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In 1834, Humboldt wrote: "I begin the printing of my work (the work of my life). I have the extravagant idea of describing in one and the same work the whole material world—all that we know to-day of celestial bodies, and of life upon the earth, from the nebular stars to the mosses on the granite rocks-and to make this work instructive to the mind, and at the same time attractive by its vivid language, every great and sparkling idea must be noticed side by side with its attendant facts. The work shall represent an epoch of the intellectual development of mankind in their knowledge of nature." Bacon conceived the same idea in the "Phenomena of the Universe,” though he was from his comparatively limited knowledge, unable to elaborate it as did Humboldt. Indeed it may be said the great Lord Chancellor had the faint shadows of a more extensive conception in the "Description of the Intellectual Globe," in which he would treat of human learning, embracing it all under the heads of history, poesy and philosophy, according to the three faculties of the mind, memory, imagination and reason. If Bacon caught the idea, which went not beyond a desire, Humboldt not only cleared away the ground, laid the broad and massive foundation stones upon solid soil, but erected thereon the mighty temple of Cosmos itself, in comparison with which the "intellectual globe" of Bacon, let the conception be what it may, dwindles into a dim and distant nebulae.

We are struck with a remark made by his eminent friend and biographer, Klencke, which should be quoted as a lesson to scientific men. He says, "These lectures of Humboldt were also new and remarkable in respect to the position which he took towards the people. For while other learned men, whose social position is always higher than that of the people, nearly all, in their scientific and academic pride, did not deem it worth their while to disseminate their knowledge among the people, whom it must ultimately most benefit, while they generally keep their learning as the property and mystery of a caste, and interchange it among themselves, while they consider it infra dignitatis, and degrading for a man of science to popularize his knowledge; Alexander Von Humboldt set them the noble example that a baron, a chamberlain, and confidential adviser of his king, did not consider it beneath his rank and dignity to appear publicly as the teacher of his favorite science. He shewed that a true man of science does not attach himself to an exclusive caste, and that all considerations of birth, rank and title, are as nothing in the high service of science. And thus Alexander, in the impulses of his heart and mind, fulfilled the noble duty which the mentally-gifted man owes to his people, of bestowing on them, and instructing them with the rich treasure of his knowledge and experience, thereby raising them nearer himself."

It was after the delivery of these lectures that our author traveled extensively in Asia, Russia and China, gathering fresh materials for his Cosmos. The same course of lectures had been delivered in the French language, at Paris, that he delivered in the German at Berlin, yet he had no notes, and in his old age he sat down to write out the great work

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not only of his life, but of the age in which he lived, if not the greatest scientific work of any age, the Novum Organum and the Principia alone excepted, in point of practical utility, but far below it in point of comprehensive and almost universal learning. The first volume was published in 1844-when the author was seventy five years old-day after day, night after night, with mind undimmed by increasing age, he labored on this his cherished work, publishing at irregular periods, succeeding volumes, until in his ninetieth year he completed the work by revising and correcting for sixteen hours a day the proof sheets of the fifth and last volume.

What boundless satisfaction in the evening of life to see embodied in undying form the image that had floated before his mind for nearly a half century. It is impossible to review such a work as the Cosmos, but we shall in our next issue endeavor to make some profitable references to it.

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ART. III.-CONDUCT OF THE WAR AND REFLECTIONS ON THE TIMES.

Law and liberty are the opposing forces that keep societies and governments alive. Too much of law or too much of liberty are equally destructive to human well-being. Under the influence of over legislation individual action is too much restricted, and society stagnates and retrogrades. When there is, on the other hand, too little of law, anarchy supervenes, the strong oppress the weak, and might becomes right. There is always equal danger that the world will be too much or too little governed. Yet it is most strange and unaccountable, that in all ages the European races have commended liberty as a good, and thereby inferentially condemned law and government as evils, for law and government are the negation of liberty.

