*

The observer may obtain further light upon the moral ideas of a people
by noting the degree of their Attachment to Kindred and Birth-place.
This species of attachment is so natural, that none are absolutely
without it; but it varies in degree, according as the moral taste of the
people goes to enhance or to subdue it. The Swiss and the American
parent both send their children abroad; but with what different feelings
and views! The Swiss father dismisses his daughter to teach in a school
at Paris or London, and his sons to commerce or war. He resigns himself
to a hard necessity, and supports them with suggestions of the honour of
virtuous independence, and of the delight of returning when it is
achieved. They, in their exile, can never see a purple shade upon a
mountain side, a gleaming sheet of water, or a nestling village, without
a throb of the heart, and a sickening longing for home.--The New
England mother, with her tribe of children around her on her hill-side
farm, nourishes them with tales of the noble extent of their
country,--how its boundary is ever shifting westwards, and what a wild
life it is there in the forest, with the Red men for neighbours, and
inexhaustible wealth in the soil, ready for the hand which shall have
enterprise to work for it. She tells of one and another, but lately boys
like her children, who are now judges and legislators,--founders of
towns, or having counties named after them. As her young people grow up,
they part off eagerly from the old farm,--one into a southern city,
another into the western forest, a third to a prairie in a new
territory; and the daughters marry, and go over the mountains too. The
mother may have sighs to conceal, but she does conceal them; and the
sons, so far from lingering,--are impatient till they are gone. Their
idea of national honour,--both their patriotic and their personal
ambition,--is concerned; and they welcome the hour of dispersion as the
first step towards the great objects of their life. Some return to the
old neighbourhood to take a wife; but they do not think of passing their
second childhood where they spent their first,--any more than the Greek
colonists who swarmed from their narrow native districts. The settlers
of the west go there, not to obtain a certain amount of personal
property, but land, station, and power.--How different again are the
Scotch--the people of the strongest family attachments! In the modified
and elevated feudal