which they owe to him; but with all these reforms, and with all this infusion of liberty and justice, the peculiar sentiments which the old system engendered, remain; and among them the most obvious, and to us the most unknown, is the sentiment of loyalty to the sovereign, with its kindred sentiment of loyalty to rank.

Another sentiment which has great influence on national character in all the countries of European Christendom, is the pride of birth. This, in its rudiment, is a natural sentiment; and as such it must have some place and influence under every structure of society. We are not ignorant of the manifestations of this natural sentiment. Every man who had an honest father and a virtuous mother, feels the impulse of this sentiment, and knows why it was implanted in his nature. Every man who respects his own name because his father bore it before him-every man who feels himself quickened in the path of honor or of virtue by the necessity of not dishonoring the blood of which he was begotten-every man who feels that the reputation of his father is involved in his own, and that the dear memory of his mother is to be honored by his virtues and achievements, or disgraced by his meanness, is conscious of that natural sentiment which in other circumstances is exaggerated into pride of birth.

Hereditary distinctions and honors, then, are not to be denounced as intrinsically absurd, or contrary to the common sense of human nature. It is natural to think the better of a man for being the worthy son of an illustrious sire. The renown of ancestors is and ought ever to be a part of the possessions of their children. The question whether the principle of hereditary distinctions shall be incorporated with the political institutions of a people, or whether the sentiment of respect for parentage shall be left to work simply by its own power, as one of the elements of human nature, is a question to be determined more by experience than by any abstract reasoning. The only inquiries ought to be, What does experience teach? Where the principle of hereditary rank is established, what is its effect on national character and the general welfare? How does it bear upon the grand result the greatest happiness of the greatest number? Does it operate most effectually to excite effort and stimulate virtuous aspirations, or more to repress exertion and to produce stagnation in all classes? In our country, guided as we

think by the long experience of mankind, we have rejected from our political structure all hereditary honors, all distinctions founded upon parentage. The children of the pauper and the felon stand, before the law, upon the same platform of equality with the children of the most illustrious benefactor of his country or of his race. No man is punished for his father's misdoings; no man is rewarded with public honors for his father's achievements. This, I doubt not, is as wise, considered in reference to its political bearings, as it is right in morals. With us, the advantages to be derived from the most illustrious parentage, are simply those which the law of nature gives without any factitious enlargement.

How contrary to this was the structure of feudal society. Under that system, every thing was hereditary. Every man's station in society was determined by his birth; and exceptions were made, only as the strata were disturbed by frequent violence. He who was born a noble, was held to be made of finer clay, tempered with a more etherial spirit, than he who was born a peasant. The influence of this old habit of thought remains in all the countries where feudalism once reigned. The system in which such a habit of thought originated, is every where passing away, if not already destroyed; but its influence in this respect still lives. In all the freer countries of Europe, and most of all perhaps in Britain, many an avenue is open by which genius and worth may rise even from the humblest walks to eminence and honor; but still the influence of old hereditary distinctions hardly begins to be effaced from the common mind. There the greatest success, the greatest honor, is to rise to the level of the old feudal aristocracy. The orator in the House of Commons, whose eloquence adorns and enriches his mother tongue-the patriot statesman, whose skill guides his country through the storm-the jurist whose genius and industry have thrown light along the Gothic labyrinths of the law-the warrior whose exploits, on the deep or on the land, have made" the meteor flag of England" burn more terrific than before-mounts at last to the peerage, and thus attains the goal of his ambition. And what an ambition! He is a peer indeed; but he comes a novus homo into the circle of the old nobility. He is a peer indeed, and is permitted to uphold the rotten aristocracy, by bringing to its aid the vigor of his talents and the lustre of his performances; but after all, the stupid descendant of some

iron-fisted, leaden-headed old baron of the days of King John, the coroneted gambler "whose blood has crept through" titled "scoundrels ever since" it was ennobled by the Tudors,-yes and the rowdy profligate who traces his pedigree back to some unmentionable female in the court of Charles the Second,-takes precedence of him, and blesses himself as of a more illustrious birth than this new created lord of yesterday. Meanwhile, the man of science and of letters has no hope of rising to so glorious an eminence. The astronomer who writes his name among the constellations-the chemist at whose analizing touch nature gives up her profoundest secrets-the inventor who gives new arms to labor, new wings to commerce, and new wealth and comforts to mankind-the historian who illuminates his country's annals, and turns into wisdom the experience of past ages the poet who entrances nations with the spell of song and fable-seeks the patronage of the high-born, happy to share that patronage with actors and Italian fiddlers, thrice happy if the king, deeming him fit to stand in the outer court of aristocracy, shall dub him knight, or exalt him to the rank of baronet. Thus Davy, transformed into Sir Humphrey, or Brewster, elevated into Sir David, is made equal in rank with such samples of human nature as Sir Mulberry Hawk ; even as Newton after having revealed the system of the universe, and having made his simple plebeian name the most illustrious in the history of human knowledge, was belittled into Sir Isaac, and enabled to stand in the court of Queen Anne at the same degree of greatness with Pope's "Sir Plume, of amber snuff-box justly vain, And the nice conduct of a clouded cane.'

