'NOTHING is beautiful but what is true;' and the truth coincident with beauty embraces not alone the literal verity of affirmations, but also the fitness of things, the harmonies of reason and conduct, and moral emotion, and all genuine feeling. It is shown, in its most engaging forms, less in the demonstrations of Archimedes and Newton, than in the characters of men of signal but not erratic virtue; a Socrates, an Alfred, a More, a Washington; men of consistent, intelligible characters, possessed not merely of a wide reach of thought, but of the faculty of sober discrimination, the power to see things under their true aspects and relations, and a sufficient sense of character to act out the truth so clearly and justly apprehended; men who sometimes pass for cold, perhaps unfeeling, but who really, in their vigor and depth of feeling, almost as far surpass the children of an artificial sensibility, as the works of God transcend the imperfect and puny creations of man. But the beauty which flows from the moral harmonies of character, is often seen most palpably in the selection and adaptation of the outward utilities of life-the material possessions which subserve the yarious uses of men. Subject to numberless wants and desires, which tax to the utmost his productive and appropriating powers, which even pass beyond the limit of present realities, and reach far away into the depths of time and being, it is trite to remark, that the dignity and happiness of man depend upon the relative place which his several desires hold in his practical system of attaining their objects. And as PROPERTY is, in some way, the necessary instrument, not only of his subsistence and comfort, but likewise of gratifying his intellectual tastes, and aiding his moral progress, the main part of practical ethics must ever be made up of principles and questions touching the uses of property, or the right employment of industry, and its products: And the principles of taste connected with this subject will be found, in every case, in entire harmony with the principle of duty, and the rule of convenience.

Mr. SEDGWICK, in his volume upon Public and Private Economy, has done much toward elucidating the principles which should

* 'Public and Private Economy.' In one volume. By THEODORE SEDGWICK. VOL. XI.

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govern the unwealthy million of society, in the consumption of their earnings, and setting in a strong light the bad taste, as well as the pernicious folly, of a large portion of the expenditure of all classes of people. For this good service, we are disposed, even at this late day, to invoke a still wider circulation and more general perusal of his book. Before proceeding to detail some of the thoughts suggested by a late re-perusal, it behooves us to mark a few errors, which strike us as being of a glaring, if not reprehensible, character. First, then, the author and it often happens to men who devote much attention to any subject, to become impressed with its all-surpassing importance appears to us to attach too transcendant a value to the possession of property, in comparison with other possessions, of a more enduring nature. Knowledge and education,' he says, are often powerful, without the aid of property; so too they are often quite helpless; but people who have wealth are never

so.'

True, knowledge is often of no avail toward the attainment of some specific utility. The man of learning and talent may be destitute of the means of subsistence, in circumstances where truth and noble thoughts cannot be bartered for bread. Here a few pieces of silver would stand him more in stead than all his wisdom. But would he be willing to exchange his radiant world of thought for these pieces of silver, and the gross utilities that know no other price? Not until physical suffering had first demented him! But are people who have wealth never helpless? Is all that makes up our physical and spiritual welfare, to be bought with gold? Vain thought! It is the mania of the most numerous class of dreamers that chase the painted bubbles on the stream of time. Is the possessor of wealth always able to apply balm to the bereaved heart? to administer sustaining counsel to the desponding spirit?- to command the unfeigned respect and discriminating affection which are awarded to wisdom, and virtue, and amiability of character? Say not that the possessors of wealth are never helpless! The sighs, the repinings, the hopeless wishes, breathed in many a noble mansion, where avarice has hoarded the earnings of thousands, and magnificence lavished the luxuries of every land, annul the baseless position. There is a worse helplessness than is implied in being destitute of property. True, the good we can do without property is indeed small; without a provision for his necessary wants, man cannot exercise his higher faculties to any purpose, and must remain in savage ignorance. But let the instrument, however necessary, be assigned to its proper place.

