law has been found in all degrees of conformity to the great principles of natural justice, never wholly opposed to them, and never yet in any age or any nation perfectly conformed to them. The legislative function, whether vesting in the patriarch, the chief of the clan, the military despot, or the representative council, has ever been exercised, even at the worst, under some dim consciousness of subjection to a law that was over all and upon all. In the most arbitrary and despotic governments, we shall find the recognition still of a fixed and absolute standard of justice, to which all positive law must defer and conform. Often this is best seen in the case of a clearly wrong enactment, in its sophistical and labored pretence of conformity to justice. A human statute, passed by the most dignified and potent of legislatures, feels itself, after all, a weak and pitiable thing, unless it can justify itself to the universal sense of natural justice, and show that there enters into it an element of absolute law. Everything that wears the name of law, therefore, aspires and affects to be just.

Nothing is more manifest or cheering than the progressive elevation of human statutes toward this higher standard, which has from the earliest ages been going forward in our world. Especially under

the impulses of modern civilization and the light of Christianity, a process of expurgation has been pushed forward, and countless inhumanities, personal wrongs, and civil and moral outrages, have been swept one after another from the civil codes of the world. Doubtless, enough remain; but on these the elevated tone and clearer conceptions of the age are acting with effect. There is a progress of national morality.

The laws of a nation stand, then, as the nearest approach which it can make to the standard of absolute justice and equity. They are clothed with the highest sanction. They are invested with the highest authority, claiming to be not mere expressions of human wisdom, but utterances of immutable right.

How clearly, then, the laws of a State constitute one of the most powerful and pervading sources of moral culture to the people. Law is one of the greatest and most effective educators. Besides what it does in actually restraining from wrong and enforcing the right, law

is a mighty influence ever at work in moulding the popular character and modifying the moral perceptions and sensibilities of a people. Other great influential agencies are in operation along with it and through it; but still it is a fact worthy of far more consideration than it has ever yet received, that while Christianity may do much, and literature somewhat, in the education of the popular conscience, the laws of a people are also at work silently, but constantly and universally, with a plastic force, cultivating the common sense of justice, the love of order, and the regard for practical equity among all classes of the community. With the single exception of Christianity, there is no mightier agent than righteous law for the moral cultivation of a people. And it is to Christianity, indeed, that we are indebted mainly for the higher style and elevated tone of our laws.

On the other hand, like every great instrument of good, this too is capable of a reversed action for evil. Defective, unjust, unrighteous law becomes an agency of fearful power for the perversion and debasement of national morality. A bad statute, defective in its moral tone, subversive of equity, will carry abroad a subtle, depraving influence among the million minds that look up to it with the regard that is due to it as law. !..

The influence of law in the formation of the popular tone of morality is seen from the attitude in which it stands before the minds of men, as the highest earthly utterance of justice and right. It is the enactment of the supreme power in the state. It is thus invested with the highest human authority, as well as with the higher authority of absolute law, in whose name it speaks. And in the estimation of the multitude, the lawful is nearly equivalent to the right. It is so with the mass of men, and especially with all that class on which law is designed to exert a direct and restraining power. They have no higher appeal, and scarcely recognize even in theory, and not at all in practice, any higher standard. If they do but conform to law, they have reached a point which satisfies them, and beyond which they are not prepared to feel the force of motives.

It is from this educative force of its laws, that every State comes at length to have an organic life and character peculiar to itself. The State is not a mere aggregation of individuals, a mass of shifting

units, but a corporate, organic thing, with a being and character of its own. And no extreme to which the democratic or popularizing principle may be carried, consistently with the existence of the State as such, can ever obliterate the corporate being of the State, as distinct from a mere concourse of individuals. The State is a necessary society, with government, rulers, and laws. And its laws are the medium of its operation, the instrument with which it accomplishes its ends. And by these it fixes a certain standard of morality, a certain style of moral sentiment, which will pervade the nation, and silently exert an universal moulding influence. It creates a moral atmosphere which all are to breathe, and in which the moral being of the individual is to have its growth. There is a distinguishable national character at length established in this way, of which every unit in the mass in some measure unconsciously partakes. The collective law of any land, its constitution, its body of statutes, its executive measures and judicial precedents, form together a very influential standard of morality and equity, which will produce an effect on private character, and leaven the common sentiment of the The State thus by its laws reaches all, and acts to each the part of a moral instructor. All its utterances, all its acts, have authority. The individual may dissent and resist, and yet will not wholly escape the effect. It will reach him, if in no other way, indirectly by contagion, streaming in upon him through the common sentiment, and from sympathy with the surrounding mass shaped by the hand of the State. While the greater number, yielding willingly, and with a law-abiding sentiment that occupies among us the place of loyalty, are prepared to receive this influence to its fullest

mass.

extent.

