THE TRANSPORTATION OF MITCHEL.

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lay no claim; has saved her ancient laws, and to the spirit of her frank and hardy sons commits the freedom which she rescued from the allied swords when they hacked her crown at Frederickstadt!

Shame upon you! Greece, "whom the Goth, nor Turk, nor Time hath spared," has torn the crescent from the Acropolis; has crowned a king in Athens, whom she calls her own; has taught you that a nation should never die; that not for an idle pageant has the blood of heroes flowed; that not to vex a schoolboy's brain, nor smoulder in a heap of learned dust, has the fire of heaven issued from the trib ́une's tongue!

And you- you, who are eight millions strong-you, who have no avalanche to dread-you, who might cull a plenteous harvest from your soil, and with the sickle strike away the scythe of death you, who have thus been prompted to all that is wise, generous, and great- you will make no effort; you will whine, and beg, and skulk, in sores and rags, upon this favored land; you will congregate in drowsy councils, and, when the very earth is loosening beneath your feet, you will respectfully suggest new clauses and amendments to some blundering bill; you will mortgage the last acre of your estates; you will bid a prosperous voyage to your last grain of corn; you will be beggared by the million; you will perish by the thousand; and the finest island which the sun looks down upon, amid the jeers and hootings of the world, will blacken into a plague-spot, a wilderness, a sepulcher!

XXIV. -THE TRANSPORTATION OF MITCHEL. t

IB.

WHO speaks to Ireland of depression? Banish it! Let not the banners droop, let not the battalions reel, when the young chief is down! You have to avenge that fall. Until that fall shall have been avenged, a sin blackens the soul of the nation, and repels from our cause the sympathies of every gallant people.

For one, I am pledged to follow him. Once again they shall have to pack their jury-box; once again exhibit to the world the frauds and mockeries, the tricks and perjuries, upon which their is based. In this island the English neverpower shall have rest! The work, begun by the Norman, never shall be completed!

-never

Generation transmits to generation the holy passion which pants for liberty, which frets against oppression. From the blood which drenched the scaffolds of 1798 the felons of this year have sprung. Should their blood flow, peace, and loyalty, and debasement,

may here, for a time, resume their reign; the snows of a winter, the flowers of a summer, may clothe the proscribed graves; but from those graves there shall hereafter be an armed resurrection.

Peace, loyalty, and debasement, forsooth! A stagnant society, breeding in its bosom slimy, sluggish things which make their way by stealth to the surface, and there creep, cringe, and glitter in the glare of a provincial royalty! Peace, loyalty, and debasement! A mass of pauperism, shoveled off the land, stocked in fever-sheds and poor-houses, shipped to Canadian swamps- rags, pestilence, and vermin! Behold the rule of England, and, in that rule, behold humanity dethroned, and Providence blasphemed!

To keep up this abomination, they enact their laws of felony. To sweep away the abomination, we must break through their laws. Should the laws fail, they will hedge in the abomination with their bayonets and gibbets. These too shall give way before the torrent of fire which gathers in the soul of the people. The question so long debated - debated years ago on fields of blood debated latterly in a venal senate amid the jeers and yells of faction the question as to who shall be the owners of this island, must be this year determined. The end is at hand, and

So unite and arm!

IB.

XXV. THE VOICE OF HISTORY.

Or all the sciences, gentlemen, history is that which is always advancing. Mathematics and philosophical improvements may be long at a stand; poetry and the arts are often stationary, often retrograde; but every year, every month, every day, is contributing its knowledge to the grand magazine of historical experience. Look at what the last years have added, and behold how history accumulates as she rolls along what new attractions she holds forth to mankind! But with what an accession of beauty she invites us to the study of her charms, while she recounts the acts and the heroism of our own ancestry!

Let the energies of our country become extinct; let her armies be overwhelmed; let her navy become the spoil of the enemy and the ocean; let the national credit become a byword; let the last dregs of an exhausted treasury be wrung from her coffers; let the constitution crumble; let the enemy ride in her capital, and her frame fall asunder in political dissolution; then stand with history on one hand, and oratory on the other, over the

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grave in which her energies lie entombed, and cry aloud! Tell her that there was a time when the soul of a Briton would not bend before the congregated world; tell her that she once called her sons around her, and wrung the charter of her liberties from a reluctant despot's hand; tell her that she was the parent of the band of brothers that fought on Crispin's day; tell her that Spain sent forth a nation upon the seas against her, and that England and the elements overwhelmed it; tell her that six centuries were toiling to erect the edifice of her constitution, and that at length the temple arose; tell that there are plains in every quarter of the globe where victory has buried the bones of her heroes;

"That the spirits of her fathers

Shall start from every wave,

For the deck it was their field of fame,
And ocean was their grave!"

Tell her that when the enemy of human liberty arose, the freedom of the whole world took refuge with her; that with an arm of victory, alone and unaided, she flung back the usurper, till recreant Europe blushed with shame; tell her all this; and I say that the power of lethargy must be omnipotent, if she does not shake the dust from her neck, and rise in flames of annihilating vengeance on her destroyer.

