under the name of Popular Sovereignty.  We have seen Freedom pronounced sectional and Slavery national by the highest tribunal of the republic.  We have seen the legislatures of Southern States passing acts for the renewal and encouragement of the slave-trade.  We have seen the attempted assassination of a senator in his seat justified and applauded by public meetings and the resolutions of State Assemblies.  We have seen a pirate, for the hanging of whom the conscious Earth would have produced a tree, had none before existed, threaten the successor of Washington with the exposure of his complicity, if he did not publicly violate the faith he had publicly pledged.—­But enough, and more than enough.

It lies in the hands of the people of the Free States to rescue themselves and the country by peaceable reform, ere it be too late, and there be no remedy left but that dangerous one of revolution, toward which Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem bent on driving them.  But the reform must be wide and deep, and its political objects must be attained by household means.  Our sense of private honor and integrity must be quickened; our consciousness of responsibility to God and man for the success of this experiment in practical Democracy, in order to which the destiny of a hemisphere has been entrusted to us, must be roused and exalted; we must learn to feel that the safety of universal suffrage lies in the sensitiveness of the individual voter to every abuse of delegated authority, every treachery to representative duty, as a stain upon his own personal integrity; we must become convinced that a government without conscience is the necessary result of a people careless of their duties, and therefore unworthy of their rights.  Prosperity has deadened and bewildered us.  It is time we remembered that History does not concern herself about material wealth,—­that the life-blood of a nation is not that yellow tide which fluctuates in the arteries of Trade,—­that its true revenues are religion, justice, sobriety, magnanimity, and the fair amenities of Art,—­that it is only by the soul that any people has achieved greatness and made lasting conquests over the future.  We believe there is virtue enough left in the North and West to infuse health into our body politic; we believe that America will reassume that moral influence among the nations which she has allowed to fall into abeyance; and that our eagle, whose morning-flight the world watched with hope and expectation, shall no longer troop with unclean buzzards, but rouse himself and seek his eyrie to brood new eaglets that in time shall share with him the lordship of these Western heavens, and shall learn of him to shake the thunder from their invincible wings.

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LITERARY NOTICES.

Library of Old Authors.  London:  John Russell Smith, 1856-7.