DAY after day have the oracles, official and otherwise, of the party now unhappily dominant, congratulated the country on the prospective reëstablishment of that "great measure of deliverance and safety" devised by Van Buren, twice rejected but ultimately ratified by a Congress of his partisans, which, though speed ily overthrown by the resulting Whig ascendency, has been ever since, at least nominally, adhered to by "the party" through good and through evil report. This measure, the people have been assured, would secure the public treasure against embezzlement, (despite the experience in the cases of Swartwout, Hoyt, Price, etc.,) give stability to the currency, and everywhere preserve the business and industry of the nation from those ruinous fluctuations growing out of contractions and expansions of the circulating medium which have proved so baneful to legitimate enterprise and patient toil. Brave words these and specious, such as have heralded all the gunboat experiments ever made upon popular credulity and party tenacity since the world began. The scheme, so plausibly commended, has secured a sort of public sanction by the votes of those who never examined the arguments in favor of, much less those against it, and to whom it was ample recommendation that it was unpalatable to the Whigs and seemed calculated to harass and cripple the banks. The Independent or Sub-Treasury project has triumphed, so far as is implied in the election of a President and Congress avowedly favorable to its reënactment. The argument is exhausted, or rather forestalled; the jury empanneled to try the issue, are already pledged to render a verdict for the scheme; and the House has put it through without ceremony, very reasonably acting on the presumption that where but one result is possible, the consumption of weeks in debate, where there can be no deliberation, is a sheer waste of precious time. So the bill has gone to the Senate, by a vote of nearly two to one in the more popular branch, and in its legitimate shape. It is in truth a bill to" divorce "the Government from Banks, if faithfully executed; providing that all payments to the United States, after the 30th of June next, whether for customs,

lands, postages, or otherwise, shall be made in solid coin, and of course all payments from the Government must soon be made likewise—that is, as soon as the eleven millions of public money now held in deposit by the banks shall have been exhausted. The measure seems to be unexceptionable in its details, wrong only in its principle and inevitable conse quences. There can be no rational doubt that the Senate will pass it, probably without materia alteration.

But now there rises to view what would be an anomaly in the history of any but Loco-foco policy and legislation. The advocates of the measure are alarmed and appalled at the prospect of its success, while a large proportion of its opponents regard that result with undissembled satisfaction. These say to the "divorce" men-" You have talked about this measure long enough-let us see it work! You once before carried it through Congress by prodigious efforts, and turned square around to contriving and managing how to render it, as nearly as possible, a nullity and a farce. Now pass it as you mean to have it stand, and set it in motion as you mean to have it work, and we will gladly abide the issue. One of two things we are confident it must prove, either an expensive and hazardous juggle, or a ruinous mischief. But if we are so grossly deceived with regard to it as you assume, a thorough, practical trial will undeceive us, and the country will reap all the benefits. If the measure work as we say, the people will soon put a stop to it. At all events, it is high time this protracted controversy were brought to a close. Put on your screws!"

But the very sturdiest champions of the "hard" policy now betray misgivings, while the summer-flies who flutter and buzz in their wake do not even attempt to conceal their reluctance and forebodings. The portents of instant calamity to result from the Sub-Treasury revolution are too clear to be denied or mistaken. Credit and confidence wither, and the Circulating Medium shrinks in volume irresistibly, as the doors of the SubTreasuries yawn to engulf several millions of specie. The banks have no more power to resist in the premises than the sun has to shine through a raging storm

Their directors may resolutely shut their eyes and ears, and go on discounting the same as ever. But this cannot last. If prudence does not teach them, bankruptcy soon will. The power of banks in a convulsion is like that of ships in a storm; they can at best but avert and overcome its perils, but must not presume to still or even direct the warring elements. Should they do so, the rebuke of their temerity is speedy and signal. No vulgar error is more gross than the supposition that banks may combine to increase or diminish essentially the volume of the currency, and thus to raise or depress the money value of property. As well might the frailest bark undertake to reverse the tides.

The Sub-Treasury project is to pass, for we assume that the dominant party is not quite ready to enter a cognovit on all the hobbies which it rode in the canvass which gave it power. "The whole of Oregon " is virtually given up by the action of the present Congress, while Mr. Walker's thoroughly free-trade report, and partially corresponding bill, must stand back for the substitute of the House Committee of Ways and Means, giving a higher range of duties on Woolens, Cottons, &c., and diverging as plainly if not as widely from free-trade principles, as does the present tariff. On no grounds but those of Protection can this bill be sustained; it is in truth simply a weaker and worse, a more timid and diluted Protective Tariff than that of 1842. We cannot see how a well-informed and earnest free-trader can commit himself to the support of such a measure. And now if the Sub-Treasury were to be thrown overboard, either openly or by an obliteration of its essential features, the party which elected Mr. Polk might as well confess its positions and doctrines of 1844 a stupendous fabric of imposture, resign the seals, and go into liquidation. But this, pride, interest and ambition will not permit, and therefore we cannot doubt the passage of the Sub-Treasury, "in spite of lamentations here or elsewhere." And, since it is to pass, why not in the shape it is to wear to the end? That it is to produce contraction, convulsion, suffering, is conceded in every attempt to give it a modified, graduated operation. No sincere advocate of the measure could vote for such a glaring violation of its essential principle as is involved in the collection and retention of two-thirds of the Revenue in bank notes, if he did not

