Hence the bloody scenes which Spain and Spanish America have exhibited for the last three hundred years. The royal feuds, the civil wars, and the Spanish American rebellion, prompted Napoleon to attempt the conquest of Spain, and his sword severed Spanish America forever from the mother country. The mode in which a cruel disposition punishes a nation, we can trace in Spanish history, even to our day. In our own time, continual revolutions, with fearful and savage slaughters, have been witnessed: Spaniard killing Spaniard in cold blood, by order of governors and commanders. The gold and silver of the American colonies, wrung from them at a cost of so much blood, have rusted in her coffers. They have neither enriched nor blessed her, but like the guilty treasures of Rome, they curse the plunderer. Spain, which in the days of Moorish power, was filled with the fruits of industry and the elegancies of art, rich and populous, is now poor, miserable, half depopulated, torn by bloody civil wars, oppressed, and devoured by the priestly agents of Rome. That once noble, great, and powerful people, have sinned against the unchangeable laws of our nature, enjoining peace, equity, and mercy; and they are now suffering the just and inevitable penalty.

The Holy Alliance of the kings of Europe,

adopted the antiquated papal doctrine, that all men should think, speak, write, and act, according to a prescribed standard. There was this difference. The popes pretended to infallible judgment on all subjects, religious, civil, and scientific. The kingly Alliance confined their claim of infallibility to legitimate kings, who were declared the fountain of wisdom and power, and authorized by the Grace of God, to rule according to their sovereign will. To enforce this royal doctrine, Louis the XVIII. was placed on the throne of France, by her armed invaders, and in Spain and Naples, constitutional governments were put down, and despotism established by French and Austrian bayonets. Already the free and dauntless spirit of the age, has driven out Charles the X. and his dynasty from France, and erected the frame work of a free government under Louis Phillippe, elective king of the French. Spain has been desolated by civil wars, supported by this unholy Alliance for the overthrow of Spanish liberty, but her Cortes and constitutional administration have been restored, and the oppressive power of the clergy has been abated, and Spain we hope, is free from royal servitude. The failure of the Holy Alliance to retain France and Spain under their iron dominion, shows that the scimetar is powerless when wielded against the freedom of the human mind.

This abortive effort of the combined kings of Europe, the denunciation of this enemy of liberty by President Monroe, and its renunciation by England, have overthrown the authority of the Holy Alliance, so far as it endangers human freedom. The rising vigor of the human mind has broken the bonds of papacy and legitimacy.

The sword partitioned Poland between Austria, Prussia, and Russia. This act of national injustice has produced terrible rebellions, and immense slaughter of conquerors and conquered; and who can say that the sword may not again sever rising Poland from the rule of her oppres

sors.

England has been invaded by successive conquerors, Danes, Saxons, and Normans, the last seizing by force what their predecessors had acquired by the same. In the Norman conquest all rights of liberty and property were violated, and William the Norman, claimed all England as his own, and the people as his vassals. This laid the foundation of the unequal state of property in that country where the few are very rich, and the many very poor. This effect of the Norman conquest has been increased by foreign and domestic wars, by the invasion of France by the British, by wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, in Europe and America, which

have bequeathed to Great Britain an immense national debt. In 1689, the British debt was 664,263 pounds sterling, and in 1836, it amounted to 787,638,916 pounds, charged with an annual interest of 29,143,517 pounds. The British war of legitimacy against France, in favor of the old Bourbon dynasty, and the American Revolutionary contest, cost Britain more than 722 millions of pounds sterling of her vast debt.

The French war resulted in restoring the antiquated Bourbons to the sovereignty of France, until 1830, when the printing press, and the advancing spirit of the age drove Charles the Tenth and his descendants forever from the throne of that noble people.

The policy of national intervention arose naturally out of the war of legitimacy upon France, for the restoration of the expelled Bourbons, and from the supervisory power over the nations of Europe, assumed by the Holy Alliance of the sovereigns of that continent. When a new and more liberal ministry came into power in Great Britain, and this celebrated Alliance had, by armed intervention applied this odious principle for the destruction of the constitutional governments of Spain and Naples, and sought to extend it to the continent of America, the British policy changed, and under the guidance of the celebrated Can

ning, opposed the doctrine of national intervention. The doctrine of absolute monarchy and armed intervention, its only prop, were overthrown in England by the free spirit of the age, and the expulsion of Charles the Tenth in 1830, once more repudiated the doctrine of legitimacy. In fifteen years after the fall of Napoleon, the object of the wars that had long desolated Europe was lost, and Britain found she had prodigally wasted her blood and treasure without any national advantage in the French as well as in the American war. A more instructive lesson cannot be found in all the history of the world. A war of near a quarter of a century, with a destruction of more than five millions of men, and an immense waste of treasure, covering Europe with mourning and taxes, to Napoleon and France, to Britain and legitimacy, proved in the end, an idle, a useless, and a ruinous contest. Such is the lesson which the wars of Napoleon teach us.

The Ottoman government is a living and dying example of the self-destroying power of force. From Mohammed, his followers derived the sword and licentious freedom as the legacy of the false prophet. The sword and the brutal part of our nature propagated and sustained this system of violence. The Ottoman Empire hoisted the crescent over the ancient Byzantium, in the fifteenth