Northerners in America, like our own colonists, have a dislike to men of any colour but their own, arising from that antipathy which is almost insensibly engendered by circumstances long gone by, and become a sort of hereditary distaste, but with us the man of colour is acknowledged to be a freeman.

The production or non-production of cotton is not the real point at issue. If it cannot be produced without slavery, still let slavery perish. That such must be the ultimate fate of that blot upon morals cannot be doubted. The increase of it to the utmost possible extent has been the main object of the Southern States for more than half a century, in place of endeavouring as much as possible to lessen the evil by degrees, and to introduce free labour. That it is the real cause of the present contest, disguise it as its friends may, is the fact, though it has been attempted on the part of the Southerners to prove that slavery has nothing to do with the present unhappy contest. No sane person credits an assertion made in order that the South should stand better with the civilised world. Concealed at the outbreak it has since become as a cause more and more clearly developed.

Again, the Southerners became treasonable to the Union government because the Northern States laid a small export duty upon the raw material: so it is pretended. But if a part of a great nation is to find a justification of rebellion in the lawful acts of its own government, when, too, it is amply represented, is it difficult to delineate with truth the character of such a proceeding, when urged as a justification? The larger part of the exports of the States proceeded from the North. It was the great commercial part of the Union; the Southerners were agricultural. The foreign commercial transactions of the States were for the most part transacted by the North. If this were displeasing to the Southern States, they had ports and rivers of their own, adequate to every desire for the export of their own produce. Why did they not act upon their knowledge of that fact? In 1850, the registered tonnage of the Free States was 1,330,963 tons; of the Slave States, 250,880. What prevented the South from extending its tonnage and exports? The States' foreign commerce for two years reckoned 631,396,034 dollars for the Free, and 234,936,306 dollars for the Slave States. The difference in the main arose from the fact that the one section was commercial and the other agricultural, through natural consequences. The domestic commerce of the United States in 1850 was six times that of the foreign, and here the divisional proportion must have depended wholly upon local circumstances. In 1855, the foreign commerce of New York alone was twice that of all the Slave States together. This being the case, was the North to blame for its superior activity? If in 1855 the Free States built 528,844 tons of shipping, and the Slave States only built 52,959, on whose shoulders lies the fault? Does this justify rebellion and bloodshed, war, ruin, inveterate hatred among brethren?

The Southerners, it is stated, are "gentlemen." My Arkansas friend makes a boast of this, no doubt in consideration of the light in which he views the hard-dealing "pawky" traders of the North. The definition of the term "gentleman" is different in different places in the Old World, and perhaps it is the same in the New. In Europe, it admits of con

siderable latitude in meaning, and is applied very frequently to men of the most exceptional lives. The name in Europe can go for little in determining character; in America it may perhaps have more of the poetical than the prosaic delineation of the original meaning of the word. Highwaymen were once called "gentlemen of the road" in old England. While it is expected that a nobleman shall be a "gentleman," it is not a necessary consequence that he should be so either in lineage or

manners.

It is of no consequence as regards the question of slavery whether the slave be used well or ill. That is a matter of humanity of which a slaveholder may be possessed, as well as one who is neither an owner nor breeder of his fellow-men for sale. I am quite ready to grant that independently of the inhumanity or kindness of slaveholders, there is a much more powerful agent for treating the slaves well in the American Slave States to be found in self-interest. But this has no weight in the moral bearing of the question. As the slave-trade no longer existed, slave property had become more valuable. The importation of slaves not being permitted in the United States, the price of the slave was enhanced. This had been so much the case, that the Virginians had taken to breed slaves for the Southern market, and were not nice about a shade or two of colour. A little white blood is not a bar to slave-selling-a bargain now and then, perhaps, in the mode of the Inkle and Yarico arrangement! I by no means accuse the Southerners of the barbarities formerly practised on slaves, before the abolition of the nefarious traffic. This was begun, both in America and the West Indies, by Europeans. I do not believe so incredibly ill of the Southerners as to charge them with wanton wickedness at the expense of their own interests. The proof of the general good treatment of the slaves in the United States is the increase of their numbers, of all complexions, without importation. Families of slaves born and bred as a sort of cattle speculation, some sent south, some west, for sale, young or old, according to demand, is a species of refinement on the old importation system. Fancy children bred for sale alone like pigs in this mode, and this breeding a trade!

