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two centuries and a half. We must infer the future from the past.

When the Pilgrim Fathers first set foot upon the snows of Plymouth Rock, there were less than three millions of men upon the face of the earth who spoke the Anglo-Saxon tongue. Now there are more than sixty and three millions of such men scattered over the islands, the continents, and the seas; so that it may emphatically be said, the sun can not look down upon land where the Anglo-American language is a stranger. Already it has invaded China, and the first whisperings thereof are heard in the secluded harbors of Japan.

And this, in our tongue, is a very hopeful feature not observable in any other language that has fallen within our observation. Wherever it may go, the force of our institutions, our character, our literature, and policy accompany it; the vigor of the race that uses it, almost as surely triumphs over all opposing obstacles as do their arms over all opposing nations. It seems to be a providential decree; and, no doubt, has a wise and beneficent object underlying it.

The language of the seas is already our own. Nine tenths of the commerce of the ocean is transacted through the copious and flexile medium of our tongue, and claims the protection of the Anglo-American fraternity.

The barbarism of Australia, the heathen institutions and worn-out languages of India, the superannuated hieroglyphs of China, and the rude utterances of important parts of Africa and of numberless islands in the Eastern seas, are fast giving way to the institutions and the language of our race.

But the great field for its most splendid and extensive development, we believe, must be looked for in our own youthful and magnificent republic, and the supremacy she is yet destined to exercise over the whole of this Western world. And here we would remark, en parenthèse, that if we desire the future of our destiny to be as great and glorious as it promises, we should never cease to discourage all attempts to introduce any other language into our midst as the medium for either business or education. However convenient certain demagogic politicians may find it, about election-time, to curry favor with the German vote, by advocating the introduction of the German tongue into our public schools, no real friend to the progress of the human family could join, or even tolerate such a proposition. Nay more, though it may sound illiberal until examined carefully, we verily believe that none but newspapers printed in the Anglo-American tongue should be allowed amongst us.

Above all, the municipal authorities (as they do in this city) should not encourage any purely German, German-written journal at the expense of papers that are native to the soil, and native in the character of their utterance. The foreigner who aspires to our citizenship, should at once endeavor to Americanize his habits and his language; and how can this be done, while he not only associates in greater part with his old countrymen, but likewise continues to receive his impressions of our government and society through a radically foreign channel?

There are now in this land, where, but a little while ago, the howl of the wild beast, and the more terrific war-whoop of the savage, filled every plain, and startled the shrieking echoes in every mountain solitude-there are now, we say, nearly thirty millions of people speaking a language which is the herald of a civilization, more magnificent, more expansive, more substantial than has ever hitherto dawned upon our world. All the others of the sixteen hundred languages, now spoken in the two Americas, seem to vanish like the dew before the morning sun; and if our race shall, in the future, continue to advance and absorb other peoples, as it has in the past of its American history, there will be at the close of the present century more than one hundred millions in this Western world alone. if it progress and overcome in the same ratio to the close of the next century, it will stretch over this entire hemisphere, upon whose shores four oceans roll their mighty tides, and promise to convey the argosies and commerce of all earth.

And

The progress which the race may make in other quarters of the globe, we may briefly allude to as we pass. It is evident that Australia is destined generally to submit to the tongue we speak. Already they have adopted it from the necessity of colonization, and we know the vigorous nature of such a language must soon displace all rivalry. It needs but a glance to see that, of the thirty-six hundred languages, our own, with accumulative and seemingly irresistible power, has alreadyand as yet it is only in its infancy-attained a prevalence hitherto beyond that attained by any other. And from what reason has it done so? From its elastic and assimilative character, we answer-which permits and enforces upon it to adopt all the best idioms and phrases of whatever language it may be brought into contact with; and thus, possessing some peculiar and popular features of each tongue, it can be the more readily and cheerfully adopted by the speakers of them all.

The genius of Homer, and the tongue he spoke, survive to

the present day, but only in the form of a curiosity and exquisite ornament. His tongue was the medium of the loftiest literature, of a most subtle, though too material, philosophy, and of a religion as beautiful to the artistic eye, as to the inward conscience it was incongruous and unsatisfactory.

From the logic of necessity in the natural sequence of events the Greek of Homer ceased to be a living tongue, because it contained within itself no germ of those divine ideas which confer immortality, and win mankind to docile and implicit acceptance. These remarks may apply to all other tongues; for in proportion to the genius and the truth which an utterance embodies, will be its influence and perpetuity on earth.

Our language is the medium of a literature almost as lofty as that of which Homer, Eschylus, Euripides, and Plato were some of the grand exponents-of a philosophy, the result of the distilled wisdom and experience of six thousand years-of a religion more ancient than the world, and of a Truth as indestructible, as immutable as the character and attributes of the Deity.

We do not claim perfection for our race; we know and feel, with deep contrition, the avarice which has plundered India, and almost exterminated the lofty though unlettered Red-men of our own fair continent. There are spots upon the sun, and our country's fair escutcheon is not immaculate. When we contemplate these evils, we are shocked at their enormity; but when we humbly look at the mysterious workings of Providence, and see, or think we see, Him educing blessings out of bondage, and civilization from the cruelties which precede it, we still hope that, although these things are appointed, the end comes quickly on, and that our race will be the chief, if not the only instrument in the regeneration of the world; and that the prayers of a universal Christianity may yet be offered up in our language,

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Thou busy laborer! one resemblance more
Shall yet the verse prolong;

For, Spider, thou art like the rhymer, poor,
Whom thou hast helped in song.

Both busily, our needful food to win,

We work, as Nature taught, with ceaseless pains:
Thy bowels thou dost spin,

I spin my brains.

DIMPLES.

DIAPERS AND

BARNUM'S LAST.

THIS is the age of novelties-of the prostration of old ideas -of the introduction of new, and the development of physi cal as well as moral progress. Of all the nations of the earth, this country claims to take the lead in pioneering out the march of intellect; and, as an humble fugleman to the grand advance, we propose to ourselves to indite a prose paan in honor of and to commemorate the last decisive stage at which the progression of humanity has arrived.

Arma virum-que, we do not sing; nor of Morse, with his telegraph; nor of Fulton, with his steam; nor yet can the ruins of Sebastopol claim from our sympathetic hearts the memorial of an elegy. The Southern Cross now rising in the Australian wilderness must yet awhile wave its silken folds, if not unhonored, at least unsung, so far as we ourselves are concerned.

A mightier theme claims our notice-a more ancient, though perpetually renewing, fact-a subject which comes back to many myriad breasts legitimately, (and to many bachelors "in a hand-basket")-a fountain from which we ourselves have risen, and which, if a more general diffusion could be effected, would greatly tend to allay the present distressing agitation for "woman's rights."

There have been poems on the subject; but all of them of the very simplest and most inartistic order; most of them the work of the female mind, and merely of the gentle, maternal, and material intellect, at that. There are no metaphysical subtleties, no super-terrene hifalutinism, no telescopic affection in these effusions, such as Miss Lucy Stone or the Rev. Miss A. L. Brown would throw into any specimen of her literary composition. They come from the heart-not from the head;

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