DEDICATION.. ΤΟ THE PEOPLE. In dedicating to you the First Volume of my Letters, I feel happily consciousthat I am inscribing the labours of at least a disinterested pen, to the freest and most enlightened Nation in the world. Your freedom is the heir-loom of a glorious ancestry; it was purchased at the price of the costliest blood, and requires, to guard it inviolate, a vigilance which shall surpass even that with which the vestal virgins kept alive the sacred fire of their immaculate goddess. The highest point of perfection is often the most critical: the nicest adjustment of the balance that which will take least to produce the most obvious derangement: the excitement promoted by endeavours to conquer the summit, is unfriendly to the stationary repose which alone can ensure to us its continuous occupation. The critical acmé of a properly-controlled power of the Crown having been attained to about the middle of the last reign, since that period we have evidently betrayed a declension into the extreme of popular encroachment. This encroachment, without dispute, is the domestic malady for which it now behoves us most diligently to provide a specific remedy. Many causes conspire, at this moment, to create in the body politic a predisposition to this particular kind of diseased action. The crisis in which the power of the Crown became subject to that control which founded and fortressed it, in most perfect strength, on the rock of the Constitution, was the climacteric of our limited form of Monarchical Govern-ment. Then its highest degree of perfection exposed it to utmost peril. Till the attainment of that state, the moral energies which by nature have inclination to encroach on their own part, were employing their forces to check encroachment on the part of others. Absorbed in efforts to compass the latter object, they had not their present leisureto devote to endeavours after the former Commerce, too, in weakening the natural ties of kindred as well as kind in dispersing families, and forcing multitudes into stations in which the inso-lence of newly-acquired power seduces them to obtrude claims of equality upon every thing superior, and to treat with arrogance and oppression every thing in-ferior, has an inevitable tendency to che rish the democratic spirit of the age. In thus describing the effects of commerce upon the subordination of social -life, I would by no means have you to understand me as depreciating its inestimable advantages. I am merely acting in conformity with the maxim, that "to know an evil completely, is half its cure." If commerce, therefore, have serious disadvantages, by well ascertaining what they are, we shall the more easily and surely be enabled to prevent the mischief to which they might otherwise give birth., The benefits of any system should not merely counterbalance but very considerably over-balance its evils. An equilibrium which a straw's weight can destroy, is too ticklish a state to possess the qualities of durabi lity. The Constitution is a mighty engine of conflicting powers; and it is indispensable to the well working of the whole, that these powers should only be so opposed as to perform the harmonious |