more than compensate for the distresses in which they originate. It is thus that, watered by mingling tears of sympathy and sorrow, the heavenly plant of Divine charity is seen rising in all its fragrance and beauty, and bearing its perennial fruits, which are for the healing of the nations. But this feeling is peculiar to man, and is evidently given him to remedy the tendencies of that appropriation to which animal creation is a stranger. Political economists, however, contemplate a system, which shall, in great measure, dispense with this distinguishing virtue of human nature, and which, if realized, would therefore rob humanity of its noblest attribute,-that in which it most resembles the Creator,-and leave it only the selfish instincts of the brutes that perish."

But how stands the proof that Nature is more liberal of her means of support, and more careful to accomplish her purpose in behalf of man, than of all the rest of creation? Why, respecting other orders of animated beings, severally considered, one only of the kingdoms of nature, either the vegetable or the animal, and that only in strictly limited parts, is generally afforded to their sustentation; respecting man, each is offered, and offered almost without limitation, for the same purpose. If, says Mr Sadler, particular tribes are confined to their own elements in their supply of food, each of these elements yields him its tribute of support, and some of them in unlimited quantities. If different climates and seasons are required to produce the means of subsistence to separate divisions of the family of nature, all the climates, and every season, furnishes his board with their various and successive stores. If astonishing instincts are impressed upon various animals, in order to obtain their necessary supplies, touching man, the godlike attribute of reason, as far surpassing instinct as mental perception does bodily sensation, instructs him to bend all nature to his purposes, and to provide, under all emergencies, for his present and continued sustentation.

The views which Mr Sadler so eloquently opens up on this part of his subject, must set the mind of every thoughtful reader astir, and suggest a thousand reflections on the grandeur of the design of man's earthly condition; and perhaps we

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may be pardoned for making a remark or two. The primary physical wants of the human being are food, clothing, shelter, and defence. To supply these, he has cleared and cultivated the earth-he has invented his various arts, and built houses and cities. At first, we see him like the other animals, labouring under the wants which their common nature produces-under sufferings to which they are alike exposed, actuated by passions which boil in their blood,-Hunger, Thirst, the incle mency of the skies, the fear and anger of self-preservation in the midst of powerful and inflammable enemies. Hunger and Thirst cultivate the earth. Fear builds castles and embattles cities. The animal is clothed by na ture against cold and storm, and shelters himself in his den. Man builds his habitation, and weaves his clothing. With horns, or teeth, or claws, the strong and deadly weapons with which nature has furnished them, the animal kinds wage their war; he forges swords and spears, and constructs implements of destruction that will send death almost as far as his eye can mark his foe, and sweep down thousands together. The animal that goes in quest of his food, that pursues or flies from his enemy, has feet, or wings, or fins; but man bids the horse, the camel, the elephant, bear him, and yokes them to his chariot. If the strong animal would cross the river, he swims. Man spans it with a bridge. But the most powerful of them all stands on the beach and gazes on the ocean. Man constructs a ship, and encircles the globe. Other creatures must traverse the element nature has assigned, with means she has furnished. He chooses his element, and makes his means. Can the fish traverse the waters? So can he. Can the bird fly the air? So can he. Can the camel speed over the desert? He shall bear man as his rider.

But to see what he owes to inventive art, we should compare man, not with inferior creatures, but with himself, looking over the face of human society, as history or observation shews it. We shall find him almost sharing the life of brutes, or removed from them by innumerable differences, and incalculable degrees. In

one place we see him harbouring in caves, naked, living, we might almost say, on prey, seeking from chance his wretched sustenance, food which he eats just as he finds it. This extreme degradation is rare; perhaps nowhere are all these circumstances of destitution found together-but still they are found, fearfully admonishing us of our nature. Man has as yet done nothing for himself-his own hands have done nothing for him -he lives like a beggar on the alms of nature. Turn to another land, and you see the face of the earth covered with the works of his hand-his habitation, wide-spreading, stately cities -his clothing and the ornaments of his person culled and fashioned from the three kingdoms of nature. For his food, the face of the earth bears him tribute; and the seasons and changes of heaven concur with his own art in ministering to his board.

