must inevitably happen; which must come to pass, as much from necessity, as yonder smoke flies upwards."-"At any rate,” said I," if posterity knew your sentiments, and heard the traditions of these your declarations, you would be well deemed a true prophet, if these events take place."-"Talk not to me of prophecy," said he angrily, "I beg your pardon for speaking so hastily; but really I lose all patience at the name. That's an old game, and has been played off successfully a long while, and on divers occasions; how much longer it will last remains to be seen. We have had quite enough of predicting events which must happen in due course, being in themselves unavoidable; of clothing prediction of future occurrences, depending on contingencies, in terms of language so loose and ambiguous, that let them happen when or how they may, or even not at all, those who foretold shall claim the merit of prescience. No, no, my friend, I vaunt not thus; I merely assert, without assuming the slightest pretensions to foreknowledge, that this apparently improbable change will happen from causes purely natural, and of course: it will take place from the very same reasons which caused the downfal of governments and imperial cities of false renown, in ages past. This city will become a shapeless mass of ruins, because it is swayed by unnatural laws; because it is not bound by the indissoluble cement of a social compact, mixed up from the unalloyed ingredients of equality and liberty because its component parts are not laid in the equal proportions necessary to give symmetry and durability to the whole; because its inhabitants have departed from the original simplicity of their common nature, and are acting in violation of her immutable laws: where are Nineveh and Babylon, Thebes and Memphis, and Palmyra? They are gone; their place is known no more. "I tell you," he continued, "this river, its waters restored to their pristine clearness, shall again reflect on its bosom the shadows of trees hanging over it in wild luxuriance; again shall its banks, clothed with reeds and sedge, be peopled with the heron and the bittern, who shall glide as heretofore, on noiseless wing, secure across the stream: again shall it shift its bed, and choke in shoals, forming swamps as it toils to join the ocean. See you those bridges reared on massive arches, which seem to claim the waters as their own? the trout shall hide her spawn in their pavement, the otter shall dive through them.While this proud edifice whereon we stand, concomitant still with the principles of its founders, and like them reduced to natural level, shall lie a crumbling disjointed monument, the victim of fruitless opposition to Nature's laws, and of fallacious policy: the owl shall whoop round its fragments, the goat browse the thistles rooted in its crevices." LETTER VII. : In the evening we resumed our conversation. "I trust," said L, "you have this day both seen and heard enough to convince you, that in what is termed a state of high polish and civilization, man is not a being feeling the same wants and desires only that he does when fresh from the hand of Nature; when he is guided by mere animal instinct that he is removed to an immense distance from those of his genus, who make both bodily and mental powers only the means of satisfying those desires; I allude to those who are as you once were, in a state called rude and savage, the exact reverse of civilization: whose intellectual energies, those which they possess above the mere feelings of brute instinct, have never been directed to the cultivation of that knowledge, which the brute from his organization can never attain. And I think we may safely assume, as a self-evident truth, that is, a truth rushing with overwhelming weight and conviction on the mind of every man, who for one moment fairly uses his reasoning powers, those very powers which alone distinguish him from the animal genera, and no more to be resisted than the certainty that I am now speaking, that every individual of the genus Homo, or man, comes from his mother's womb, endowed of natural and inalienable right, by virtue of his prerogative as a formation of Nature, and heir to such a portion of her concomitant gifts, (the pabula or continuances of existence, which are air and food, and clothing and fuel, if dwelling in such part of his maternal territory, as shall render a covering and defence from her other inevitable powers necessary to preserve that existence), as shall enable him to keep up the economy of animal life, on an equal footing with every other of his genus. And, that as it is equally self-evident and notorious, that not a particle of such food or raiment can be obtained from any other source than the lap of Nature, the Earth's surface; such surface must, and does, necessarily constitute a joint fund, a common stock, from whence every individual by the rights inseparably annexed to his being, shall procure just so much food as shall suffice to appease his natural cravings, that is, to eat and drink to satiety; and to grow thereon articles of clothing. But further, that as many parts of the |