These remarks would be treated as useless abstractions, and pass unheeded in ordinary times, but now every one perceives the necessity of restricting, nay, of banishing liberty, for the time, in order that when 1 peace is restored, we may again enjoy a reasonable amount of it. Nobody however looks forward to or hopes for that lorn rule, and approximation to anarchy, that made our institutions under the late Union, the laughing stock of Europe. Excess of liberty was the evil under which we labored until a few months past. Now martial law has corrected all that, and everybody hails martial law as a blessing. The whole white male population of the South, between the ages of 18 and 35, have, through their representatives, "aliened life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Their slaves are ten times freer than themselves. er Yet everybody feels that all this is eminently right. Liberty and slavery are neither good of themselves, good when unrestricted, but only good when duly apportioned and balanced, and administered pathologically, as times, circumstances, sex, classes, ages, individuals and races may require.

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VOL. VIII.-NO. I.

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Our rulers, State and Confederate, Legislative and Executive, have, of late, shown themselves admirable pathologists, and seeing that the nation was sick of too much liberty, have dosed it well with law, which is the negation and corrective of excess of liberty.

In Richmond, where we reside, the declaration of martial law has banished panic, reassured the people, and given a feeling of safety and security to all our citizens. Liberty of speech and liberty of the press are sufficiently restricted by a stringent public opinion, which no man dares tamper with. If they were not thus restrained the public authorities would readily step in, and punish or incarcerate any one who, by indiscreet talk or indiscreet writing, jeoparded the public safety. You meet at every corner of the street armed men, who preserve order, keep the peace, and turn over to summary punishment the criminal and disorderly. Prices are regulated by law, extortioners punished, and the making or vending of liquor strictly prohibited.

This is not liberty, but the reverse of it, yet none but the corrupt and criminal object to it. The right to cheat and swindle your neighbor is suspended for the present, and it may be that hereafter, when peace is restored, that we may discover that this free trade principle is not indispensible to the well-being of society.

LIMITED GOVERNMENTS.-Our present experience will teach us another valuable lesson, to wit: "that limited governments, or governments with written constitutions, are unnatural and impracticable." England is in the true and only true sense, a limited or constitutional government; but there the only limits to the power of government are time-honored precedents, and the checks and balances which commons, lords, the church and the throne interpose to each other. Hence, it has been truly said that "king, lords and commons may do anything except make a man a woman." Hers is a government "at all points" ready to meet and apply the proper means to any exigencies that may arise, and to wield the whole unrestricted power of the nation to cope with any inimical people. No one can forsee what a day may bring forth, and therefore it is rash and unwise to prescribe fixed, unbending rules for our future conduct, and still more unwise and rash to prescribe such rules for the conduct of others. What would become of a child in the jostle and struggle of life, if at its birth a programme of its conduct through life, strictly prescribing what it should and what it should not do, were to be the guide of its conduct through life. A human being with such limited powers of action, would not be a greater absurdity than a government of a nation similarly limited, for the exigencies of national life are as various, complex and unforseen as those of individual life. Yet a written constitution is a programme of conduct prescribed at the birth of a nation, for its future conduct throughout all time. Or at best it is an attempt to make an organic law, which may not be changed readily as occasions for change may arise.

The Constitution of our Confederacy provides that "after the 1st March, 1863, the expenses of the Post Office Department shall be paid out of its own revenue." If this be done, the people will be deprived

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of a great part of their accustomed mail and traveling facilities, and great inconvenience and stagnation of trade will occur. And yet there is little probability that a change of Constitution can be made soon enough to meet the emergency. Such regulations are the proper subjects of statute law, which can readily be made or changed to suit varying occasions.

A nation trammeled with a written constitution is like a man with his hands manacled. Its capacity for action is cramped and diminished. Our Confederacy, like all other nations and confederacies, has an unwritten constitution, which consists of the sympathies, instincts, community of interests and necessities, that brought us together and will hold us together, and in the institutions and laws which we derived from England, gradually and insensibly modified to suit our republican society. This unwritten constitution, like all true constitutions, has been the work of nature and of time, and when closely analyzed, will be found to be nothing more than that social status which is as old as man himself.

