In the note accompanying their proposition, the Government say, that the term toleration is too tame, and ought not to be introduced into any law which shall be framed on this subject. "The province," say they," would appear to descend from the point of civilization which it has attained, if it were to establish a law of toleration, or to pretend to grant a liberty which the public authority was always obliged to protect; but since the laws that formerly governed render necessary an act to abolish them, and give a solemn guarantee to persons who may wish to live in our society, the Government has found no other way to do it with dignity than by the proposed law, which it has the honour to transmit for the consideration of the honourable representatives. This act, which will complete the liberty of the citizens, will not be less glorious than that which solemnly declared the independence of the Republic."

And even in Mexico, which has been usually considered as more under the influence of the Papal power than any other Spanish colony on the Western continent, the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome is now publicly and solemnly renounced. The constituent Congress of Mexico has just issued a long and spirited address to its constituents, in reply to a circular from the Pope, from which, as being a very important ecclesiastical document, we think it right to copy some of the most material passages. We apprehend that our readers after the perusal of this document, in connexion with the many other" signs of the times," will be of opinion that there is upon the whole far more to fear from a latent, but widely spread spirit of infidelity than from the exploded claims of the hierarchy of Rome; though against both evils we ought to be on our guard, and to oppose to them their best remedies, the universal circulation of the holy Scriptures, the extension of Christian missions, and the promotion of Scriptural education throughout the world. The following are extracts from the Mexican document.

"The Congress would do a manifest injury to your religious feelings, and your advanced knowledge, if it for a moment suspected that a document of that kind [the Pope's circular] could affect your adherence to the religion which you profess, or the liberty and independence which you have purchased at the price of your blood, and of twelve years of sacrifices and sufferings. The time has passed when a bull forged in Rome could throw into combus

tion empires and nations, and in which they saw themselves under the necessity of breaking off their connexion with the Roman See, or becoming the puppets of the intrigues of its courtiers. The moderation and knowledge of this philosophic age have succeeded to that exaltation of the passions which characterised the ages of barbarism. We now know enough to fix with precision and clearness the limits between the rights of the Church and of its visible head, and those of the nation in which it is established. The controlling power which belongs to governments, used with care and circumspection, has avoided those tumultuous schisms which never began without bloodshed, nor ended without bringing scandal on religion and good morals.

"The religion which you profess is nowise opposed to the liberty and independence which you have adopted as the basis of your government; that the ecclesiastical authority neither interferes, nor can interfere, in that kind of affairs; and that the civil government is sufficiently authorized by justice and the laws to repress all the excesses which endanger the public tranquillity, and which are committed under pretext of religion.

"Whoever has read the Gospel with attention will comprehend the spirit with which it is animated, and the plan which the holy and wise Founder of Christianity proposed respecting civil governments. Jesus Christ assures us, in the most direct manner, that his kingdom is not of this world-that the mission which he received from his Heavenly Father was only to establish the empire of holiness, and the doctrines of faith. He constantly refused, though pressed by the Jews, to exercise any civil function. He abstained from meddling with governments, not because he would authorize their vexations and injustice, as some unjust censors of his conduct calumniously pretend, but because his mission was simply limited to the establishment of the church, which had nothing to do with them, and because that was the only object of his cares and his labours. Finally, He was so circumspect and delicate in this point, that He even refused to give his opinion respecting the Roman dominion exercised over the Jewish people, in spite of having been provoked to do so by the Pharisees. The principles of doctrine and conduct adopted by Jesus Christ to place civil governments apart from all ecclesiastical interference, being so clear, solid, and luminous, what have such governments to fear from authorities which not only have no power to intermeddle in

such affairs, but even have no right to express an opinion, if they wish to follow the example of their Divine Master?

"Inhabitants of the State,-you see clearly that to profess the religion of your crucified Redeemer, you are so far from being required to renounce your liberty and independence, that you are called upon to repress the excesses of some wicked ministers, who, pretending to decide on points beyond their competence, dishonour the religion which they preach, by infringing its precepts. Neither the dogmas of Christianity nor its worship, nor the jurisdiction of its ministers, which is purely spiritual, and has nothing of physical power-nor the means of supporting this religion, which are reduced to exhortation, good example, patience, and the exercise of all the virtues, have any thing to do with the form of government under which the nations in which it exists are constituted. It has no right to dictate whether they shall be subject to a foreign chief or not - whether or not they shall maintain relations with the other parts of the world, or whether they shall have juntas or assemblies to prescribe their respective fundamental laws. Whatthen shall we say of the encyclic which embraces the decision of such points? The kings who took the title of Catholic,' such as Ferdinand the Catholic,' Charles V. the Defender of the Church,' Philip II. the Pious,' would have characterized the document, as they did so many others, as being turbulent and seditious; but your congress, guided by the principles of moderation which animate it, see only in it a monument of that human weakness from which even the successor of St. Peter unhappily is not exempt."

