the government," and the biographer of George Stephenson furnishes facts which abundantly confirm the truth of this remark. After describing the extravagant length to which Railway speculation was carried in that country in 1844-1845, Mr. Smiles proceeds:

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Parliament, whose previous conduct in connection with Railway legislation was so open to reprehension, interposed no check, attempted no remedy. On the contrary, it helped to intensify the evil arising from this unseemly state of things. Many of its members were themselves involved in the mania, and as much interested in its continuance as even the vulgar herd of money-grubbers. The railway prospectuses now issued, unlike the Liverpool and Manchester and London and Birmingham schemes, were headed by peers, baronets, landed proprietors, and strings of M. P.'s. Thus it was found in 1845, that not fewer than one hundred and fifty

seven members of Parliament were on the list of new companies, as subscribers for sums ranging from two hundred and ninety-one thousand pounds sterling [not far from a million and a half of dollars] downwards! The proprietors of new lines even came to boast of their parliamentary strength, and the number of votes they could command in the House.' The influence which landowners had formerly brought to bear upon Parliament, in resisting railways, when called for by the public necessities, was now employed to carry measures of a far different kind, originated by cupidity, knavery, and folly. But these gentlemen had discovered, by this time, that railways were as a golden mine to them. They sat at railway boards, sometimes selling to themselves their own land, at their own price, and paying themselves with the money of the unfortunate stockholders. Others used the railway mania as a convenient, and to themselves inexpensive, mode of purchasing constituencies. It was strongly suspected that honorable members adopted what Yankee legislators call log-rolling;' that is, 'you help me to roll my log, and I will help you to roll yours.' At all events, it is a matter of fact that, through parliamentary influence, many utterly ruinous branches and extensions, projected during the mania, calculated only to benefit the inhabitants of a few miserable old boroughs, accidentally omitted from schedule A, were authorized in the memorable session of 1844–45.” *

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These things, be it remembered, took place, not in a newly gathered republic, just sprouting, so to say, into existence on the frontier, inhabited by the pioneers of civilization, who had rather rushed together, than grown up to the moral traditions of an ancient community; but they took place at the metropolis of one of the oldest monarchies in Europe, the centre

* Smiles's Life of Stephenson, p. 371.

of the civilized world, where public sentiment is propped by the authority of ages; heart of old English oak encased with the life circles of a thousand years. I was in London at the height of the mania; I saw the Railway King, as he was called, at the zenith of his power; a member of Parliament, through which he walked quietly, it was said, "with some sixteen railway bills under his arm;" almost a fourth estate of the realm; his receptions crowded like those of a Royal Prince; and I saw the gilded bubble burst. But I did not write home to my government, that this marvellous "state of things" showed the corruption which springs from hereditary institutions, nor did I hint that an extension of the right of suffrage and a moderate infusion of the democratic principle were the only remedy.

I have time for a few words only on the "unscrupulous and overbearing tone" which is said by Lord Grey to "mark our intercourse with foreign nations.”

"If any one European nation," he observes, "were to act in the same manner, it could not escape war for a single year. We ourselves have been repeatedly on the verge of a quarrel with the United States. With no divergence of interest, but the strongest possible interest on both sides to maintain the closest friendship, we have more than once been on the eve of a quarrel; and that great calamity has now been avoided, because the government of this country has had the good sense to treat the government of the United States much as we should treat spoiled children, and though the right was clearly on our side, has yielded to the