believe that the collection forthwith of the whole in specie would prove disastrous. But to make such a revolution as this bill proposes take effect by degrees, can never modify the essential character of that revolution, nor even its essential consequences; it can only serve to blind the less observing millions to the causes of their sufferings. And this is in truth the main object of the gradualists. They fear the public will not swallow the whole quart of their nostrum, so they present it in four half-pint doses. If they asked us but to take one as a sample, there would be some difference in favor of gradualism; but, since the same act binds us to take the whole, there really

is none.

But mark the difference against it. The currency is now mainly sound and yet sufficient; the banks solvent, yet actively benefiting their customers and the public. But pass the Sub-Treasury in the graduated form, and the power of the banks to facilitate business will be diminished, while they will be forced to the unpleasant and unpopular resort of curtailment and collection. In the agony of contraction, some of the weaker institutions will go to the wall, creating a panic and a run upon the whole. Soon the inevitable stringency and occasional ruin of a bank will be appealed to as reasons for an entire divorce from banks and paper money, because of their fluctuations and insecurity; and thus the consequences of the Loco-foco nostrum will be brazenly adduced as its causes. Government will be held by its advocates to have cut loose from banks because they were unsafe and useless, when in fact it has made them so by its predetermination to do this very thing. Every consideration of justice, business, policy, combines to urge that the measure should take the shape at first that it is to wear to the end; and we cannot believe that Whigs will lend their aid to any scheme of which the design is to mystify and delude.

The

That the practical evil of the Sub-Treasury, honestly and faithfully enforced, will be far greater than many even of its adversaries anticipate, we have long considered inevitable. The real point of danger is rarely touched in the popular discussions on this subject. Whether the Government shall see fit to keep its deposits with banks or elsewhere, and to make its transfers of funds by means of drafts or guarded wagon-loads of specie,

is a question which derives far greater importance from considerations which do not strike the general mind. That the Government should see fit to keep its own funds, and to that end should withdraw them from banks, even though it were to hoard them inflexibly in specie, is not enough in itself to convulse the business and paralyze the industry of a nation so energetic and so prosperous as ours. The use of the five to ten millions per annum which constitute the aggregate balance in the Treasury might be lost either to business or banks, and hardly be felt. But when the Government openly, ostentatiously determines to withdraw its deposites from and cease all dealings with or trust in banks, the moral influence of such a resolve cannot fail to be great, and to be felt in every corner of the Union. The example appeals forcibly to the ignorant and the timid, especially among those who justify and sustain it, for imitation, and imitated it will be. We know that already individuals who had hoarded sums in bank notes, have, since the Sub-Treasury passed the House, taken them to the banks and drawn the specie thereon, in order to be secure against apprehended danger, who would not have thought of so doing but for the action in Congress. This process must go on and become general when the act goes into operation. Guardians, trustees, treasurers and individual depositors, will be impelled to convert their funds into coin, and place them beyond the reach of whatever consequences may result from so vital a change of national policy. The banks will thus be driven, by a perpetual drain of specie, to contractions far beyond their present anticipations.

But when to this moral influence of the Sub-Treasury is added the practical, inevitable effect of the Government's denying avowedly, uniformly, inflexibly, to all bank notes the character of money, or its legitimate and honest representative, no apprehension can magnify the reality of the desolation which must ensue. Bank issues now form nearly the entire circulating medium of the country; they are universally accepted without hesitation or doubt as money, and pass from hand to hand with a celerity which defies calculation. The six hundred millions of dollars of specie in France do not, and could not, perform the service which is here done by less than one hundred millions of coin and a

bank circulation resting thereon averaging something like one hundred and fifty millions. A tiny slip of paper, prepared in five minutes and sent by mail at an expense of ten cents, effects a transfer of a million or more from New York or Boston to St. Louis or New Orleans, without agitation or remark, when that same transfer, if made in coin, as of old, would have cost thousands, and required the labor of several persons for weeks. A contraction of even fifty millions in the bank note circulation of the country necessarily involves a contraction of credits, of operations and of money values, to ten times that amount.