"From the 5th and 6th centuries of Christianity, a scandalous struggle has been maintained between the priesthood and civil authority."

Happily, the morning of light and knowledge which followed the dismal night of the 19th, 14th, and 15th centuries, enlightened nations on their true rights, and taught them to reduce within its natural limits the respect due to sacerdotal authority. Governments gradually desisted from agitating questions foreign to their functions, and began on the other hand to protect themselves from the consequences of bulls and excommunications. The heads of the church, on their side, have been receding gradually from their pretensions over civil affairs; so that in the last three centuries the successors of St. Peter could scarcely be called a shadow of the popes in the middle age."

DOMESTIC.

We have great pleasure in stating, that the quarterly accounts of the revenue continue to afford a gratifying proof of the vast resources and prosperity of the country. The receipts for the quarter, ending this month, exceed those of the same quarter last year, by the sum of 137,594/., and the increase for the year above the revenue for 1824, is 1,863,6957.; and this notwithstanding the recent diminution of taxes.

We lament to find that most extensive naval and military operations are considered necessary for prosecuting the Burmese war. The expenditure in this unhappy war has been enormous, and the waste of human life most appalling ; and all for no object that the public is acquainted with, which can justify either the cost or the bloodshed.

The picture

Among the numerous, and many of them highly interesting, papers recently laid before Parliament, is a voluminous series of documents on the subject of Colonial Slavery. Most of these papers were printed at too late a period of last session to allow of much use being made of them before the prorogation of Parliament; and to the public at large their contents, and even their existence, are scarcely known. We are most happy, therefore, to find that an abridgment of them has been drawn up and printed under the title of "The Slave Colonies of Great Britain; or a Picture of Negro Slavery, drawn by the Colonists themselves;" with the very appropriate Scriptural motto, "Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee." The pamphlet is printed for the Anti-Slavery Society, and may be had at our publishers'. We trust it will be very widely circulated and perused. which it exhibits of slavery is so fearful and revolting, that we might hesitate to credit the existence of the reality, were it not that the statements are official, and emanate from the Colonial Authorities themselves; and what renders it peculiarly deserving of public attention is, that it is not a narrative of atrocities long forgotten, and, we would hope, deeply repented of, "a tale of days by-gone," furbished up anew to excite the feelings of the British public, but a delineation of the actual state of our Slave Colonies, at the present moment; a narrative which tells us of stripes yet unhealed; of groans which still echo around our plantations; of tyranny to this moment unchecked in its deeds of cruelty and crime; of injustice, oppression, and inhumanity, both private and legislative, bearing date not in dark ages or Pagan lands, but in British Colonies, and with the ink scarce

Jydry upon the record. Our extracts must necessarily be brief, and for the present shall be confined to the conclusion and postscript of the pamphlet. The editors remark:

"Having now brought the proposed analysis to a conclusion, we beg to offer a few observations upon it.

"The first impression, which its perusal is calculated to produce, is a feeling of surprise and horror at the extraordinary state of society which it develops, as existing in a considerable portion of his Majesty's dominions. In the present analysis, as in Mr. Stephen's Delineation of Colonial Slavery, the colonists are made to describe their own system; the proofs of its iniquity being drawn from the colonial laws, from other colonial records of unquestionable authority, or from the evidence of colonial proprietors. In the ameliorated slave-codes now brought before them, the public will find the proof, the irrefragable proof, of the determined pertinacity with which the colonists cleave to the worst errors, and most revolting deformities of their system. -That such would be the result of a reference of this great question to the decision of the colonial assemblies, we never doubted for a moment. Our opinions on the subject have never been more admirably or accurately expressed, than they were by Mr. Canning, in a speech on the Slave Trade made by him in 1799. 'Trust not,' says that enlightened statesman, making the sentiment of a previous speaker his own, trust not the musters of slaves in what concerns legislation for slavery. However specious their laws may appear, depend upon it they must be ineffectual in their operation. It is in the nature of things that they should be so.- LET THEN THE BRITISH HOUSE OF COMMONS DO THEIR PART THEMSELVES. LET THEM NOT DELEGATE THE TRUST OF DOING IT TO

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the West-India body in England. The plan, therefore, was theirs; it was adopted on their recommendation, and was supported in Parliament by their concurrence. It has been contumaciously rejected, however, by the colonists; and now neither Parliament nor the WestIndia body can, with propriety, decline the only means of carrying their own propositions into effective operation.

"We have hitherto confined our remarks to the single point of legislation; and we think it has been shewn that it is the very height of fatuity to continue to look to the colonial assemblies for any adequate improvement of the state of the slave law.

