butes of his humanity, so long as this means our own white race. Beyond it the abstraction ceases, so much so that the supreme court lately decided that people of color (although they were unquestionably subjects to the King of England before the independence of the United States) are not citizens in the sense of the constitution,' and that several free states. have enacted laws against the ingress of people of color, which seem to be founded exclusively on the power which the white race possesses over the colored, and which elicit little examination because the first basis of all justice, sympathy, is wanting between the two races.

From this conception of the citizenship-this carrying of the ancient jus ante omnia jura natum, so long as it relates to our own race, much farther than the English do-arises the fact that in nearly all states universal suffrage has been established, while in England the idea of class representation much more prevails. The Americans do not know, I believe, in a single case the English rate-paying suffrage; but it must be recorded that the serious misrule of American cities has induced the opinion of many reflecting men that populous cities can not be ruled by bare universal suffrage; since universal suffrage, applied to city governments, gives to the great majority, that do not own houses or land, the right to raise and dispose of the taxes solely levied on real property.

On the other hand, it appears to Americans a flagrant act to disfranchise entire corporate constituencies for gross pervading bribery, as has been repeatedly done in English history. Indeed the right of voting has been often pronounced in England a vested right of property.

I have also stated that our whole government has a more popular cast than that of England, and with reference to this fact, as well as to the one mentioned immediately before it, I would point out the following farther characteristics of American liberty.

1 The Dred Scott case, already so famous, but which will become far more famous still in the course of our history.

We have established everywhere voting by ballot. There is an annually increasing number of members voting in the English commons for the ballot. It is desired there to prevent intimidation. Probably it would have that effect in England, but certainly not in such a degree as the English seem to expect. The ballot does not necessarily prevent the vote of a person from being known.' Although the ballot is so strongly insisted upon in America, it is occasionally entirely lost sight of.

"Tickets" printed on paper whose color indicates the party which has issued it, are the most common things; and, in the place of my former residence, it happened some years ago that party feeling ran to such a height, that, in order to prevent melancholy consequences, the leaders came to an agreement. It consisted in this: that alternate hours should be assigned to the two parties, during which the members of one party only should vote. This open defeat of the ballot was carried out readily and in good faith.

The Constitution of the United States, and those of all the states, provide that the houses of the legislatures shall keep their journals, and that on the demand of a certain, not very large, number of members, the ayes and noes shall be recorded. The ayes and noes have sometimes a remarkable effect. It is recorded of Philip IV. of Spain,2 that he asked the opinion of his council on a certain subject. The opinion was unanimously adverse, whereupon the monarch ordered every counsellor to send in his vote signed with his name, and every

1 There is an instructive article on voting in the Edinburgh Review, of October, 1852, on Representative Reform. The writer, who justly thinks it all-important that every one who has the right to vote for a member of parliament should vote, proposes written votes to be left at the house of every voter, the blanks to be filled by him, as is now actually done for parish elections. There existed written votes in the early times of New England, and people were fined for not sending them. It was not necessary to carry them personally to the poll. These written votes prevailed in the middle ages. For this and other subjects connected with elections, see the paper on elections in the appendix. 2 Coxe's Memoirs of the Bourbons in Spain.

vote turned out to be in favor of the proposed measure. The ayes and noes have unfortunately sometimes a similar effect with us. Still, this peculiar voting may operate upon the timid as often beneficially as otherwise; at any rate, the Americans believe that it is proper thus to oblige members to make their vote known to their constituents.

We never give the executive the right of dissolving the legislature, nor to prorogue it.

We have never closed the list of the states composing the Union, in which we differ from most other confederacies, ancient or modern; we admit freely to our citizenship those who are foreigners by birth, and we do not believe in inalienable allegiance.1

We allow, as it has been seen, no attainder of blood.
We allow no ex post facto laws.

1 The character of the English, and of our allegiance, is treated at length in the Political Ethics. I there took the ground that even English allegiance is a national one, whatever the language of the law books may be to the contrary. The following may serve as a farther proof that English allegiance, after all, is dissoluble. It appears from the New England charter, granted by James I., that he claimed, or had the right “to put a person out of his allegiance and protection." Page 16, Compact, with the Charter and Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth, etc.; Boston, 1836.