The general good treatment of the slave by his Southern masters is, notwithstanding, no justification of man-selling, or man-stealing. Men are born free; this is admitted in some of the more despotic countries.* The destruction of the free agency of any responsible individual, except for offences against social law, is a violation of natural right, a crime analogous to those outrages operated by brute force, which correspond to felonies, and may be as justifiably resisted by the slave, ay, to the death, or worse consequences if possible, just as the traveller may resist the footpad to the death, or the burglar the midnight housebreaker. In a country claiming to be free, slavery is a twofold blot, bad in its own nature, and bad because a slave can perform no act from a virtuous motive. Nor can any palliation be found for the evil, grounded in the experience of all ages, that the unlimited authority of the master over the slave insensibly accustoms the master himself to lapses in the moral

Even in the East, "les docteurs de la mosquée sontiennent qu'un enfant trouvé, soit qu'il appartienne à un Musselman ou à un infidèle, doit être regardé comme libre; parce que, disent-ils la liberté, selon l'esprit du Koran, est une qualité' inhérente à l'homme dans l'origine."-" Esquisse Politique sur l'Action des Forces Sociales," par mon ami Bozzelli, jurisconsulte Napolitain.-C. R.

virtues, and makes him severe, haughty, choleric, and voluptuous. Hence no doubt the temper to which I have before alluded as displayed at different times by Southern members in congress-imperious, threatening, regardless of the sanctity of the senate-house, outraging all decency in a great legislative assembly. In a free state, too, slavery is contrary to the spirit of the constitution, imparting an idleness and luxury which are highly injurious before the law, and ruinous to the equality of social life in a well-ordered republic.

Having succeeded for a considerable time in preventing any action that might limit or lessen the extent of the plague-blot of slavery, and, on the contrary, having as much as practicable endeavoured to render it impossible of removal or even of diminution, and determined when it could no longer remain powerful enough, through a pro-slavery president, and the securing a sufficient number from one or both parties in the North to turn the balance their own way, they resolved at last, "the pear being ripe," by the addition of an immense territory subjected to slave influence, to destroy the Union, and consolidate a system which would make the name of a republic so constituted a mockery, and an incubus upon the advanced civilisation of man. Things appear to have been well prepared, and the pro-slavery states rose in rebellion: the sequel is well known, and no more need be said here on the nature of the sanguinary operations that have ensued. What civil war is, a great man, Wellington, once forcibly described in our House of Lords, when he nobly said he knew what it was, and he would rather lay down his own life than see six weeks civil war in Ireland.

To return to the subject of slavery, which the Southerners so strenuously uphold. We have the usual arguments which those who support slavery and its coincidents present in its defence. To go into the recriminations of the disputants is not of moment. Despite all that has been put forth in the matter, I maintain that the maintenance, extension, and attributes of slavery are at the bottom of the present contest, and I repeat it. The extent of the attachment of the South to the principles of political freedom, as well as to the general independence of the Union, have been tested, and found wanting.

I discover, for the first time, that my ideas, as well as those of my countrymen, are best part of a century behind the times as to America. A Miss Murray and a Mr. Coleridge are produced to prove how superlatively happy the slaves are, and how paternally they are regarded. The old story, that Freedom is but a relative term; and the English poor-law, the English apprentice, and the slave contrasted, are brought forward for the ten-thousandth time to uphold it. Statements of Brougham, Wilberforce, Canning, and others, when writing about or debating the question of slave emancipation, are applied as a justification of its present state in America! There is a Jeremiad, as usual, over our ruined West Indian colonies, such as is found in all writers in favour of slavery. The benefit of slavery to the negro is insisted upon, as an advance in his position— what must that position have been previously! The most ingenious part of the pro-slavery writer consists in one of the most shallow arguments ever put forth in favour of oppression. Men must work, that they may rise by that means from ignorance to knowledge! Rise in knowledge, religion, and political freedom under the tutelage of those who breed them up in the violation of all three! Secondly, those who do work (the slave

masters not included, I presume) have a right to compel those to work who do not. Thirdly, that this right-the right of man to steal, or breed up men and compel them to work-has been from all time one of the means which God employs to make humanity advance in the path of progress, &c.!! Fourthly, that in imposing work upon the black race, which has hitherto remained in total idleness, the white only accomplishes a right and duty! Slavery must admire an advocate so ingenious, as if the real object were not the sordid profit of the master, and the slave were considered at all beyond the balance-sheet return.

