these papers, was of dismal augury for the tendencies of democratic rule.
It was pardonable in the conservative of that day to mistake the
temporary evils of a change for permanent diseases of the system which
that change was to establish. A revolution, or anything that interrupts
social order, may afford opportunities for the individual display of
eminent virtues; but its effects are pernicious to general morality.
Most people are so constituted that they can be virtuous only in a
certain routine; and an irregular course of public affairs demoralizes
them. One great source of disorder was the multitude of disbanded
troops, who were continually returning home, after terms of service just
long enough to give them a distaste to peaceable occupations; neither
citizens nor soldiers, they were very liable to become ruffians. Almost
all our impressions in regard to this period are unpleasant, whether
referring to the state of civil society, or to the character of the
contest, which, especially where native Americans were opposed to each
other, was waged with the deadly hatred of fraternal enemies. It is the
beauty of war, for men to commit mutual havoc with undisturbed good-
humor.

The present volume of newspapers contains fewer characteristic traits
than any which we have looked over. Except for the peculiarities
attendant on the passing struggle, manners seem to have taken a modern
cast. Whatever antique fashions lingered into the War of the Revolution,
or beyond it, they were not so strongly marked as to leave their traces
in the public journals. Moreover, the old newspapers had an
indescribable picturesqueness, not to be found in the later ones.
Whether it be something in the literary execution, or the ancient print
and paper, and the idea that those same musty pages have been handled by
people once alive and bustling amid the scenes there recorded, yet now in
their graves beyond the memory of man; so it is, that in those elder