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stead of one dependent upon the Crown of the old country. Were the West India Islands to unite in successful revolt, and, having joined in a federal compact, to elect a President and neral Congress, there would be a repetition of the American Republic. The institutions of America are all our own, modified by circumstances, or pushed a little to the extreme. What is more, a large proportion of the existing population has been received direct from these Islands by constant emigration; and America is building prisons to receive English convicts and Irish paupers. To England also she owes her first steps in that career of national crime, which, if not speedily checked and retraced, will, as surely as there is a righteous Judge, "who executeth judgement for the oppressed," entail upon these haughty republicans a fearful retribution.

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The Americans,' says Capt. Basil Hall, are perpetually ' taunting England with having entailed slavery upon their country. This is, after all, but the taunt of guilt to its tempter. England has repented of her sin, and, by a splendid sacrifice, has justified the sincerity of her wish to exterminate a system so abhorrent from the spirit of her laws and institutions. But the people of England have never been to any considerable extent a party to either the abominations of the slave-trade, or the toleration of slavery itself. The West India interest of this country, though strong in commercial wealth, and protected by the whole influence of the Crown, embraces but a small section of the community and out of that sphere of sordid mercantile interest, the national feeling has been uncorrupt. The laws of this country never recognised slavery as the legal condition of a British subject, of whatever colour; and it required only an appeal to the laws to decide, (in the case of the negro Somerset, in 1772,) that the claim of property in man could not be substantiated upon the British soil. On touching the English shores, the negro is under the protection of the same laws as the native Englishman, and the slave becomes at once a free man. No subject of the British Crown can be dealed with as a criminal, till he has been adjudged to be such; and the law knows nothing of personal bondage, except as the punishment of crime. Thus there is a privilege attaching to the condition of a British subject, which does not belong to the native of the free republican States of America; and the beneficent fiction which makes the Crown, as the sovereign proprietor, the equal protector of all classes of its subjects, throws a lustre around the constitutional monarchy of these realms, that is wholly wanting to the jealous and tyrannical republicanism which condemns every coloured native to the degradation of a servile caste, and denies to a sixth of the population the common rights of humanity.

“

Among the twelve millions who make up our census,' an American writer does not blush to say, 'two millions are sepa'rated from the possessors of the soil, by birth, by the brand of ' indelible ignominy, by prejudices mutual, deep, incurable. Be'nevolence seems to overlook them. Patriotism forgets them. In every part of the United States, there is a broad and impassable line of demarcation between every man who has one drop of African blood in his veins, and every other class in the community. The bar, the pulpit, and our legislative halls are shut 'to them by the irresistible force of public sentiment. No talents, 'however great, no piety, however pure and devoted, no patriotism, however ardent, can secure their admission. The Soodra is not further separated from the Brahmin, in regard to all his 'privileges, than the negro is from the white man, by the prejudices which result from the difference made between them by 'the God of nature.'* That is, from the difference in the colour of the skin, which, in the case of many a mulatto, approaches so near to the complexion of the American Brahmin as to be with difficulty discriminated. The licentiousness which is the fruit of slavery, and the hypocrisy of the plea set up for the treatment of the coloured freemen, are attested by the same living evidence. 'Talk of the barriers of nature,' exclaims Mr. Garrison with honest indignation, when the land swarms with living refutations of the statement !"

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Though I had heard much,' says Mr. Abdy, 'before I left England, about the aristocrasy of the skin, which so disgracefully distinguishes the new from the old world †, I was not pre'pared to find that America had borrowed from Asia her degrading system of castes, and that the western world was divided into Brahmins and Pariahs.'

That a people, not otherwise inferior to the rest of mankind, in justice, religion, or kind-heartedness, should condemn nearly one-fifth of their fellow-citizens, without pity, without remorse, and without a trial, to contempt and obloquy, for no reason but that of the strongest, and no crime but that of colour, is one of those anomalies which the history of every age and country-to the shame of human nature— exhibits; but which the history of no age and of no country exhibits in more preposterous contradiction to the spirit of the times, the advancement of intelligence, and the spread of Christianity. Alarmed at the increasing numbers of this insulted race, and foreseeing, with the instinctive acuteness of cruelty, in their advancing intelligence, a demand for social rights and the efforts of commercial competition, the

*African Repository, passim. See Ecl. Rev. 3d Series, Vol. IX. pp. 147, 148.

This is not true of the southern peninsula of the new continent.

favoured majority were straining every nerve to drive them out of the country by contumelious treatment or deceptious promises.'

In England, a sable complexion is a passport, almost every where, to kindness and liberality. In that part of America which claims kindred with her sons, it is viewed with aversion or repelled with scorn. The studied separation in the first periods of life;--the universal antipathy during all that succeed; the rigorous exclusion from the courtesies and accomplishments of social life;—and, above all, the risk of losing caste attached to any deviation from what despotic custom has marked with her inexorable tabu;-form a barrier to a more liberal and humane intercourse, which none but the most generous or the most vile among the whites can break through.'

Vol. I. pp. 44, 5; 55.

