deductions; for both which reasons, I have always had a less value for broad maxims in politics and religion, than some seem to put on them. I say not that they are useless; but the light is so distant, as to shed very little radiance of any practical utility on my private and purblind path.

Yet it is precisely these principles, formed by the coldest philosophers in their closets, that have had the greatest agency in exciting the popular passions, and setting the world on fire. Robespierre kept all France in commotion, and the guillotine moving, by certain abstract principles, taken from Helvetius and Rousseau; and I have seen religious books which seem to make the very fate of the gospel depend on the definition of virtue, i. e. that it is impartial benevolence. New England is not the only country, in which a lens of ice, taken from a polar sea of philosophy, has become a glass to collect the rays of the sun to a focus, and pour them on the regions of the burning line of popular excitement. Why is it so? How can so much passion come from such inadequate means? How can you make men fight for a metaphysical abstraction? Nothing is more common; and the reason is because the mind admires the vast, the immense, the indefinite; and where the object is obscure, the passions will be proportionably inflamed.

The truth is, the value of a general principle depends almost wholly on the deductions you make from it. Spinoza taught that all things were but develop

ments of God; confounding the author with his work, he made man, and all material things, but particles of the Deity; certain deductions were made of himself, or followers from this system, which struck mankind with horror. A pious divine of our own country, given too much perhaps to abstract speculation, approached very near to the same general principle. He too, taught, that all we see, and are, are in a sense but the developments of God. But his deductions were pious, and his general principles were embraced by a numerous class of devoted Christians. In the days of the French Revolution, thrones were overturned, churches robbed, the nobles chased from the land, property confiscated, and the sanctuary of private rights invaded by the rude hand of ruffian violence, under the shelter of the general principles of liberty and equality. I too, believe in liberty and equality; and adopt these words in what I conceive their most rigorous sense. I believe it is departing from the principles of equality, that our land is now suffering all the evils that open upon us, and will open us, until we learn to make wiser deductions from this noble principle. For what is liberty? Not the liberty to do wrong. What is equality? Not the

equality of property, but of rights. Now when we can found our republic on strict equality, the only equality which justice allows-that is, when those men only vote in the disposal of property, who have property at stake; our frame of government may stand, and not

before.

Universal suffrage is one of the grossest

violations of political equality; and unless it is restrained, or modified, our liberty will be destroyed. But we see, at any rate, that the truth of the principle depends on the deductions we make from it. The light of the sun will be colored by the glass through which we permit it to enter our room.

THE PURITAN.

No. 32.

He could raise scruples dark and nice,
And after solve 'em in a trice;

As if divinity had catch'd

The itch, on purpose to be scratch'd;
Or, like a mountebank, did wound
And stab herself with doubts profound,
Only to show with how small pain
The sores of faith are heal'd again;
Although by woful proof we find,
They always leave a scar behind.

Hudibras, Canto I.

THUS we find the value of general principles have been vastly overrated; their inclusiveness diminishing their perspicuity, and leaving room for a diversity of deductions, according to the fancy or prejudices of the holder.

If we should suppose a candle placed before a female domestic, and ask what point of knowledge was most valuable to her, as to any use which she could apply it, we shall find, that what she needs to

know is, that the object is a candle; that is, a substance made of tallow, and a cotton wick, and that it will burn and give light on the application of fire or a match; and if you go higher in the generic scale, in proportion as you ascend, you communicate a kind. of knowledge she is less and less interested to acquire. You may tell her that it is a compound of animal and vegetable matter; very well, the knowledge is of some importance; it may teach her the source from which candles are derived, but hardly how to light them or, you may tell her that it is matter; very well, that teaches her to distinguish it from spirit: or, you may say it is a created substance; that will teach her not to be a Spinozaist. But every step you take in the ascending scale, you depart from those qualities which bear on practice, and constitute real knowledge. Just so it is in intellectual generalization; what we are most interested to know, is the nearest class to which they belong. It is a matter of gratitude, that the useful is most clear.

To illustrate the vagueness of the most general principles on which philosophy attempts to build her splendid but changing fabrics, it may be remarked, that though volumes have been written on politics, and the most comprehensive minds have encountered the theme, yet they have never been able to build up a consistent system as a legitimate deduction from first principles. This is one of the chief sources of the perplexity of the subject, and may be one reason