If we may trust our understanding of such passages as the ensuing, there is too great a similarity to a certain cant of radicalism, which would be quite out of place in so sensible a book as this of Mr. Sedgwick's: As all property comes from labor, and as these few favored persons have not been laborers- neither farmers, mechanics, merchants, manufacturers, nor professional men- their property has been derived from other sources than their own industry-unequal laws in their own favor, which is monopoly.' 'The idle class will be in proportion to the riches of the people, and the number of idlers that the people agree to support at the public expense. In England, there is a debt of eight hundred millions pounds sterling;

this, in one way and another, supports a great many idlers.' 'All idlers are, of course, supported at the expense of the industrious.' Our author elsewhere speaks of the idle class as those who live on their incomes, without laboring in any business or profession. Now, we had supposed that the property of the rich could not yield an income, without being employed to assist the industrious in the work of production. Mr. Sedgwick quotes the pregnant maxims of Adam Smith, that capital is hoarded labor - labor laid up for future use; and that labor is the original price paid for all things. Both the working man, then, and the rich man who chooses not to work with his hands, have labor to bestow toward the production of new value. The labor of one is in the exertion of his personal strength; the labor of the other is hoarded, laid up, in implements, machinery, lands, buildings, or in money which can be exchanged for any or all of these things. Each must contribute to the work of production a portion of the productive power he has to bestow, or he can receive no return. If any among us will not work, will not bestow a portion of the labor which resides in his muscular strength, his invention, or his capital, he cannot eat of the fruit of this all-creating industry, unless he cheat or beg. Is the right of the capitalist to his share of the product of this combined labor, less sacred than that of the working man? Such a distinction is as repugnant to our instinctive sense of justice, as hostile to the existence of civilized society. Perhaps the right of property owes its stability less to any politic consideration of its necessity to society, than to a less erring principle, the common sympathy with the possessory feeling, the instinct which connects man's spirit with the outward utilities which belong to his condition in this world. Theft and robbery are an outrage on this primary feeling, and it is chiefly against this insult to our common humanity, that the moral judgment of every society denounces the penalties of its criminal code. Priority of occupancy of any part of the common fund of nature, constitutes, to the unsophisticated apprehension of men, as good a foundation for the claim of the occupant, as the fact of his having incorporated with it a portion of his own labor - his own creative energy. A correct analysis, perhaps, would show the recognition of the right of the occupant, in either case, to depend upon the common sympathy with his sense of property, and his reasonable expectation of possessing and enjoying what he has created, or rightly appropriated. And this proprietary feeling, and the disposition to sustain and vindicate it, lose none of their strength from length of possession. In this potent instinct of our race the instinct of appropriation we see an effectual secu

rity against whatever is apprehended from the spirit of agrarianism, or any other spirit whose aim and impulse is against the established laws of property and order. We should almost as soon expect to see a society assent to a plan of mutual extermination, as agree to carry into practice the principle of an equal division of property. In France, when anarchy and oppression made the most fearful demonstrations of their united strength, political crime was made the pretext for spoliation. Some such assumption was necessary to reconcile the spirit of Jacobinism to stripping a hated aristocracy of their hereditary estates.

If then the legal protection of property, whether acquired by the industry of the individual, or inherited from his ancestors, be according to our native sense of justice; and as necessary to the very being of society, as the protection of personal freedom itself; and if this property, or hoarded labor, can yield no income to its possessor, without being made to assist in creating more property, the passages we have quoted must be rejected as unsound in reason, if not exceptionable on the score of their tendency. As the possessor of ancestral property has not labored for the same, ‘and as all property comes from labor,' we suppose his possession must rest on unequal laws in his favor, which is monopoly! We will not now quarrel with a word. The law of nature will stand good, whatever name you call it by.

