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Pisistratus Caxton.

Letter From Albert Trevanion, Esq., M. P., To Pisistratus Caxton.

Library of the House of Commons, Tuesday Night.

My Dear Pisistratus, ------- is up; we are in for it for two mortal
hours! I take flight to the library, and devote those hours to
you. Don't be conceited, but that picture of yourself which you
have placed before me has struck me with all the force of an
original. The state of mind which you describe so vividly must be
a very common one in our era of civilization, yet I have never
before seen it made so prominent and life-like. You have been in
my thoughts all day. Yes, how many young men must there be like
you, in this Old World, able, intelligent, active, and persevering
enough, yet not adapted for success in any of our conventional
professions,--"mute, inglorious Raleighs." Your letter, young
artist, is an illustration of the philosophy of colonizing. I
comprehend better, after reading it, the old Greek colonization,--
the sending out, not only the paupers, the refuse of an over-
populated state, but a large proportion of a better class, fellows
full of pith and sap and exuberant vitality, like yourself,
blending, in those wise cleruchioe, a certain portion of the
aristocratic with the more democratic element; not turning a rabble
loose upon a new soil, but planting in the foreign allotments all
the rudiments of a harmonious state, analogous to that in the
mother country; not only getting rid of hungry, craving mouths, but
furnishing vent for a waste surplus of intelligence and courage,
which at home is really not needed, and more often comes to ill
than to good,--here only menaces our artificial embankments, but
there, carried off in an aqueduct, might give life to a desert.

For my part, in my ideal of colonization I should like that each
exportation of human beings had, as of old, its leaders and
chiefs,--not so appointed from the mere quality of rank (often,
indeed, taken from the humbler classes), but still men to whom a
certain degree of education should give promptitude, quickness,
adaptability; men in whom their followers can confide. The Greeks
understood that. Nay, as the colony makes progress, as its
principal town rises into the dignity of a capital,--a polls that
needs a polity,--I sometimes think it might be wise to go still
further, and not on