capital, and made a sordid trade of its faculties and opportunities? There may be undoubtedly there are some characters so privileged, that they can walk through the daily temptations of any calling, without a stain on their raiment. There are, in all professions, men fortunately constituted, who can find leisure in the midst of absorbing employment, and expansion in the very pressure of the most contracting influences-to whom literature blossoms, a spontaneous wayside flower, along every path; and art, and taste, and fancy, and graceful and refining thought and occupation, come smiling and ministering, like a reaper's joyous children who troop around him in the harvest field. So, too, in the least liberal pursuits of trade, are men, who gather and are generous-who grasp and yet give-whose hearts grow with their fortunes, and whose intellects expand with their experience-men with whom labor seems compatible with leisure, and whose manly nature has the ring of a metal purer than their gold. But such is not the common experience of the world; and it were not wise to write philosophy altogether for the Happy Valley, whose soil is the salt of the earth. We must deal with the rule-though we be thankful for the exceptions.

In Holbein's Dance of Death-that marvellous series of grim portraitures-is painted the coming of the fatal messenger to men of every condition, as they are. He arrests the lawyer—an ill-favored varlet, you may be sure—and drags him away (in a direction happily not indicated), just as he is about to dispute the authority of the summons, and is producing the precedents to the contrary. He turns back the physician, who, with the cup of healing in his hand, is hastening to stay death's own career elsewhere. He comes behind

the merchant, who is weighing the golden proceeds of some venture, and flings a human bone into the opposing scale. The moral of these strange pictures is that of every-day experience and life. It goes beyond the plain one, which the vulgar eye sees in them. It is the folly-the absurdity-the wantonness of dedicating life, and all of hopes and enjoyments that may be in it, to one absorbing, sole pursuit; the madness of wasting existence itself in the search after superfluous means of existence, instead of dedicating what suffices, when found, to the rational ends of our being.

It is of course impossible that all the baneful influences to which we have alluded, can operate upon the individuals who compose a nation, and yet fail to affect the national community itself. You cannot have the ocean at rest, when every separate wave in it is tossed as by a tempest. Thus there is, in the Republic of which we are citizens, the same feverish unrest which makes the citizens themselves build their houses of life upon quicksands-the same unwillingness, perhaps incapacity, to appreciate and quietly enjoy the blessings that are round about it. Of our actual greatness and future glory-of our expanding wealth, and territory and resources-the whole air is vocal with the tidings; but not a man, of those whom we call statesmen, lifts his voice to bid us pause and be happy in what we have: if we are free, to enjoy our freedom; if we are wise, to profit by our wisdom; if we are wealthy and powerful, to sit down in the sunshine of our wealth and power. With millions upon millions of acres, which we can neither cultivate nor enjoy, we are told that it is our policy to go searching after more. With peace and plenty laughing at our doors, we are made

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to believe that we should welcome war, rather than not have the things we cannot need, which are far away from us. Has the age of political philosophers-of practical and honest public thinkers died out altogether with us? Is there no one to tell us—with the voice of an authority which we will respect that the true grandeur of nations is to be found in the development and happiness of the human creatures who live under their institutions; their true power in the virtue, independence and cultivation of their citizens; their own genuine and lofty mission, in their own example? one, I had rather see the nation under whose flag I was born, compacted, for all time, within the limits where our fathers left it with friendly and admiring nations growing up around it, enlightened by its example and blessed by its vicinity—its wealth brought home to be enjoyed, instead of being wasted in new conquests, or the search after something more-its intellect devoted to its own civilization, instead of being maddened by crusading enterprise and the discord of ambitions I had rather see this, than witness, as its destiny, the most magnificent march of empire that ever trod human hearts beneath its feet. I had rather see what already is our own, made to blossom with the arts of peace and beauty, than to hear of a province conquered, daily, for pensions, pre-emption rights, and land warrants! I should hold one. fruitful, joyous, civilizing and refining hour of national repose, more precious than the most prodigal decade of national aggrandizement.

There is, I am aware, a great deal of rhetoric on the other side of these views-a great deal of very obvious declamation, about ignoble ease, individual sloth and national stagnation.

But all this is merely a begging of the question in dispute. I deny that a life of repose-not of idleness, but of leisure and wholesome rest is more ignoble or more unprofitable, in man or nation, than the throb and throe-the convulsive preternatural activity-of labor, without enjoyment and without end. I do not mean that rest which is typified by the Chinese hieroglyphic of happiness-an open mouth and a handful of rice. I mean the repose which is the parent of wise activity, and the restraint, as well as the substitute, of activity which is not wise. I mean the rest which is won and deserved by labor, and which sweetens and invigorates it, and furnishes its reward. Whence comes this doctrine, that life—to be anything-must be forever in motion? There is no process of physical development which does not need and depend upon repose. To all the green and beautiful things that deck the earth-the flowers that give it perfume, and the fruits and foliage that make it glad—there are needful the calm sunshine and the peaceful shade-the gentle rain and the yet gentler dew. Not a gem that flashes, but has been crystallized in the immovable stillness of the great earth's breast! It is impossible to look on the most wondrous scenes of physical grandeur, where the convulsions of nature have left their traces on mountain and valley, without feeling that the quiet centuries, gliding in between, have woven the tranquil vesture of their beauty. I know no difference from this in the laws of our moral and intellectual nature; and I believe that to be false philosophy and pernicious morality which denies to individuals, as it is misguided and perverse political economy which takes away from nations, their seasons of leisure and meditation-teaching them that

existence was meant to be nothing but a struggle, and that it stagnates and is worthless when its strife grows still.

But it is to be feared that the evils which we are considering are not so much the result of vice or conviction, as of instinct and constitution. They seem to have come to us from our Anglo-Saxon progenitors, and are perhaps a part of the penalty which we have to pay for our inherited share of the restless activity and predominance of the race. There is a charming little book by Emile Souvestre, well known in English as the "Attic Philosopher," a most delightful, genial picture of simple pleasures and moderate desires-of humble but serene enjoyment, and homely yet blessed charities and consolations. I do not, however, mention the volume merely to praise it-though it deserves all praise and gratitude-but in order to ask you whether you think the scenes of such a volume could be laid in any part of this vast continent, which toils and grows prosperous beneath the pressure of AngloSaxon energy and institutions. Can we conceive such a book to be the truthful story of a life led within the atmosphere of any great city of our confederation-a life of contentment, in the pettiest fortunes-reduced to the first and actual necessities, yet happy, contemplative, useful, independent, respected and self-respecting? Surely not. Such things are not the growth of the principles under which we live and move. They could never be developed under the influence of a social and political economy which inflames one-half the intelligent manhood of our country with the hot thirst of public life— which stigmatizes every man as a drone, whose existence does not burn, like a heated wheel, from the friction of ceaseless revolution. Their impossibility is a leading characteristic of