der upon the community, it will be more than they have ever done yet; more than many of their advocates expect them to do. The great vice of our time is a propensity to run into debt, reckless of providing the means of payment. The calculation, so far as any is made, seems to be, that credit, not industry, is to pay the debt. So far as industry is concerned, the calculation will doubtless prove true. Credit may succeed in transferring the debt from one creditor to another many times, but will probably never pay it. Our farmers and other industrious producers are amused with the notion that they are only lending their credit, when their representatives put out bonds by the forty or fifty millions of dollars. Let them look to their bonds! As surely as the bonds are signed and sealed, and put into the hands of the speculators, will the lands and labor of our people be taxed to pay both the interest and principal of the greater part of them,-or, the people will refuse to pay them. Which will they do? Which must they do? Necessity will drive them to take the latter course. When the people shall find that their representatives have transcended their power and abused their confidence, they will discard such men from their councils, and disavow their acts. Let them, like young Hamlet, go "for England," and face, if they dare, the bond-holders at the Royal Exchange. Let the bond-holders send the bonds back by them for collection if they choose, and then will come up the third and final question: THIRDLY: Have the holders now, or will they ever have, any power or means to enforce the payment of them? The following extract from the Constitution of the United States, Art. XI. of the Amendments, bears with weighty force upon this question. "The judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of another state, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state." Thus, then, the several states cannot be sued upon their bonds in the courts of the United States. Can the bond-holders in Europe be aware of this fact? When they shall be made acquainted with it, how long will it be ere they send the bonds back to Wall street for sale? At what rates could they be sold under such circumstances? Is it possible that our state legislators, who are voting to put out these bonds, are aware that there are no lawful means to enforce the payment of them? No lawful power for, but the supreme law against their emission? What shall be said of grave lawgivers who are either ignorant of such facts, or who, knowing them, issue bonds and "bills of credit" by the hundred million? Are they all honorable men, and do they consider those bonds debts of honor? They are welcome to share the honor among themselves, that of the payment of the bonds not excepted. Some of the states, like Mississippi, may permit suits to be brought against them in their own courts. If the states are able to pay these bills and choose to do it, they can pay them without a suit more easily than with one. If they do not choose to pay them, suits in their own courts would be mere mockery. The same power that gave being to their courts can alter or abolish them, at pleasure. The holders of the bonds may as well sue the signers of them, or the Norman lawyers who advised their issue, in their own kitchens, before their own cooks and footmen, as sue the several states in their own courts. The court of honor is the only court left open to them. There the law is apt to run counter to the stock-jobbers. When the people generally shall be made fully to understand the facts in relation to this, matter, the trade in state bonds must cease, or be carried on pretty much as the Life and Fire trade was in 1826. The lottery business of a later date, and the exchanges and note shaving of 1836, 1837, were scorching and withering blasts to many persons; but the trade in banks, bonds, bills of credit, and stock-jobbing, since those periods seems likely to sink all former revulsions into comparative insignificance. It is due to the community that the facts should be spread abroad, and the subject publicly discussed. The people, when made acquainted with them, will draw correct conclusions, and apply the proper corrective measures to the root of the evil. They will return to their first political love; to the principles of the Declaration of Independence; to the principles of the Constitution of the United States; and honestly put them into practical operation throughout the land. They will require of their judges, in every state, that they be bound thereby. There they will rest, under the deep and perfect conviction, "That no free government or the blessing of liberty can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue." The state debts have been incurred for the following objects: LAMENT OF LA VEGA IN CAPTIVITY. BY S. ANNA LEWIS. "O patria amada! á tí suspira y llora Está en su carcel alma peregrina, Llevada errando de uno, en otro instante." I. I AM a captive on a hostile shore, Caged, like the falcon from his native skies, In futile lamentations, tears, and sighs, While human shackles clank around their listless ears. II. Hark! hear ye not 'mid those triumphal cries III. My soul appall'd shrinks from Hypocrisy, The Fiends of War, inflated with acclaim, IV. I am a captive while my country bleeds; While she by desecrating hands is riven; V. And thou, ethereal one! my spirit's bride, Our quick hearts ebbing into one soft stream VI. Oh, my distracted country! child of pain Must thou become the poet's Mecca? Lore For antiquaries? Temple of decay? Wilt thou survive no more, my beautiful Monterey? VII. Spirit of Cortes! Montezuma! rise! Let not the foe your cherish'd land enslave! Let her not fall a bloody sacrifice! And thou, eternal Cid! who from the grave And ye Hear, in the spirit-land, my country's doleful wail! "Cid Campeador, after death, was dressed in his war-apparel, placed on his richly caparisoned steed, and led forth from the walls of Valencia toward the Moorish camp, at the sight of whom, and the great number of his followers, the Moors, in all sixty thousand, fled towards the sea."-SOUTHEY'S CHRONICLES OF THE CID. †The Darro is a small stream running through the city of Grenada, and containing in its bed particles of gold. The plain surrounding Grenada, and the scene of action between the Moors and the Christians. THE AMERICAN PRESS AND THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. BY THEOPHILUS FISK. THE heroes of the French revolution were not compounded of courage and crime; nor is their unmatched Republic the offspring of folly and fraud. It has been the result of an unparalleled combination of talents and virtue. It was no convulsive effort to liberate themselves by enslaving others. It was not a mere change of masters, entailing upon the people burdens and oppressions equal to those they had staggered under for centuries, only with a change of name. No. It is Liberty for all, Equality to all, and Fraternity with all. As the followers of Mohammed are said to turn their eyes to the place of his birth, so hereafter may the lovers of true freedom and equality turn to the mighty nation which has just struck the first successful blow for social reform, since the creation of the world. The light of divine truth and immortal justice, which has shone upon regenerated France in the fulness of its overwhelming power, has been the signal of emancipation for the whole human race. A live coal, taken from her consecrated altar, is lighting all Europe into a conflagration. Crushed, down-trodden humanity, is everywhere rising up in the might of its omnipotence. The whole race is emerging from an age of iron-from centuries of bondage, ignorance, and degradation, and coming forth into the out-breaking sun-light of a new and glorious era, whose rays are gilding the mountain peaks of human hope, while the night-shadows of crumbling Despotisms are fleeing away to the caves of darkness and oblivion. Old social dispensations of carnage and oppression, hate and injustice, which have so long swayed the destinies of our race, are coming to an end at length, and a new social dispensation of peace, harmony, and justice—of liberty, equality, fraternity—is to take their place. The false and rotten foundation of the old social edifice, a vast prison-house of groaning servitude, indigence, and woe, is crumbling to ashes. Giant industry will not much longer hug its fetters. Human society will not always remain a vast machine out of which Mammon grinds blood, and coins it drop by drop into gold for the exclusive benefit of a few privileged idlers and drones. The immediate causes which led the poverty-stricken day laborers of Paris to engage in the liberation of France, and thereby emancipate all Europe, are too familiar to the public to make it necessary for me to dwell a moment upon the details. Suffice it to say that the people desired an extension of the right of suffrage, which had been so shame |