of the people is consumed in maintaining armies, not for defence against foreign aggression, but for enforcing obedience to domestic authority.  Standing armies are the oppressive instruments for governing the people, in the hands of hereditary and arbitrary monarchs.  A military republic, a government founded on mock elections and supported only by the sword, is a movement indeed, but a retrograde and disastrous movement, from the regular and old-fashioned monarchical systems.  If men would enjoy the blessings of republican government, they must govern themselves by reason, by mutual counsel and consultation, by a sense and feeling of general interest, and by the acquiescence of the minority in the will of the majority, properly expressed; and, above all, the military must be kept, according to the language of our Bill of Rights, in strict subordination to the civil authority.  Wherever this lesson is not both learned and practised, there can be no political freedom.  Absurd, preposterous is it, a scoff and a satire on free forms of constitutional liberty, for frames of government to be prescribed by military leaders, and the right of suffrage to be exercised at the point of the sword.

Making all allowance for situation and climate, it cannot be doubted by intelligent minds, that the difference now existing between North and South America is justly attributable, in a great degree, to political institutions in the Old World and in the New.  And how broad that difference is!  Suppose an assembly, in one of the valleys or on the side of one of the mountains of the southern half of the hemisphere, to be held, this day, in the neighborhood of a large city;—­what would be the scene presented?  Yonder is a volcano, flaming and smoking, but shedding no light, moral or intellectual.  At its foot is the mine, sometimes yielding, perhaps, large gains to capital, but in which labor is destined to eternal and unrequited toil, and followed only by penury and beggary.  The city is filled with armed men; not a free people, armed and coming forth voluntarily to rejoice in a public festivity, but hireling troops, supported by forced loans, excessive impositions on commerce, or taxes wrung from a half-fed and a half-clothed population.  For the great there are palaces covered with gold; for the poor there are hovels of the meanest sort.  There is an ecclesiastical hierarchy, enjoying the wealth of princes; but there are no means of education for the people.  Do public improvements favor intercourse between place and place?  So far from this, the traveller cannot pass from town to town, without danger, every mile, of robbery and assassination.  I would not overcharge or exaggerate this picture; but its principal features are all too truly sketched.