To one who habitually endeavors to contemplate the true state of things, the political state can hardly be said to have any existence whatever.  It is unreal, incredible, and insignificant to him, and for him to endeavor to extract the truth from such lean material is like making sugar from linen rags, when sugar-cane may be had.  Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written to-day for the next ten years, with sufficient accuracy.  Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend.  Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.

But will the government never be so well administered, inquired one, that we private men shall hear nothing about it?  “The king answered:  At all events, I require a prudent and able man, who is capable of managing the state affairs of my kingdom.  The ex-minister said:  The criterion, O Sire! of a wise and competent man is, that he will not meddle with such like matters.”  Alas that the ex-minister should have been so nearly right!

In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.  It is grateful to make one’s way through this latest generation as through dewy grass.  Men are as innocent as the morning to the unsuspicious.

     “And round about good morrows fly,
     As if day taught humanity.”

Not being Reve of this Shire,

     “The early pilgrim blithe he hailed,
     That o’er the hills did stray,
     And many an early husbandman,
     That he met on the way";—­

thieves and robbers all, nevertheless.  I have not so surely foreseen that any Cossack or Chippeway would come to disturb the honest and simple commonwealth, as that some monster institution would at length embrace and crush its free members in its scaly folds; for it is not to be forgotten, that while the law holds fast the thief and murderer, it lets itself go loose.  When I have not paid the tax which the State demanded for that protection which I did not want, itself has robbed me; when I have asserted the liberty it presumed to declare, itself has imprisoned me.  Poor creature! if it knows no better I will not blame it.  If it cannot live but by these means, I can.  I do not wish, it happens, to be associated with Massachusetts, either in holding slaves or in conquering Mexico.  I am a little better than herself in these respects.—­As for Massachusetts, that huge she Briareus, Argus and Colchian Dragon conjoined, set to watch the Heifer of the Constitution and the Golden Fleece, we would not warrant our respect for her, like some compositions,