pretty deeply; that if they pronounce it constitutional, even in the territories, they do much to strengthen it everywhere, and greatly increase their popularity at the South; if unconstitutional, they will be called abolitionists there, be rendered odious among the slaveholders, and find it next to impossible, may we not say impossible, to reside among them, as they now do? Does he not know, indeed, that to decide it in any way is almost, if not quite, tantamount to giving up their present situations, and, what with most men is deprecated above all things, of losing caste among their slaveholding associates, whose practice they think most gentlemanlike, whose opinions they most value, and for whose society they are best fitted? This loss of caste or consideration, indeed, the certainty of being made odious, at the South, in the event of entertaining, or of being strongly suspected of entertaining, anti-slavery sentiments, has been too often stated, both by members of Congress, as well as by the members of the large religious bodies, to be unknown to Mr. Clayton. Under these circumstances, when, too, a large portion of the country is slaveholding, is it to be looked for from such men as compose the Supreme Court, that they will decide, without any chance of reversal, that Slavery is unconstitutional anywhere? For if they decide it to be unconstitutional in the territories, they at the same time decide it to be unconstitutional, at least, in all those states which once were territories. Such a decision is only to be expected from men in circumstances very different from those of a majority of the Court-from extraordinary men—from men who are able to discern the truth, according to the highest standard known to man, and who have selfrespect enough to prefer it to every other consideration. To decide, under the circumstances mentioned, that Slavery is unconstitutional anywhere, is only to be looked for from the absolute honesty which led Algernon Sidney, when solicited to do an unworthy act to save his life, to remark, that “when it became necessary for him to do or say falsely even for the high object set before him, he knew it was the will of God that he should die." A lawyer will not hesitate to pervert the facts or the law to a jury—or court, if he can impose on the latter, to gain his client's cause; a physician, to tell a dying man that his malady is not a hopeless one; a tailor or shoemaker,

*It is not long since one of them -Judge McKinley, we think, -advertised the sale of a large number of slaves at public vendue.

a customer that his coat or his shoes will be ready for him next morning, when he has no expectation, or a very slight one, of complying with his promise. Meantime these men take up their paper in bank carefully to the very hour, are punctual in the payment of their debts, and their engagements, in all matters out of their profession or calling, may be depended on. These, in common parlance, are called honest men, nor can they be called otherwise without appearing unjust to them. So they are, according to the low and imperfect standard-the "sliding scale," rather-which they set up for themselves. But even this honesty we do not wish to underrate; indeed, we would not put below its worth,- for it has some worth,― honesty of any grade. This grade of it -professional, perhaps not higher-is to be found, not only in the Supreme Court, but in other places deemed exalted, and our public affairs are, for the most part, managed by it. For if it were absolute, such as we have supposed Algernon Sidney possessed; such as impels us to take up the cross and carry it to the place of an inglorious death, sooner than do or say what we believe to be wrong or false, we should not have men commissioned to mete out justice to us, who refuse it to multitudes of their fellow-beings their brothers and sisters, whose earnings through life they take from them; whom, and there posterity, if they have not already sold them, they consign to their heirs, when compelled by death to relinquish their hold; to whom they carefully deny all opportunity of improving those faculties bestowed on them by God, and which belong to man so plainly that they cannot be made plainer opportunities, too, which they themselves enjoy without stint, and for which they declare, and justly, toothere can be no equivalent. Nor should we have those judges who send back into slavery, without any reference to its horrors, a fellow-man endeavouring to escape from it, or be instrumental, for the sake of the pelf a commission brings with it, in affixing a ruinous fine on one whose humanity might lead him to give what aid he could to the attempt; thus showing that their love of money is stronger than their love for the race to which they belong.

But Mr. Clayton seems fully to rely for an equitable decision on the high character of the Supreme Court, which, says he," for purity and justice is immeasurably superior to that of any other tribunal on earth." These, to many, will seem rather odd words in the mouth of an American Senator, who,

as the world goes, ought, at least, to be somewhat remarkable for the precision of his statements. They will be likely to look on them as in no small degree extravagant, if not, in the worst sense, hyperbolical. Some, no doubt, will go further, and suppose that the speaker used these words because he knew that he should lose nothing by an unfavorable comparison of other courts with ours, but by his praise of ours he might add greatly to his reputation for patriotism, since nothing, nowadays, contributes more to reputation for this quality, than depreciating what our neighbour has and exalting what we have. Others will wonder that men, eminent above all other men in similar circumstances "for purity and justice," could, in any manner, consent to be made the instruments of inflicting on a very large portion of the country the curse of Slavery, the most copious fountain of social and individual impurity, and the rankest specimen of injustice under the sun. Indeed, they will think that the very attempt to reconcile Slavery with a Constitution which professes to establish liberty, must unavoidably bewilder the mind, and obscure and pervert its perception of right. They will be amazed that men so "immeasurably" superior in purity and justice could at all hesitate between the law of man, even if it should command us to set up Slavery, and the law of God forbidding it and telling us so reasonably to do to others as we would have them do to us. They may even proceed to say that the Rights of man, of human nature, were incorporated into the Constitution by the Convention, and that this was business proper for the Convention only, and that the judicial power was ordained by that body to enforce those rights, according to the forms of the Constitution, should those rights at any time be invaded; but that it never was clothed with authority so to interpret that instrument, that wrong should be done to the poorest and the humblest individual, but rather that he should fly to its sacred precincts for protection against all wrongdoers pursuing him for his destruction, and there be reassured that he is a man.