That negro stealing, selling, and buying, to be made a slave of in a foreign land, and a marketable commodity there, is any advance of the negro's position, I deny. If not his, on the other hand, it must be an admitted advance for the slave-shipper's purse to sell to the slave-dealer the muscle, blood, and bones he has transhipped. It is an advance, too, for the slave-dealer's purse, when he sells in his turn to the planter, who lives upon the work of the slave. But this is no advance of the negro's position. Is it not, rather, an advance of the planter's lucre, and of his idleness while the slave supports him? How the negro is to rise to a knowledge useful to soul or body in being carried off by fraud or force from his native land in this mode, is as difficult to discover as that the buyer of the slave (the stolen goods) has a right to make the slave work, and put the wages of him whom he thus furtively possesses into his pocket. I contend that man has no right to compel his stolen fellows to work. The labourer or slave is to be ruled in this respect by the law, that if he does not work he cannot eat. His rights are in every way equal with those of the white man. Fraud or force have placed him as a slave. He is not to be compelled to work under restraint, or to be subject to the lash for others little or no way above himself save in the power to oppress. God never made men exist to profit others perforce under the false plea of their obtaining an education, and placing them in the ranks of civilisation. God never constituted black men to labour for the idle and voluptuous, that these last may reap the fruit of the toil and suffering of those whom they have obtained in the way of stolen property. There is no other question between the white man and the negro, since the former stole the first black from Africa, down to the day the breedinghutches of Virginia were used to multiply these dependents (many not pure negro, some, it may be, semi-whites). How much money could be made by each transaction on the part of the slave-stealer, slave-dealer, and slave-employer, was ever the sole object. Lucre, and no interest of the slave, had any concern in the matter, the advocates of slavery disguise it as they may.

The man who will not work cannot eat. If he can live without work, he is a happy man; but here we have no such question to meet by keeping our fellows in bondage. An idle man in a civilised community is not compelled to labour day by day, or tasked for a very scanty meal, in order to put his earnings into the pocket of any individual, or to work against his will, and often against his strength, and, in addition, to see his wife and children dispersed and sold for the profit of one who breeds and sells them as he would breed or sell hogs. There is no analogy. More than that, God and nature justify the act of the slave in any measure to obtain his freedom if he have no other ground for making it than the violence that holds him in chains. The conduct of the patriarchs in

age,

regard to slavery is no example for us who live in a more civilised much less in the mere fact that slavery existed even when Christianity showed its head in ancient times in states where the advocates of the new doctrine had no secular power. If the mere existence of a base thing which is part of a system in a country ruled by the heathen be a sanction for it, we may find a justification for many crimes under the same plea. Judæa was not under Christian rule, and Christianity is not to be blamed for the existence of slavery there any more than for its continued existence where the power and influence of Christianity are of small temporal influence.

In a country like the United States, which professes to rule according to the doctrines of Christianity, it is wonderful to discover how well religion is made subservient to purposes of lucre. "The shop" is the first care, and everything is accommodated to that mean sordid standard. Churches are endowed with the bones and muscle of men the product of a felony on the African coast. People die, and leave so many negroes to be sold by a missionary society for the purpose of "preaching the Gospel to the heathen!" Power is made the law of right in the slave districts. Judge Harper laid it down that slavery was in the order of nature and God. "The being of superior faculties and knowledge, and therefore of superior power, should control and dispose of those who are inferior. It is as much in the order of nature that men should enslave each other, as that other animals should prey upon each other." I do not believe that the negro, if carefully educated, is not equal to the white man. The latter is often enough not much above a quadruped in knowledge or sagacity.

It is alike in the Southern States with all sects-Independents, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists-all agree most marvellously upon the right of man-selling and enslaving their fellow-beings, and if a brother of the pulpit presume to differ with others in opinion, he is anathematised by the sentiments of those who cannot agree upon any other article of faith. What an astounding harmony among these saints, where selfinterest is the latent rule! Bowen, Bishop of Charleston, talked of "the malignant philanthropy of abolition!" Some openly assert that manstealing and slavery are by divine appointment! At Charleston, about the time this phrase was used, the Gazette of that place offered fifty dollars for the head of a fugitive negro! Thus, upon the same moral and political system, murder is lawful, provided it be committed upon a man with a dark skin. In slave countries religion ceases to be the consoler of human nature or the pilot to eternal happiness: it is only a mask to cover slave-dealing avarice.

The convenience of upholding the doctrine of my Arkansas friend, no one can deny in any place where slavery exists. Self-interest is an argument beyond all moral or religious considerations, and the possession of the power to oppress for that end supersedes every other. Such is the basis of all the arguments of the Southern slaveholders, while they have the effrontery to declare that slavery is for the benefit of the victim, for whose advantage a little injustice is to be permitted. Is there no one in the Slave States of America honest enough to say, "Well, I grant it may not be quite right to steal men, or breed them up like cattle for sale, but one must not be nice when a convenience and a profit are to be made by it." It is true, Judas Iscariot_might have reasoned in the same way,