How does the national debt of Great Britain support a class of idlers? The question is surely of little practical moment to us; but it is worth while to have something like clear ideas of a subject so much spoken and thought of. When the debt was created, an amount of property, equal to it, was destroyed- worse than wasted- by drawing hundreds of thousands of men away from the proper, honest business of men, stripping them of their proper humanity, converting them into fighting machines, ministers of destruction, to lay waste alike the proud city and the peasant's home, and turn a peaceful, unoffending land into one wide slaughter-house. The property used to equip and support these instruments of ruin, was of course consumed, lost. That is past. But the whole nation of Great Britain chose not to contribute the sum by a tax on themselves; but, by the agency of their government, borrowed the amount, on interest, of a few capitalists, a part of the nation, because it was more convenient to pay the interest, than contribute so much from their productive capital, and it still continues to be more convenient. The productive capital of Great Britain is indebted to certain capitalists, or holders of stock, as our productive capital is indebted to banks, and other lenders. The owner of any amount of British Government stock is, legally and morally, the owner of an equal amount of the active capital of the British nation. If he lives by the active labor of others, others live by his hoarded labor. He is supported at the public expense,' in just the same sense as the lender of money, at a fair rate of interest, is supported at the expense of his borrower, that is, in a very perverted sense of the words, or in no sense at all. But let us hasten to more edifying argument.

care.

Man is constituted with a multitude of wants and desires, other than those which are supplied by the bounty of nature, without his The objects of these wants and desires are necessary, in different degrees, to his existence, his comfort, and the development of his faculties, physical, intellectual, and moral. He wants food, and clothing, and shelter, to protect him from the inclemencies of the weather. When he is provided with these first necessaries, in their coarsest, humblest form, a multitude of secondary wants are ready to prompt him to new efforts. He wants better food; his clothing, his habitation, and furniture, require improvement, not only to fit them better for their first simple purpose, but also to gratify

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his desire for order, elegance, and beauty. He wants opportunities and leisure for converse with his kind, and the means to gratify his benevolence, by alleviating their distresses, and supplying their wants. He is endowed with curiosity; he wants knowledge, and the means necessary to its attainment. Finally, there is not a word of truth in the dictum of the gentle hermit, Man wants but little here below.' His wants are boundless, and without number, and prompt him to the indefinite accumulation of all useful and pleasant things, perishable and imperishable. Sad and true is the picture which our author has drawn of the poverty of the great mass-the ninety-nine hundredths of mankind. The poverty of European laborers is too melancholy an object, for those whose hand may not reach, and whose strength may not suffice to redress it. But our own day laborers are poor, very poor. They are destitute of all but a few of the most necessary comforts and conveniences of life. Our farmers are poor. There is a sad want of comfort and elegance in their houses and furniture. In their gardens and grounds, there is little convenience or beauty - far less than there might be. How indifferently are their children supplied with the means of obtaining such an education as befits the citizens of a republic! Our mechanics and tradesmen are in no better condition. But the most revolting description of poverty is here drawn.

By fashionable and expensive poor, is intended all those, whether merchants, farmers, mechanics, day laborers, etc., who live in the imitation of expensive fashions, without any proper regard to their wages or fortunes. This class, in the United States, embraces a larger proportion of the people than in any other country whatever. In other words, travellers and strangers agree, that the people of the United States are, in many particulars, the most wasteful of all civilized people on earth.

Of these fashionable expensive poor, a large number, even of those that belong to the higher classes, are among the poorest people in the United States. If there were weights and scales to weigh human misery by the ounce and pound, it would be found that these unhappy people suffer more in mind from embarrassments, duns, mortification, offended pride, and conscious meanness and wickedness, at the thought that they are spending the property of their friends, and of honest, hard-working mechanics and others, than many very poor people do in body, for the want of sufficient clothing, fuel, and food. Striving to be something which their property will not allow, they are in a perpetual conflict, in the worst war in the world - a war with themselves. They do not live by any rule of their own, according to what God has given them, and what is therefore only allowable for them to spend, but they live after a rule set by the fashion of rich people, and thus they see with other people's eyes, whose eyes are their ruin. Instead of having their clothes made in the most economical way, in their own houses by their wives, daughters, and servants, they run to the fashionable milliner's and tailor's, at the same time that they are suffering for good, substantial, seasonable garments. Their parlors and dining rooms are full of what they call splendor, that is, finery. If they have