This is the difference which man has made in his own condition by the use of his intellectual powers, awa kened and goaded on by the necessities of his physical constitution. He stands naked in the midst of nature, but armed with powers which will make him her sovereign lord. Want, Pain, and Death, howling in the forest, urge him on, and he rouses up the powers of his invincible mind to the contention with physical evil. It is not his hand alone that delivers him from this lot of affliction; but it is his mind working in that powerful organ. His first food is from nature's bounty; his next is from his own art. He sees that the seeds she casts into the ground spring up with another season. He casts them in, and waits for the season. He then, at her guidance, chooses the soil and prepares it; and thus his first step towards the conquest of nature, is to observe her own silent and mysterious operations.

The early history of the great primary arts of life, their origin, and the first steps of their progress, lie buried in the darkness of antiquity; but thus much we may understand, that man found himself in the midst of a world teeming with natural productions, and full of the operation of natural powers offering him benefit, or menacing him with destruction. The various knowledge, the endlessly multiplied arts, by which he fills

his life with the supplies of its great necessities, and with all its great resources of security and power, or with which he adorns it, are all merely the regulated application of powers of nature acting at his discretion upon her own substances and productions. But the various knowledge, the endlessly multiplied observation, the experience and reasonings of man added to man, of generation following generation, which were required to bring to a moderate state of advancement the great primary arts subservient to physical life, the arts of providing food, habitation, clothing, and defence, to man, we are utterly unable to conceive. We are born to the knowledge, which was collected at first by the labours of many generations. How slowly with continual accessions of knowledge were those arts reared up which still remain to us! How many arts which had laboriously been brought to perfection, have been displaced by superior invention, and fallen into oblivion? Fenced in as we are by the works of our predecessors, we see but a small part of the power of man contending with the difficulties of his lot. But what a wonderful scene would be opened up before our eyes, with what intense interest should we look on, if we could indeed behold man armed only with his own implanted powers, and going forth to conquer the creation! If we could see him beginning by subduing evils, and supplying painful wants; going on to turn those evils and wants into the means of enjoyment-and at length, in the wantonness and pride of his power, filling his existence with luxuries! If we could see him from his first step, in the untamed though fruitful wilderness, advancing to subdue the soil, to tame and multiply the herds, -from bending the branches into a bower, to fell the forest and quarry the rock,-seizing into his own hands the element of fire, directing its action on substances got from the bowels of the earth,-fashioning wood, and stone, and metal, to the will of his thought,-searching the nature of plants to spin their fibres, or with their virtues to heal his disease;-if we could see him raise his first cities, launch his first ship, calling the winds and waters to be his

servants, and to do his work,-changing the face of the earth,-forming lakes and rivers,-joining seas, or stretching the continent itself into the dominion of the sea;-if we could do all this in imagination, then should we understand something of what man's intellect has done for his physical life, and what the necessities of his physical life have done in forcing into action all the powers of his intelligence.

But there are still higher considerations arising from the influence of man's physical necessities on the destiny of the species. It is this subjugation of natural evil, and this created dominion of art, that prepares the earth to be the scene of his social existence. His hard conquest was not the end of his toil. He has conquered the kingdom in which he was to dwell in his state. That full unfolding of his moral powers to which he is called, was only possible in those states of society which are thus brought into being by his conflict with all his physical faculties against all the stubborn powers of the material universe; for out of the same conquest Wealth is created. In this progress, and by means thus brought into action, the orders and classes of society are divided; Property itself, the allotment of the earth, takes place, because it is the bosom of the earth that yields food. That great foundation of the stability of communities is thus connected with the same necessity; and in the same progress, and out of the same causes, arise the first great Laws by which society is held together in order. Thus that whole wonderful developement of the Moral Nature of man, in all those various forms which fill up the history of the race, in part arises out of, and is always intimately blended with, the labours to which he has been aroused by those first great necessities of his physical nature. But had the tendency to increase his numbers been out of all proportion to the means provided by nature and infinitely multipliable by art, for the subsistence of human beings, how could this magnificent march have moved on?

considered not the supply of the animal wants merely; but they contemplated that mighty change in the con

dition of mankind to which these arts have given origin. It is on this ground that they had raised the character of human life, that Virgil assigns them their place in the dwellings of bliss, among devoted patriots and holy priests, among those whom song or prophecy had inspired, among those benefactors of men whose names were to live for ever in their memory, giving his own most beautiful expression to the common sentiment of mankind.

"Hic manus ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi,

Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita manebat,

Quique pii vates, et Phœbo digna locuti, Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes,` Quique sui memores alios fecere merendo ; Omnibus his niveâ cinguntur tempora vittâ."