For the reader of history, every hero has fought, every philosopher has instructed, every legislator has organized. Every blessing was bestowed, every calamity was inflicted, for his information. In public, he is in the audit of his counselors, and enters the senate with Per'i-clés, Solon, and Lycurgus, about him; in private, he walks among the tombs of the mighty dead; and every tomb is an oracle. But who is he that should pronounce this awakening call? who is he whose voice should be the trumpet and war-cry to an enslaved and degraded nation?—It should be the voice of such a one as he who stood over slumbering Greece, and uttered a note at which Athens started from her indolence, Thebes roused from her lethargies, and Macedon trembled.

REV. CHARLES WOLFE.

XXVI. — OUR COMMON SCHOOLS.

SIR, it is our common schools which give the keys of knowl edge to the mass of the people. Our common schools are important in the same way as the common air, the common sunshine, the common rain, invaluable for their commonness. They are the corner-stone of that municipal organization which is the char

acteristic feature of our social system; they are the fountain of that wide-spread intelligence which, like a moral life, pervades the country.

From the humblest village school, there may go forth a teacher who, like Newton, shall bind his temples with the stars of O-ri'on's belt; with Herschel, light up his cell with the beams of before undiscovered planets; with Franklin, grasp the lightning. Columbus, fortified with a few sound geographical principles, was, on the deck of his crazy caravel, more truly the mcnarch of Castile and Aragon, than Ferdinand and Isabella, enthroned beneath the golden vaults of the conquered Alhambra. And Robinson, with the simple training of a rural pastor in England, when he knelt on the shore of Delft Haven, and sent his little flock upon their Gospel errantry beyond the world of waters, exercised an influence over the destinies of the civilized world, which will last to the end of time.

Sir, it is a solemn, a tender and sacred duty, that of education. What, sir, feed a child's body, and let his soul hunger! pamper his limbs, and starve his faculties! Plant the earth, cover a thousand hills with your droves of cattle, pursue the fish to their hiding-places in the sea, and spread out your wheatfields across the plain, in order to supply the wants of that body which will soon be as cold and as senseless as the poorest clod, and let the pure spiritual essence within you, with all its glorious capacities for improvemert, languish and pine! What! build factories, turn in rivers upon the water-wheels, unchain the imprisoned spirits of steam, to weave a garment for the body, and let the soul remain unadorned and naked! What! send out your vessels to the farthest ocean, and make battle with the monsters of the deep, in order to obtain the means of lighting up your dwellings and work-shops, and prolonging the hours of labor for the meat that perisheth, and permit that vital spark, which God has kindled, which He has intrusted to our care, to be fanned into a bright and heavenly flame, permit it, I say, to languish and go out!

What considerate man can enter a school, and not reflect with awe, that it is a seminary where immortal minds are training for eternity? What parent but is, at times, weighed down with the thought, that there must be laid the foundations of a building which will stand, when not merely temple and palace, but the perpetual hills and adamantine rocks on which they rest, have melted away! that a light may there be kindled, which will shine, not merely when every artificial beam is extinguished, but when the affrighted sun has fled away from the heavens! I

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can add nothing, sir, to this consideration. I will only say, in conclusion, Education, when we feed that lamp, we perform the highest social duty! If we quench it, I know not where (humanly speaking), for time or for eternity,

"I know not where is that Pro-me'the-an heat,
That can its light relume!"

EDWARD EVERETT.

XXVII. THE PEOPLE ALWAYS CONQUER.

SIR, in the efforts of the people, of the people struggling for their rights, moving, not in organized, disciplined masses, but in their spontaneous action, man for man, and heart for heart,there is something glorious. They can then move forward without orders, act together without combination, and brave the flaming lines of battle without intrenchments to cover or walls to shield them. No dissolute camp has worn off from the feelings of the youthful soldier the freshness of that home, where his mother and his sisters sit waiting, with tearful eyes and aching hearts, to hear good news from the wars; no long service in the ranks of a conqueror has turned the veteran's heart into marble. Their valor springs not from recklessness, from habit, from indifference to the preservation of a life knit by no pledges to the life of others; but in the strength and spirit of the CAUSE alone, they act, they contend, they bleed. In this they conquer.

The people always conquer. They always must conquer. Armies may be defeated, kings may be overthrown, and new dynasties imposed, by foreign arms, on an ignorant and slavish race, that care not in what language the covenant of their subjections runs, nor in whose name the deed of their barter and sale is made out. But the people never invade; and, when they rise against the invader, are never subdued. If they are driven from the plains, they fly to the mountains. Steep rocks and everlasting hills are their castles; the tangled, pathless thicket their palisado; and nature, God, is their ally! Now He overwhelms the hosts of their enemies beneath his drifting mountains of sand; now He buries them beneath a falling atmosphere of polar snows; He lets loose His tempests on their fleets; He puts a folly into their counsels, a madness into the hearts of their leaders; He never gave, and never will give, a final triumph over a virtuous and gallant people, resolved to be free.

IB.