law. Trade issues its own edicts, and they are ordinarily found
to be too powerful for resistance, wherever there are the
concentrated means of rendering them formidable by the magnitude
of the interests they control.

We see, then, nothing in the future that is very likely seriously
to disturb the continued growth and increasing ascendancy of the
great mart of the country. A trading people will pursue its
interests under any conceivable or tolerable condition of things.
It would require a generation or two, indeed, to obliterate, or
even sensibly to diminish the habits and opinions now in
existence among the people; and it must ever be remembered that
society pursues its regular course more or less successfully,
according to circumstances, even in the midst of revolution, war,
and rapine. A battle is fought to-day, and a month hence it
becomes difficult to discover its traces, over which the p{l}ough
has already passed, and among which the husbandman is resuming
his toil, as he replaces his fences, and clears away his fallen
trees after the passage of the whirlwind. It follows from these
views, and this course of reasoning, which might be greatly
extended and much more satisfactorily developed, that political
changes have less direct influence on the ordinary march of
society than is commonly supposed. The spirit of the age is and
must be respected by rulers of every shade of character; and the
fourth estate, as opinion is commonly termed, enters largely into
the ordinary action of every form of government or combination of
social organization that the accidents of history have produced,
or the sagacity and wants of men have more ambitiously paraded
before the eyes of their fellow creatures. When we couple with
these facts the certainty that there are undercurrents which