ENVY AND SCANDAL.

Knickerbocker, June 1849.

IT is customary for us to boast of our virtue as a nation. If there is one thing more than any other which an American believes, and has been taught to believe from his youth, and is ready to maintain on all occasions, it is that he belongs to a particularly virtuous and moral community. And the reports given of other countries by that rapidly-increasing class of our countrymen who travel abroad, tend very strongly to confirm this impression. Interrogate a travelled American on this point, and he will be likely to answer (supposing him to be a man of pretensions to character and morals) after this guise: Can there be a doubt of our superiority? Compare our practices with those of Europeans. In Paris a young man speaks of his mistress as openly as he would of his horse; he would laugh at the idea of its being necessary or desirable to disguise the connection. In England parsons drink their bottle or bottles of wine after dinner, and poor men are starving by thousands, while lords enjoy incomes larger than what we consider the principal of a large fortune. In Italy' And so on; every country supplies him with unfavorable points of contrast to our own.

Now it certainly is but just to admit, that after every qualification, and exception, and drawback, and caveat, which a candid and well-informed man would feel obliged to make, these pretensions are perfectly correct, so far as they go. Our men are decidedly more chaste than the Europeans, and the general tone of our society is in this respect purer. And in temperance, to use the word in its popularly limited and technical sense - I was on the point of saying in its slang sense we stand far before several nations of the old world. Our superiority in both these respects may be correctly attributed to those Puritan sentiments, from the influence of which not even those of our states which were settled by the Cavaliers

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are altogether exempt. And it is also certain that there is among us a more general sympathy between different classes of society, which prompts the undertaking and promotes the carrying out of schemes of general benevolence to a greater extent than is customary elsewhere. And this merit is the direct result of what we conveniently sum up in the phrase, 'our democratic institutions.'

But readily granting and gladly accepting all this, it remains to be considered how far the influence commonly thence drawn is sustainable. It remains to be inquired, if the whole moral law is included in abstinence from sensual sins and exemption from the pride and selfishness of class feeling. And though the pursuit of this inquiry may subject us with the unthinking to the charge of unpatriotic feeling, it is in truth a most patriotic investigation, because it is one likely to be beneficial. The profit of haranguing people against a sin to which they are not given, is exceedingly problematical. At best it is a mis-spending of time, since every audience has sins enough to which it is prone, and in the condemnation of which the preacher or moralist may find ample employment. But, moreover, it is particularly apt to create self-righteousness, and lead people to

"Compound for sins they are inclined to,

By damning those they have no mind to.' To declaim, for instance, upon the errors of Popery before a congregation of rigid Presbyterians, or 'Evangelical' Episcopalians, amounts to just nothing; there being no rational probability that any members of such an auditory will ever go to Purgatory or pray to relics. The man who makes a profitable use of the theme is one who, like Whately, points out how these errors have their origin in human nature, and to what similar or corresponding errors Protestants are liable. And a 'tee-total' lecture to a meeting-house-full of New-England women and boys, most of whom never see the outside of a bottle of wine from one year's end to the other, is very much a work of supererogation. And generally, people are more apt to be pleased than profited by homilies on the faults of their neighbors. Let us then not shrink from the examination through any such erroneous views of the requisitions of patriotism.

Our democratic polity, as we said, has introduced a