On the other hand, our written constitution is one-half a mere league or treaty between Sovereign States, and the other, statute law, which will require frequent change, and yet is so awkwardly contrived that timely changes can scarce ever be made. We ought to have a Convention every two years to modify the constitution, so as to adapt it to new exigencies and emergencies. The frequent changes of State constitutions show that they are in truth mere statute laws, which can seldom provide for the distant future.

All of our great statesmen and great jurists have been as blind as bats on this subject, and quite overloked our real, natural, God-given, unwritten constitutions, whilst they perplexed themselves and their readers with learned disquisitions on written constitutions which were not, and in the nature of things never could be, constitutions at all. Not constitutions, nor a whit more like constitutions than a horse is like an alderman. The doctor who should mistake the diet and physic which he administers to his patient for the patient's constitution, would be deemed a great blockhead; yet precisely such blockheads are all who mistake human regulations of society for the constitution of society. They are in truth but its diet and its physic, whilst real constitutions are the vital principles impressed on societies and nations at their birth.

Written limitations of power are worthless. Institutional limitations are invaluable. The Confederate Government will be sufficiently checked, limited and restrained by the institution of the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Judiciary and the Executive, which will rarely unite in any act of injustice or tyranny. If they should, the separate States are each institutions clothed with the power of secession, that will keep the combined powers of the Confederate Government within proper limits of action.

The checks, balances and limitations of governmental power are all institutional, none constitutional. Such is the theory and practice of

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the English Government, and such is the practice of all Governments. Among civilized people there never was a pure and simple despotism or monarchy, because among such peoples there are always many institutions that check, mitigate and limit the power of the monarch.

The Confederate Constitution is a mere tub thrown over to the whale. No inteligent man who voted for it deemed it would be permanent; but only considered it a temporary expedient, a giving way, for the time, to popular prejudices, a bridge or passway between mobocracy and anarchy, and conservative republicanism.

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We are continually assembling conventions, clothed with sovereign power, to remodel our State institutions, and to establish principles of universal and eternal right. These conventions are chosen by the same people who elect our members of the lower and upper Houses of the Legislature, our Judiciary and our Executive. It would be a thousand times more sensible and prudent procedure to invest our ordinary functionaries of Government, the two Houses of the Legislature, the Judiciary and the Governor, with sovereign power, than to invest sovereignty in a single body (a convention), because in the former case we have checks and balances, and in the latter none. Never, in the history of the Caucasian race, has so stupid and impracticable a body of met together as the late Virginia Convention, yet they were clothed with sovereign power, whilst our Governor, Senate and our House of Delegates and Judiciary, with ten times their intellect and twenty times their patriotism, were restricted in their powers, and liable to be removed or neutralized by this contemptible convention. Delegate sovereign power to the combined branches of our State Governments and we shall need no more conventions, no more absurd and ridiculous written constitutions. Refuse this sovereign power, and you have but an imperfect, half made up government. A government just as defective as a man without eyes or ears, or legs, or arms. No people can be well ruled by a government of limited powers-by a constitutional government.

There is another objection to written constitutions, that like all legislative compromises, platforms, and preambles and resolutions they mean nothing or anything just as the party in power chooses to construe. They are formed by men whose theories of government differ and conflict, and hence the instruments themselves are replete with contradictory and unmeaning provisions. In every compromise between astute politicians, the various terms of compromise are tendered in one sense and accepted in another. We know from the history of all constitution making that they are but compromises, and that the men who make them never afterwards agree as to their meaning. Nay, even in the instances of platforms and legislative compromises, which have much fewer provisions than constitutions, there never was an instance in which their framers agreed as to their meaning. Such instruments are always carefully worded with a double or a dozen meanings, so as to deceive, gull and entrap. A great debate, like that of Webster and Hayne's, about the meaning of a constitution, is always a Kilkenny cat

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