And

"But the papers which we have analysed exhibit a view not only of WestIndian legislation, but of the administration of West-India law. Here a new field of horrors opens upon us. here again we derive our proofs of the radical iniquity of the system, exclusively, from the recorded testimony of the colonists themselves. They are our witnesses. We do not confine this remark to those domestic punishments of which we have so curious an exhibition in the returns from Trinidad, and of which neither law nor justice but mere individual caprice is the arbiter. We allude rather to their criminal slave-courts;-to the nature and imperfections of the judicial returns from the fiscal of Demerara;--to the trials of the insurgents in that colony in 1823 (which, however, are not comprehended in the returns that form the subject of the preceding analysis);-to the impunity of the White insurgents of Barbadoes ;--and, above all, to the reports of the trials of the alleged Black conspirators in Jamaica, in which every species of judicial irregularity appears to find a place; and to the barefaced oppressions exercised in that island towards some of the People of Colour. Let these things be fully weighed, and neither the Government nor the Parliament can hesitate as to the imperative necessity of radically reforming a system which pro

duces such abominations as have been detailed; such perversions of the very forms of law to purposes of cruelty and oppression, as can only find their parallel in the execrated proceedings of Judge Jefferies, or in the practical jurispru dence of Constantinople, Morocco, or Algiers.

"These things must come to an end, and that speedily. They must come to an end, because neither the government, nor the parliament, nor the people of England can tolerate them much longer; and even if the government and the par

liament and the people of England should be so lost to a sense of their obligations, as to suffer them to continue, they must find their close in one of those convulsions which will involve White and Black, master and slave, the oppressor and the oppressed, in one common and undistinguishing and overwhelming calamity.

"We are at the same time, well aware of the preponderating influence which the West-Indian proprietors possess in both houses of parliament. This alone could have prevented, for twenty long years, the abolition of the slave trade. This alone could, for fifteen years more, have paralyzed every effort which was made to rouze the attention of the government and the parliament to the enormities of the slave system, and to the utter worthlessness and inefficiency of all the pretended improvements adopted by the colonial assemblies. To this cause must we also ascribe it, that almost every public functionary in the slave colonies, is either a proprietor of slaves, or the known partizan of the slave system; that not only many governors, and judges, and attorney-generals, and fiscals, and registrars are taken from the class of slave-holders and their friends, but that, even under the new order of things, this class has been made to supply protectors and sub-protectors of slaves the very officers on whose zeal, fidelity, and disinterestedness its whole efficiency depends;-that we should be burdened with imposts, and our commerce fettered by impolitic and injurious restrictions, in order to enable the colonists to perpetuate their demoralizing and murderous system;-that the interests of one hundred millions of British subjects in India, in addition to those of Great Britain herself, should be sacrificed to about two thousand planters and merchants; and that all the benefits which would have flowed to us from establishing international relations with Hayti should have been contemned, her overtures rejected, and her offered favours scorned, until she has at length been driven to throw herself again into the arms of France."

In a postscript to the pamphlet, is given an analysis of the official Report of the Proceedings of the Fiscals of Demerara and Berbice, in their Capacity of

Guardians and Protectors of Slaves, with their Decisions in Cases of Complaint of Masters and Slaves against each other. This document was ordered by the House of Commons to be printed last June. These returns, though very defective, are

highly important as admitting us into the interior, the very penetralia, of the slave system, which they exhibit in all its deformity. It is out of our power, however, to do more than select a very few examples from the mass.

He

The first complaint on the list, we are sorry to say, is against a lady, Mrs. Sanders. Nine Negro men, on the 1st of February 1819, complain of a great want both of food and clothing. One man produces a bolt and shackles, with which the Negro women were often confined, the ancles and wrists crossways, by which they are bent double; and says he was twice confined in that way himself. and three others went on one occasion to complain of hunger. Mrs. Sanders ordered them to be tied down and flogged by two drivers. It was on a Sunday: supposes he had sixty stripes. They are made to reap cassava, and get firewood, every Sunday, till the greatest part of the day is spent. The women and children have no allowance; and the men are obliged to share their allowance, which is also a very scanty one, with them. These charges are denied by the lady. They are in part admitted, but in part denied, by her overseer. The Fiscal's judgment is not given. Mrs. Sanders appears before the Fiscal on several other occasions, to answer to similar complaints; on one of which the son of this lady, undertaking to defend his mother,

says,

"The Negro is a very bad character. My mother will not allow him to be flogged, because he bears the marks of former punishment so very evidently; he did receive a slight punishment for running away; this punishment was inflicted by two small boys with tamarind rods, and it was to endeavour to shame him. My brother brought him to town five days ago to cook, and why he has run away I do not know; he was flogged by said boys under his feet with tamarind rods, on account of HIS BACK BEING CUT UP."

The following is the next case:

،،

Nettelje, Julia, Lea, and Mietje, each with an infant in arms, complain that no time is allowed them to nurse their children; that during the crop an equal quantity of coffee is expected and required of them as from other women having no children, or of the men; that a similar task is given them in weeding grass with the rest of the gang, which they are not able to perform, in consequence of carrying their children on their backs; if they fail, they are beaten in the manager's presence with the handle of the whip by the driver Esperance. Nettelje and also Mietje were flogged the day before yesterday by the carpenter La Fleur; they,