True, that in savage life men starve. But is that any proof that nature has cursed the race with a fatal tendency to multiply beyond the means of subsistence? None whatever. Attend for a little to this point. Of the real power of the bodily appetites for food, and the sway they may attain over the moral nature of the mind, we, who are protected by our place among the arrangements of civil society from greatly suffering under it, can, indeed, form no adequate conception. Let us not now speak of those dreadful enormities which, in the midst of dismal famine, are recorded to have been perpetrated by civilized men, when the whole moral soul, with all its strongest affections and instinctive abhorrences, has sunk prostrate under the force of that animal suffering. But the power of which we speak, as attained by this animal feeling, subsists habitually among whole tribes and nations. It is that power which it acquires over the mind of the savage, who is frequently exposed to suffer its severity, and who hunts for himself the food with which he is to appease it. Compare the mind of the human being as you are accustomed to behold him, knowing the return of this sensation only as a grateful incitement to take the ready nourishment which is spread for his repast, with that of his fellow-man, bearing through the

lonely woods the gnawing pang that goads him to his prey. Hunger is in his heart; hunger bears along his unfatiguing feet; hunger lies in the strength of his arm; hunger watches in his eye; hunger listens in his ear; as he couches down in his covert, silently waiting the approach of his expected spoil, this is the sole thought that fills his aching mind"I shall satisfy my hunger!" When his deadly aim has brought his victim to the ground, this is the thought that springs up as he rushes to seize it, "I have got food for my hungry soul!" What must be the usurpation of animal nature here over the whole man! It is not merely the simple pain, as if it were the forlornness of a human creature bearing about his famishing existence in helplessness and despair-though that, too, is indeed a true picture of some states of our race;—but here he is not a suffering and sinking wretch-he is a strong hunter, and puts forth his strength fiercely under the urgency of this pain. All his might in the chase,all pride of speed, and strength, and skill-all thoughts of long and hard endurance-all images of perils past-all remembrances and all foresight-are gathered on that one strong and keen desire-are bound down to the sense of that one bitter animal want. These feelings recurring day by day in the sole toil of his life, bring upon his soul a vehemence and power of desire in this object, of which we can have no conception, till he becomes subjected to hunger as a mighty animal passiona passion such as it rages in those fierce animal kinds which it drives with such ferocity on their prey. He knows hunger as the wolf knows it -he goes forth with his burning heart, like the tiger to lap blood. But turn to man in another condition to which he has been brought by the very agency of his physical on his intellectual and moral being! How far removed is he now from that daily contention with such evils as these! How much does he feel himself assured against them by belonging to the great confederacy of social life! How much is it veiled from his eyes by the many artificial circumstances in which the satisfaction of the want is involved. The work in which he labours the whole day

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-on which his eyes are fixed and his hands toil-is something altogether unconnected with his own wants-connected with distant wants and purposes of a thousand other men in which he has no participation. And as far as it is a work of skill, he has to fix his mind on objects and purposes so totally removed from himself, that they all tend still more to sever his thoughts from his own necessities; and thus it is that civilization raises his moral cha racter, when it protects almost every human being in a country from that subjection to this passion, to which even noble tribes are bound down in the wildernesses of nature.

Yet it is the most melancholy part of all the speculation that is suggested by the condition of men, to observe what a wide gloom is cast over their souls by this severe necessity, which is nevertheless the great and constant course of the improvement of their condition. It is not suffering alone-for that they may be inured to bear, but the darkness of the understanding, and the darkness of the heart, which comes on under the oppression of toil, that is miserable to see. Our fellow-men, born with the same spirits as ourselves, seem yet denied the common privileges of that spirit. They seem to bring faculties into the world that cannot be unfolded, and powers of affection and desire, which, not their fault, but the lot of their birth, will pervert and degrade. There is an humiliation laid upon our nature in the doom which seems thus to rest upon a great portion of our species, which, while it requires our most considerate compassion for those who are thus depressed, compels us to humble ourselves under the sense of our own participation in the nature from which it flows. Therefore, in estimating the worth, the virtue of our fellow men, whom Providence has placed in a lot that yields to them the means, and little more than the means, of supporting life in themselves and those born of them, let us never forget how intimate is the necessary union between the wants of the body and the thoughts of the soul. Let us remember, that over a great proportion of all humanity, the soul is in a struggle for its independence and

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