erating elements of fluctuating popular delusion.

Either the institutions under which we live are founded in truth, or
they are founded in error. Our constitution is the work of wisdom, or
of folly. It is founded in justice, or injustice; in RIGHT, or
_wrong_. Shall we honor the astuteness of its founders, and
perpetuate these institutions to remotest ages? or shall we prove
recreant to this trust, unworthy of these manifold blessings, and in
our mental blindness and moral imbecility invoke the scorn of future
ages, and the just execrations of all mankind?

The _material_ elements of greatness of the Great American Republic,
must be vivified and enlivened by a corresponding degree of INTELLECT;
they must be permeated by an adequate element of illuminating soul, or
they will fall, a lifeless mass, into chaotic ruin. Let us remember

"That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay,
As ocean sweeps the labored mote away;
Whilst self-dependent power can time defy,
As rocks resist the billows and the sky."

THE RIGHT OF SLAVERY.

INTRODUCTION.

AFRICAN SLAVERY is, at present, the subject of all-absorbing interest
to the American mind; for, our people, almost intoxicated with their
own freedom, seem unsatisfied with those manifold blessings acquired
by the labors of their sires; and while they are conscious of not
excelling them in wisdom, virtue, or valor, they are becoming ideal,
and seem willing to sacrifice the practical, safe rules of republican
action, for mere idealisms, born in the dizzy sphere of their own
over-wrought imaginations. They tremble at the name of Washington,
whose purity and moral power shed lustre upon the name of man, and
they worship him as a god; but while the REAL WASHINGTON commands the
homage of mankind, and stands the intermediate between the race of men
and the Infinite, we find the imaginations of men ignoring reason, and
embarked upon a voyage aerial, amid the clouds. There they revel high
above the mountain tops of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, where
the atmosphere is pure, where the light is clear, and where the
lightnings play; but, alas for human weakness and frailty! they are
there only in imagination, though the splendid illusion is to them a
reality, and the pleasing dream of ideal beauty, which, by the magic
power of transmutation, annihilates or obliterates the reason and
memory, destroys those distinctions of great and little, right and
wrong