Mr. Abdy, while evidently disposed to do ample justice to the Americans and their institutions, has spoken out as becomes an Englishman and a Christian, on the subject of this foul plaguespot' on the national character. In his volumes, the naked truth is dispassionately, but fully and distinctly disclosed, in reference to the treatment of the coloured race, so as to leave no excuse for that mawkish candour which would throw a veil or a false colouring over conduct that outrages justice, religion, and humanity. The time is come, when it behooves British Christians to lift up their voice in loud and emphatic reprobation of the wickedness in which all religious denominations in the United States are more or less involved;-to make their voice heard across the Atlantic in the language of firm, uncompromising remonstrance. It is high time to bring the whole force of public sentiment in this country to bear upon the unjust and unchristian prejudice which steels the professed followers of Christ against the plainest dictates of his word; and to give the utmost support of our sympathy and encouragement to the noble band who, alive to their country's shame and danger, are striving to diffuse a better feeling through the American community.

More than two years ago, we made an effort to bespeak the attention of that portion of the public to whom our influence extends, to the Claims of the Blacks*, as advocated by their heroic champion, William Lloyd Garrison, against the slave-holders and pseudo-philanthropists of the United States. Our eyes had then been but recently opened to the true character of the American Colonization Society, and of their jesuitical agent, Elliott Cresson. Those of our readers who, not being prepared for the startling revelation, then thought our strictures unduly severe, would now, we apprehend, deem that article sufficiently mild and forbearing. A reluctance to think so ill of our American brethren as to believe them chargeable with such enormity of injustice and so anti-christian a spirit, has led many estimable persons to maintain

* Eclectic Review, Feb. 1833.

an obstinate scepticism or a criminal silence upon this subject. If these things are true, has been the cogitation of many, what must we think of all that has been told us of the progress of religion in America? Has, then, this last fair and promising experiment of social renovation completely failed? Are we to believe that all the spiteful invective and narrow-minded ridicule which have been poured forth against the free republicans of the western world, by high-church bigots and Tory partisans, find a justification in the real character of the Americans? By no means. These volumes, at the same time that they expose the guilt of the nation in this particular, bear ample testimony to their moral excellencies, and to the general efficiency of their political and religious institutions. Mr. Abdy's object is not to lower the Americans as a people in our esteem, but to fix our indignation upon that horrible flaw in the framework of their social system, which, if not repaired, threatens it with dissolution. No law of courtesy or kindness to either individuals or communities, requires that we should tamper with the immutable standard of right and wrong, or accommodate our notions of vice and virtue to the meridian of another country. The inveteracy and malignity of some crimes that have rooted themselves in society, and obtained conventional license, are rendered only more conspicuous by the social virtues with which those palpable obliquities are in many cases found associated. Religious persecution, perjury, political injustice, cruelty, irreligion, are crimes of this description, with which we may well connect man-stealing and man-selling, which the Mosaic law punished with death, and the law of Christ classes with murder and parricide.

We protest, then, against being required to soften down the charge which lies against the people of the United States, out of any regard to their claims, on other grounds, to our respect and cordiality; and we protest equally against any sweeping depreciation of American institutions, by way of unfair inference from these facts. It is our firm belief, that there is diffused over a considerable part of the United States, a larger measure of social happiness, in connexion with a higher average of social worth, than exists in almost any other country on the face of the globe; but we are at the same time compelled to admit, that the darker shades of human nature are discoverable there also; that antagonist principles are at work; and that more especially slavery, and the anti-social sentiments which spring from it, are working like a secret and potent venom through all the veins and arteries of the social system, and spreading to the vitals of the state.

We should be sorry, indeed, if it were otherwise. That slavery should, on any portion of God's earth, exist with impunity to the slave-holder, would be more deplorable than the most fearful catastrophe that could befal a people persisting in the

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crime. Nothing tends to shake a religious confidence in the moral government of the Supreme Proprietor, so much as even the temporary immunity of the oppressor, and the success of the fraudulent. We wish nothing but prosperity to the Americans; but we say deliberately, that if the low and narrow barrier which prevents their inland seas from rushing down into the valley of the Mississippi, and sweeping every thing living from the surface, were to give way before some physical convulsion, it would be less calamitous, in its remote consequences, to the moral interests of mankind, than would be the success of their present experiment upon the forbearance of Him who " hath made of one blood all nations of men, to dwell on all the face of the earth", and who regards all nations alike as his offspring.

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The toleration, or rather the legalization of slavery in the United States, and the maintenance of the slave-trade in the very capital of the republic, by which the Americans are degraded to a level with the Algerines, with an aggravation of guilt derived from their Christian profession-this criminal perpetuation and extension of a traffic denounced by every civilized nation of Europe as piracy, and protested against by the heroic founders of American Independence, --this execrable commerce', which, in the emphatic words of that protest, wages war against human nature itself", and the execrable husbandry which is maintained by it,—are not, however, the most heinous features of the American policy. Where slavery has existed for any length of time, extenuating pleas may be urged on behalf of humane planters, who find themselves hereditarily involved in a condition of things which they do not approve, but cannot, as they think, remedy. Although we do not admit the validity of such pleas, yet, there is something to be said in defence of those who are doing all in their power to mitigate the rigours and evils of slavery; and the temporary prolongation of slavery on the part of both the proprietors and the state, may be to a certain extent involuntary. But, in the treatment of the free coloured population, or, as they are falsely called, Africans, there is oppression the more inexcusable, because the more wanton; cruelty the more malignant, because exercised without that shadow of right which springs from the relation between master and slave; and a more direct blasphemy against the work of our common Maker. The feelings with which an American of the northern States regards his black countryman, appear to be much the same as would be inspired by the belief that the coloured race had the Devil for their creator. And he hates him the more for being his countryman, and for being free; he hates him with a pride of caste, which more effectually bars all contact and all sympathy, than any mere difference of political condition. Slaves have, in various countries, been the domestic companions, the tutors, the adopted