CORRUPTION is like a ball of snow, when once set a rolling, it must increase. It gives momentum to the activity of the knave, but it chills the honest man, and makes him almost weary of his calling: and all that corruption attracts, it also retains; for it is easier not to fall, than only to fall once, and not to yield a single inch, than having yielded, to regain it.

"O Postume, Postume, fugaces labuntur anni."-Horace.

"O Postumus, Postumus, the swift years glide away."-Translation.

THE reflection, which is contained in the above appropriate motto, extracted from the classics, and which was addressed by the famous Latin bard to his friend, Postumus, is one, which must forcibly press upon the mind of any person, who but stops, as he did, to contemplate or attempt to calculate the speed of time.

Whenever we look forward to any distant period in the future, days seem, it is true, to be magnified into the importance of weeks, and weeks into months, and months into years, and years into ages; and particularly do those several fragments of time appear to be, as it were, little eternities, if they happen to intervene between us and the accomplishment of some darling object, or the enjoyment of some anticipated pleasure.

But when once past, and we look back upon those same periods, they dwindle into extreme insignificance-mere diminutive specks of time, like motes in the sunbeam, or drops in the vast ocean, and, when so passed, we are astonished that they should have ever possessed so large a space in our estimation. We come to the same conclusion as did Horace, and exclaim mentally-"How swiftly glide the years away!"

The practical utility of the indulgence of such a thought must be apparent upon a moment's consideration. Consult, for instance, all analogy, and what great lesson does it teach? Why, that the minds of men in every age of the world have been luxuriantly fertile in sublime and brilliant purposes of action - that resolutions almost innumerable have daily been made, pregnant with immense importance, but that they have, in a vast majority of cases, been entirely unproductive of any practical results. "Procrastination," that benumbing paralysis of human energy-the nightmare of the soul that notorious robber, who filches away from deluded dreamers some of the

most precious and brilliant jewels of the earth, has rendered them abortive.

But, were the Latin motto from Horace-"fugaces labuntur anni” ever present to the mind- were wholesome reflections upon the never-ceasing, never-tiring flight of time, often harbored and cherished, procrastination would no longer commit its thieving depredations as now, but the soul would shake off that brooding incubus that paralyses its energies, and be as splendid in action as it is brilliant in purpose.

Amid the bustle of business-the turmoil of the world- the emulation and rivalship of statesmen-the bickerings of party strifethe insane scramble after wealth, and the aspirations of "vaulting ambition," it is wholesome, also, to permit such reflections to have a lodgment in the mind. They correct, in a great measure, the optical delusions of a diseased fancy. Things, that would otherwise enlarge into dimensions of immense extent and importance, dwindle down into puny insignificance, and take their proper place in the relative. consequence of events and circumstances. If, for instance, some high place of honor swell into Alpine magnitude before the eye of an ambitious man, and fill the whole area of his vision, how does that magnitude gradually fade away into nothingness, like the mists of the night before the radiance of the morning, if he but take a solitary walk in the cemeteries of by-gone ages, and there, prompted by the thoughts which must naturally crowd upon the mind, he thus soliloquizes - "Where are the men of other days, who strove hard to immortalize their names by learning, or wealth, or political wisdom, or the achievements of a daring valor? Dust and ashes are they. Time, the Destroyer, in his hurricane rush, hath swept them all into the grave, and is even fast obliterating the last faint vestiges of their remembrance from earth and its records." "Sic transit gloria mundi." "So passes away the glory of the world." So fades into midnight-darkness the light of its most brilliant hopes and aspirations.

ENVY, if surrounded on all sides by the brightness of another's prosperity, like the scorpion, confined within a circle of fire, will sting itself to death.