Had we any nobility, or had we closed our confederacy, we must have been exposed to the troubles to which the ancient republics were exposed, and which form a leading feature through the whole history of Rome. We acquired Louisiana, and, with her French population she is fairly assimilated with our great polity. She would have been a dangerous cancer had we treated her as Rome treated her acquisitions, and a war of the Socii, as the Romans had it, must ultimately have broken out. In this then we differ in a marked way from the English. When Scotland was united to England, by establishing one legislature for both, and when a similar process took place with reference to Ireland, a perfect assimilation was not the consequence as had been the case with Wales. The non-assimilation is still more marked in the case of the colonies. English readers may possibly believe that a foreign author passes his proper boundary if he ventures to discuss a subject of the highest statesmanship peculiarly domestic in its character, but "the by-stander often sees the faults of the men in the ring." How could we write on foreign his

American liberty contains, as one of its characteristic elements, the enacted or written constitution. This feature distinguishes it especially from the English polity with its accumulative constitution.

We do not allow, therefore, our legislatures to be politically "omnipotent," as, theoretically at least, the British parliament is. This characteristic, again, naturally led to the right and duty of our supreme courts in the states, and of the supreme court of the United States, to decide whether a law passed, by

tory, were we not allowed to judge of foreign subjects? Nor is this subject wholly foreign to an American, because he naturally knows more of Canada than most English do, and he knows his own colonial history. Thus justified, and making full allowance for the difficulties that may exist, we cannot help feeling surprised that England, in many other respects the only power that has shown true liberality toward colonies-so different from Spain!-and with our war of independence before her eyes, should not think of tying the distant empires she creates in all the portions of the globe, by a representation in her parliament, making it, so far as the colonies are concerned, the imperial congress. Though each distinct colony with a colonial self-government should have but two or three representatives in the commons, representing the colony as such, it seems that the effect upon the consistency of the whole gigantic empire would be distinct, and that such a measure is the only one that would promise continued cohesiveness.

1 For the English reader I would add that the following works ought to be studied, or consulted on this subject: The Constitution of the United States, and the constitutions of the different states, which are published from time to time, collected in one volume; the Debates on the Federal Constitution; The Federalist, by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay; the Writings of Chief Justice Marshall, Boston, 1839; the History of the Constitution of the United States, by G. T. Curtis, a work of mark; Mr. Justice Story's Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States; Mr. Calhoun's and Mr. Webster's Works; Mr. Rawle's work on the Constitution, and Mr. Frederic Grimke's Considerations upon the Nature and Tendency of Free Institutions, Cincinnati, 1848. To these may be added the Course of Lectures on the Constitutional Jurisprudence of the United States, by W. A. Duer, Boston, 1856. An entire literature of its own has accumulated, by this time, on the constitution, jurisprudence and constitutional history of the United States. The chief of the enumerated works will suffice to lead the student to the more detailed works of this department.

the legislature or by congress, is in conformity with the superior law-the constitution, or not, in other words, on the constitutionality of a law. It has been stated already that the courts have no power to decide on the law in general; but they decide, incidentally, on the whole law, when a specific case of conflict between a certain law and the constitution is brought before them.

I may add as a feature of American liberty, that the American impeachment is, as I have stated before, a political, and not a penal institution. It seems to me that I am borne out in this view by the Federalist.1

In conclusion, I would state as one of the characteristics of American liberty, the freedom of our rivers. The unimpeded navigation of rivers belongs to the right of free locomotion and intercommunication, of which we have treated; yet there is no topic of greater interest to the historian, the economist, and the statesman, than the navigation of rivers, because though the rivers are nature's own highways, and ought to be as efficient agents of civilization as the Road, or the Mail, their agency has been thwarted by the oppressive force of man, in almost all periods of our history. The Roman empire, doing little indeed for commerce, by comprehensive statesmanships, effected at least a general freedom of the rivers, within its territory, as a natural consequence of its unity. The Danube became free, from the interior of Germany to the Black Sea. But the barbarous times which succeeded reduced, once more, the rivers to the state of insecurity in which they had been before the imperial arm had warded off intrusion and interruption. Free navigation had not even been re-established in

1 No. lxv.

As to the parties in America, they may fairly be said to have little to do with civil liberty, which will be readily seen by the so-called National Platforms, resolved upon as the true indexes of the parties by the conventions held preparatory to the presidential elections. Nor do the names of the parties indicate anything with reference to Liberty. The term Democratic has wholly lost its original meaning, as used to designate the party which has taken it. Among others, the Resolutions published by the different conventions in the year 1853, previous to Mr. Pierce's election, and which were drawn up with great care, fully prove this.