Now let us suppose the Sub-Treasury established as the law of the land, in that shape which all agree that it must ultimately assume if it is to be a reality, and not a pestilent, profligate sham, and that its requisitions are faithfully enforced. Does any man, can any man, believe that the present system of bank credits and circulation will not be violently affected? When the Government has written glaringly over the doors of all its customhouses, land-offices, post-offices, &c., "No Bank Notes taken-nothing receiv. ed or known here as money but the hard coin itself," can any one think that everybody else but the Government is to go on receiving and regarding bank notes as heretofore? Will not the citizen who has twice or thrice been repulsed from the post office, where important advices awaited him, because he happened to have nothing but good bank notes in his pocket, be careful to have something else another time, and to that end convert his notes into specie? Will not the prudent merchant, daily required to make payments at the Custom-House, take care to have a supply of the only money there recognized, stowed away against the possible event of a suspension caused by this very exaction? Will not the emigrant going westward, the land speculator, the capitalist seeking profitable investment,&c., all take with them that medi um which will alone pay for lands, instead of that which is most convenient? The notes or certificates of a New York or Boston bank will no longer be worth more in the West than the specie they promise, because no longer accepted at the land-office, or used by it in remitting its funds. In short, bank notes, no longer answering all the purposes of money, must cease to be regarded as the equivalent of coin, because no longer

POLAND has become linked by association and sympathy with the cause of Freedom the world over. Her heroic struggles and her cruel fate, while they have rejoiced the despotisms that surround her as another victory of Tyranny over Liberty, have bound her to the heart of the patriot in every land. Poland is now a corpse dismembered and divided to her conquerors, and all that her children can do is to see that her grave is not dishonored, nor her name covered with undeserved obloquy. She struggled while she could, and when hope in her own arm had departed, she leaned on her broken spear, and turned with pleading look to the world, but in vain, and she fell. Not content with her ruin, her enemies attempt to blacken her history, and destroy the moral effect of her example.

We propose to devote here three chapters to the affairs of Poland, with a view of giving a concise sketch of its history, so that one can form a more definite and correct opinion of that nation than from the meagre and prejudiced sources furnished by English historians. There is so little written on Poland in the English language, and most of that either in prejudice or ignorance of Polish authorities, that a correct and comprehensive history of Poland is yet a desideratum in English literature. We never were so forcibly reminded of this fact as when reading Alison's History of Europe-that libel on all history. Mr. Alison set out with fair professions of candor and impartiality, but he has not made those professions good in any part of his work; and every nation he has taken up has suffered at his hands; England alone the immaculate England-is glorified. In speaking of Poland, he discovers there too much of republicanism, and his sensibilities are at once offended. Instead of taking up the thread of history at the beginning, and following it to the end, he takes it up at the most unfavorable point, and from the circumstances which then exist, he judges of the whole nation and her entire history. In history, as in painting, the outline may be correct but the coloring may be false, not true to nature. The historian may dip his brush only in black, and thus,

while faithful to dates and names, he may give an unnatural complexion to the subjects he paints. This is precisely the case with Mr. Alison when sketching the history of Poland. On this account it is more difficult to refute him, without going all over the ground, as every feature in this subject must be retouched with its appropriate color, that the whole picture be faithful to nature. To do this, neither time nor space would allow us; but we will attempt such a sketch as will present Poland in her proper light, and serve as a partial vindication of her so much misunderstood or misrepresented cause.

The inhabitants of the great plain, now unrighteously partitioned, bounded by the Baltic, the Ďwina, the Dnieper on one side, and by the Oder, the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea on the other, according to the belief of some, had the Scythians for their ancestors. The Poles were also called by the Greeks and Romans Sarmata, and hence the name of Sarmatia was given to the country they inhabited. Sarmatia is but a contraction of Saurommatos, and means lizard-eyed, being derived from the two Greek words saura lizard and ommatos the eye.

These lizard-eyed people bore also the name of Slavonians, which appellative is derived from the word slava, meaning fame or glory. Slavonian, therefore, means famous or glorious. Of late the Slavic writers prefer this to another equally authentic generic name of the Slavic race, we mean Slovianie (read Slo-viah-nieh.) Slovianie is derived from slovo word. Slovianin, the singular of Slovianie, means rich, full in words. This latter appellative is used to this day by a small tribe of the race calling themselves Slovacy (Slo-vah-tsy) the singular of which is Slovak. It follows that the proper appellation of the race is Slavianie, or Slovianie, Slovacy being reserved for the tribe alluded to. In English we should say Slavonian or Slovian, or if it should please better, Slovianian, Slavic or Slovic race, and never Sclavonian, Sclavonic, or Sclavic race.

The Germans, who were mortal enemies to the Slavonians, were in the habit