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us; but it is painfully evident that the shrewdest of men are but treading on the ice and walking amongst pitfalls, when they apply to their own times (and it is all they can) the rules and maxims which have descended to them from others. The parliaments of William, of Queen Anne, of George the First and Second, rung with patriotic eloquence

Upon the danger to the state of a standing army

Upon the evils of being drawn through our connexion with Hanover into the circle of continental politics

Upon the necessity of a Place Bill to purify the House from the corrupting influence of the crown.

On all these topics the voice of patriotism was loudly lifted up, and lifted up, we now see, with very little sagacity.

Worthy members of the House-their minds haunted with images of Prætorian guards-saw in a standing army only the instrument of tyranny. We now see in it the necessary instrument for securing internal peace, and due obedience to a constitutional government. The patriots of the day had not discovered that these Prætorian guards were theirs; paid by themselves, and supporters of their power. Nor would they recognise the fact that the condition of Europe, and the armies which other nations kept on foot, rendered a military force absolutely necessary for self-defence.

But they hoped to keep themselves remote from the arena of continental politics. The House of Hanover should not lead them out of their own island home. Vain idea. It was not the House of Hanover, it was the growing greatness of England, her commercial prosperity, her colonial possessions, that was leading her into the entangled diplomacy of the continental states. Whilst England was shut up in her own cliffs, the alliances she entered into, and the wars she conducted on the continent, were oftentimes determined by the caprice or the ambition of her monarch. But when England had colonies to defend, when she met the armaments of other nations on the seas, or in remote regions of the world, her relations to the powers of the continent assumed a new character. They were a necessary consequence of the development of her commercial greatness. And something more than a consequence. It is by the emulation-the strife, if you will, with other powers, that a nation fully develops her re sources, pushes her enterprises, and multiplies, while she seems to squander, her wealth. To advance, to struggle forward, is not the first spontaneous effort of society; its natural temper is rather to rest content with what it has. Commerce needs as bold a spirit as war itself; nor is it in a condition of Arcadian tranquillity that the courage of enterprise will be wakened. It would not be

difficult to show, that if England could have withdrawn herself from the contests and politics of the continent, she would have been unwise in doing so. Peace, of course, should be the first wish and object of a Christian statesman; but peace sought in pacific alliances, a European peace, not the sullen, sluggish peace, if such can be secured, of an isolated state.

That the two first Georges loved their Electorate of Hanover better than their kingdom of England is pretty certain; but, on the other hand, the patriots thought it quite sufficient reason for disproving of any measure of foreign policy that the interest of Hanover was concerned in it. They never waited to inquire if what was the interest of Hanover might not also be the interest of England.* They became averse to take that share in the system of European politics which was imposed upon England by her position and growing greatness. And traces of this aversion to foreign alliances still from time to time appear in the minds of some of our politicians. We may safely assert that if England could have sat quietly within her own island, and saved all those millions she has spent in her armaments and subsidies, she would now have been a poor and subordinate nation, instead of being the first people in the world-enabled by her power to extend over every quarter of the globe her own civilization, her own intelligence, her own high moral feeling.

We extract the following passage, which we think deserves consideration, from an Essay by Professor Heeren, On the Rise of the Continental Interests of Great Britain.

'In the meanwhile, the great impediments which arose to the commerce of the Baltic during the war, afforded England opportunities of complaint. No power ever carried commercial restrictions against his enemies so far as Charles XII. did in his regulations. It is true he had extraordinary inducements to such a course. His severe measures, which were directed in the first place against the Dutch, fell also upon the English, and would almost have annihilated their commerce with the Baltic had they not protected it with armed vessels. The interest of George I. as Elector of Hanover was therefore not the only cause which induced him to adopt measures against Charles, for he had grounds of complaint also in his character of King of England. Nevertheless, it is the constant reproach of all English writers, that he did not distinguish between these two interests; but that the wish to preserve the Duchies of Bremen and Verden, by which a communication was opened between his new kingdom and his German territories, led him to implicate England in his contests with the Northern States.

It would not be difficult, from what has been already said, to find grounds of defence for George I.; but allowing every one to form his own judgment upon this point, there remains another ground which has not been taken by any English historian with whom I am acquainted, and which is the most important of all in the determinations of the controversy-I refer to the question whether the interests of England or Hanover were most nearly concerned in the acquisition of Bremen and Verden? And I believe it will not be difficult to prove that the former were chiefly involved in it.

Hanover certainly gained at a sufficiently cheap rate two provinces, one of little importance, the other more so, yet neither remarkably fertile, except in those parts which border on the rivers. But then the latter of the two commands the entrance

In the third and last subject we have alluded to, in their anxiety for a Place Bill, the patriots were still more palpably mistaken. Impressed with the evil consequences which might result from the corruption of the House by the influence of the court, they could see nothing but mischief in the permission of men who held places, or received pensions from the crown, to sit as members of parliament. At one time, even the ministers were to be excluded. They overlooked the primary necessity there was, that the monarch and the House of Commons should be able to work together in the government of the country. It is this double position of the minister, as member of the cabinet and member of parliament, that alone renders feasible this partnership in the sovereignty between the throne and the senate; and the minister occupies the high place which is accorded to him in our monarchy, because he is essential to this alliance between the two powers. By excluding the ministry from their walls, the House of Commons would have forfeited its share in the administration of the government; unless, indeed, they meant to assume to themselves the whole powers of government. Such would have been the alternative to which their Place Bill would have brought them. They must have excluded themselves from all participation, in the rights and prerogatives of the monarchy, or they must have made their own Speaker the great executive and monarch of the realm.

