There is yet another reason for conceding the ascendancy of the palate over the other organs. The palate and the stomach have had more to do with the establishment of civil liberty than is even suspected by those who have neglected this important study. The custom for magistrates to feed their clients, is as old as the Roman empire, and has been preserved in all civilized countries. Our Saxon and Anglo-Saxon ancestors were accustomed to do every thing important over a dinner; and to that circumstance, as Alderman Walker, of the English metropolis, very justly remarked, must be ascribed the preservation of English liberty, as contradistinguished from that of France. A people, accustomed to civic festivals, will not easily be reduced to slavery. Good cheer enlivens our attachment to the country, enhances patriotism, and calls for those expressions of sentiment which I look upon as the main pillars of liberal institutions. And if public liberty is consolidated by public feastings and Lord Mayors’ dinners in England, where the people only partake of the good cheer, by a liberal construction of the constitutional charter, that is to say, through their legal _representatives_, how much more conducive to public liberty must be those public dinners in _our_ country, where people enjoy the privilege of assisting in person at the banquet! Instead of hearing the herald proclaim, “Now the Lord Mayor is helping himself to turtle—now the Lord Mayor has commenced upon venison—now the Lord Mayor drinks to the queen!” they themselves eat the turtle, the venison, and drink success to popular governments;—with this difference only, that they have less patriotic _cooks_—cooks who, in most cases, have scarcely an interest in common with those to whose patriotism they minister. This is radically wrong, and ought to be looked to. If our Fourth of July dinners have somewhat fallen into disrepute with the fashionables, it is, I trust, not from a want of patriotism on their part, but on account of the atrocious manner in which some of them are prepared. Let venison and turtle, or if these be out of season, the best that the market affords abound, and the _beau monde_ of our Atlantic cities will excuse the sentiments for the cook’s sake, and wash them down with Champagne and Madeira!