Thus "the Aristo of the North," after having filled the world with his fame, received the honor of a baronetcy, and was made almost respectable enough to be company for such as the high-born earl of Munster, and the noble marquis of Waterford. Thus perhaps, if Milton were to come to life again, under the present whig administration, and were so far to divest himself of his old Puritan and republican whims, as to make himself agreeable to my Lord Melbourne, we might hear of Sir John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost.

This sentiment then, the feudal sentiment of pride of birth, is in Great Britain, and far more in most European

countries, one of the elements of national character. It works not only in those who have high birth to be proud of, but in those who feel themselves depressed because others were born so far above them. It affects not only the etiquette of the palace and of the princely castle, but the manners and feelings of society in each of its numerous gradations. You may see the reflection of its influences direct and indirect, upon all the volumes even of the current literature of the old world.

Inseparable from this in its influence on society, is another feudal exaggeration of a natural human sentiment. As the pride of birth, which we have been considering, is the perversion of that human affection which connects us with our ancestors, so family ambition is the perversion of that human affection which connects us with our posterity. The pride of being born of a great family, and the ambition to be the founder or upbuilder of a great family are only modifications of the same disposition. Great families are a part of the feudal system. The estate of a landed proprietor under that system, is of the nature of a subordinate principality. Hence the undivided transmission of estates to the eldest son. Hence the law of entail, by which the estate is inalienable, the possessor for the time being having only a life interest in it. These two principles working together make great families. In our country, happily, great families are impossible. We see indeed, now and then, something of the European ambition to make a great family; for the impossibility is not yet so fully understood as to produce its complete effect upon the sentiments and habits of the entire people. Now and then we see a man who has acquired wealth by skill and diligence in business-or more often one who has suddenly grown rich by the chances of speculation-and who, having seen or heard how the aristocracy of Europe live in feudal grandeur on their great estates, on which their ancestors have lived for ages before them, and on which their descendants are to live through ages yet uncounted,— is ambitious to do something of the same kind here, to call his lands after his own name, and to build the baronial mansion which his posterity shall inhabit. But the great estate is divided; each heir, trained in the same luxurious habits as if he were to inherit the whole, finds his fragment insufficient for his wants; the domain passes into the hands of strangers; the aristocratic mansion becomes

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perhaps a tavern, perhaps a manufactory. The experiment soon becomes ludicrous, for till the laws which control inheritance and the tenure of estates-laws more fundamental to our social system than any others, and more deeply engraved upon the hearts of the people-are radically changed, the attempt must be as futile as an attempt to change the order of the seasons. All that a man can do for his posterity, under our laws, aside from what he does for the common welfare of his country-he must do by training his own children, so that they shall train theirs, for virtue, and for that wealth which is in the mind and not in outward possessions. In feudal countries, on the other hand, and in Britain as much as in any other, the moment a man begins to rise from poverty itself, the moment his accumulations begin to put him in any sense beyond the reach of personal want, one of his first temptations is to look out for his family; not merely to secure his children against poverty, but to raise his remote posterity into an elevated rank, to separate their interests from the interests of society at large, and thus to spread out his selfishness over all future time. The effect of this on national character cannot be insignificant. Look at such a man as Walter Scott fired with this family ambition, and under the impulse selling himself to a drudgery that broke his mighty energies, and exhausted those powers that had so long seemed exhaustless, and all for what? Why, that the author of Marmion and of Ivanhoe might be as Carlyle has well expressed it, "the founder of a race of Scotch lairds."

With the sentiments already noticed, and with the structure of society which engenders them, the sentiment of contempt for labor and for poverty is inseparably connected. Where society is thus divided into classes by hereditary distinctions-one class created to possess, to enjoy, to govern, to be honored, and another class destined to obtain by toil a scanty subsistence, or in more fortunate instances a humble competency,-labor is of course dishonored. There those who are born to labor feel that their lot is degradation, they are made to feel it by all the arrangements of society. Human nature every where, and under all political institutions is prone enough to despise labor, and to honor as the favorites of fortune or of Providence those who have nothing to do; but in the state of society of which we are speaking, that propensity instead of being counteracted, as the author