into the two principal rivers, and consequently the chief commercial approaches of northern Germany; and thus by its geographical situation becomes of very great importance. Little was gained by the electorate, a country which has not one seaport, nor any commercial town of moment, which exports comparatively little, and the exports of which, as they are objects which are not generally classed amongst contraband commodities, there could not easily be found causes to interfere with. But this made the advantages to England all the greater. From the time that the province which commands the mouths of those streams, and with them the two principal sea-ports of Germany, became annexed to the dominions of her king, these roads of commerce were permanently open to England; the communication with Germany no longer depended on political circumstances; she had no longer any cause to fear that her exports would be either excluded from the continent or admitted under the disadvantages of increased duties; and a fair prospect was opened to her of securing the commerce of the whole of northern Germany.

In order to comprehend the truth of this, we must view the case, not according to present circumstances, but those of that time. In the state of alienation which then existed between England and Sweden, it was but too certain that Charles would seize the first opportunity of vengeance. Let us suppose he had succeeded in recovering himself-and this, considering the reconciliation he was on the point of affecting with Russia, was far from impossible-and had regained possession of his German territories, would not these rivers, as well as the entrance into the Baltic, have been closed, either immediately or on every future quarrel, and privateers have been fitted out for the purpose of infesting that as well as the northern

sea ?'

ART. VII. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. 12mo, pp. 384. Churchill, London. Third Edition.

THE object of the author of this work is to exhibit a theory of creation, one that in a few words shall afford a rational explanation of the varied phenomena of the universe. Such attempts have often been made by the teachers of science, to satisfy their own longing for the establishment of sufficient causes for the phenomena of nature, and have been adopted by the public mind from the same cause. These theories, however, have always been regulated by the knowledge of facts possessed by their authors, and they have been deserving of attention only as they might be confirmed or rejected when brought to the test of facts.

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It is thus that a false theory in natural philosophy is so much more easily corrected than one in physiology. At the same time, due consideration of this fact is seldom found in the mind of the public; and the generalization of the physiologist is admitted with as little evidence in its favour as that of the chemist, the complication of the phenomena in the one case as compared with the other, being entirely overlooked. One of the simplest laws in science is that of gravitation; it refers to but one property of matter; its facts can be observed without difficulty, and combined stage after stage in the inquiry, till we come to the masses of matter moving through space the highest expression of that law. This law is not interfered with by the laws which express other properties of matter, and may be said to stand alone in its simplicity and extended application. In passing on from the consideration of the effects of the property of gravitation or attraction, to the other properties of matter, the peculiar relations of its various forms, we find the difficulty of high generalizations increase, although the genius of a Dalton has effected for chemistry what Newton had previously done for physics. The difficulty of investigating and of generalizing increases in chemistry as we enter the domains of organic nature, even where life is absent; but when matter is endowed with this principle, assuming unnumbered forms, each form presenting varied phenomena, performing functions influenced by the agencies of heat, light, electricity, and chemical forces, it is then that the investigation of the phenomena requires the highest powers of observation, and the greatest patience, caution, and judgment are necessary, lest the investigator should be betrayed into a hasty generalization. But, obvious as this must be to every one, it is precisely in

this science of life that the wildest speculations are put forth as sober reason, and absurd hypotheses as rational theories. It is in this science that some tyro rises up, and imagining himself a physiological Newton, pronounces, with all the gravity of a philosopher, that he has discovered a law for the organic kingdom, as extensive as that of Newton for the inorganic.

The sum of all we have seen of the psychical constitution of man, is, that its Almighty Author has destined it, like everything else, to be developed from inherent qualities, and to have a mode of action depending solely on its own organization. Thus the whole is complete on one principle. The masses of space are formed by law; law makes them in due time theatres of existence for plants and animals; sensation, disposition, intellect, are all in like manner developed and sustained in action by law. It is most interesting to observe into how small a field the whole of the mysteries of nature thus ultimately resolve themselves. The inorganic has been thought to have one final comprehensive law, GRAVITATION. The organic, the other great department of mundane things, rests in like manner on one law, and that is-DEVELOPMENT. Nor may even these be after all twain, but only branches of one still more comprehensive law, the expression of a unity, flowing immediately from the One who is First and Last.'—p. 342.

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Such is the language of the unknown author of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,' from which it will be seen that the object of the author is somewhat more ambitious than the title of the work would seem to indicate. We would, however, here state that, had the work been put forth as the production of idle hours, and its speculations been correctly estimated by its author, we should not assume the tone of censure in which we feel compelled to speak of this volume. The author, as the above passage has shown, is evidently ignorant of the weakness of his theory, and the worthlessness of many of his facts, and consequently, writing with sincerity, is the more likely to lead away those who are less informed on the subject of his speculations than himself. But let us seek for an expression of this law of development, and the facts on which it rests, before pointing out its inconsistency with facts better established. The following passages are the substance of the author's conclusions:—

The whole train of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest, up to the highest and most recent, are, then, to be regarded as a series of advances of the principle of development, which have depended upon external physical circumstances, to which the resulting animals are appropriate. I contemplate the whole phenomena as having been in the first place arranged in the counsels of Divine Wisdom, to take place, not only upon this sphere, but upon all the others in space, under necessary modifications, and as being carried on, from first to last, here

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