It is not ours, or we do not intend at this time to make it ours, to compose these strifes, nor to pronounce on the honesty, and so forth, of the respective parties mentioned; but this we will say of some of them, especially of the English Courts, the King's or Queen's Bench, and of the Admiralty Courts, that persons standing as high in public estimation, and occupying as close relation to their governments as Senator Clayton did to his, have spoken in very high terms of the

purity and justice and intelligence of the courts of their countries, although they may not have been as extravagant or as exclusive as the Senator, and that their reports and decisions are read, as ours are, in all our courts, both supreme and state, except in a very few instances, even if they now exist, - where ignorance has excluded them. In matters of account between man and man, however complicated,supposing the structure and object of the government not to be concerned, -our Supreme Court and the Court of Queen's Bench would, in all probability, decide alike. Here they would act on the same ground of doing justice between men, without any temptation to warp their opinion. But if there were submitted to them the question: Which is the best, that is, the most reasonable, form of government for man? they would, without hesitation, give the preference to that under which they live -under which, in spite of its imperfections, they had attained the zenith of their profession, and enjoyed the honors they possessed. In this case, we suppose them equally honest -equally conscientious in coming to their conclusions; but, at last, they are conclusions fashioned by the influence of those around us, by habits of thinking, and by education in its extended sense, which neither religion, nor reflection on the nature of man in their case, has been sufficiently strong to cure. It is very certain that they both cannot be right. Indeed, they approach right only as far as their respective governments allow the powers of men to have their natural sway.

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But these two sets of Judges, although they differ as to government, agree in thinking polygamy not only opposed to the letter and spirit of Christianity, but especially to the manent strength and advancement of any people in civilization. If now, with a single view to benefit the government, the abolition of the harems throughout the empire were proposed to the rulers of Turkey, they would say with one accord, that they do not see how polygamy is connected with national weakness and ignorance, or how a people can be so well governed when the rulers and the rich have but one wife as when they have many. Yet these persons, we will suppose, have an unblemished reputation for honesty at home, and are exemplary in all their dealings with their fellow-men.

These instances of men being right although they differ from other men having equal honesty and intelligence, on the most important subjects, may be so endlessly multiplied, that we have but little confidence in any tribunal which impels us to

do unto others as we would not have them do to us. This tribunal, erected in every man's heart, always speaks the truth to him, however he may force it to tell a falsehood to others. Believing in it, we must say that our trust is small in the honesty of any one south of Mason and Dixon's line.

Some of our foregoing remarks may properly lead to the belief, that we intended what we have said of the speeches of certain Senators only as introductory to a more important subject. But as we advanced, we found so many wrong notions to set right, that what we projected only as our vestibule has become our temple.

ART. II.- A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. By HENRY D. THOREAU. Boston and Cambridge: James Monroe & Company. 1849. pp. 413.

WE stick to the sea-serpent. Not that he is found in Concord or Merrimack, but like the old Scandinavian snake, he binds together for us the two hemispheres of Past and Present, of Belief and Science. He is the link which knits us seaboard Yankees with our Norse progenitors, interpreting between the age of the dragon and that of the railroad-train. We have made ducks and drakes of that large estate of wonder and delight bequeathed to us by ancestral irkings, and this alone remains to us unthrift heirs of Linn. We give up the Kraken, more reluctantly the mermaid, for we once saw one, no mulier formosa, supernè, no greenhaired maid with looking-glass and comb, but an adroit compound of monkey and codfish, sufficiently attractive for purposes of exhibition till the suture where the desinit in piscem began, grew too obtrusively visible.

We feel an undefined respect for a man who has seen the sea-serpent. He is to his brother-fishers what the poet is to his fellow-men. Where they have seen nothing better than a school of horsemackerel, or the idle coils of ocean around Halfway Rock, he has caught authentic glimpses of the withdrawing mantlehem of the Edda-age. We care not for the monster himself. It is not the thing, but the belief in the thing, that is dear to us. May it be long before Professor Owen is comforted with the sight of his unfleshed vertebræ, long before they stretch many a rood behind Kimball's or