tice and humanity to the Negro. But the plaudits were premature. If appearances could be trusted, it was not the Negro but herself Britain had spared. She laid down her own whip, but, whether in imbecility or sentimentality, again took it up, loaded it afresh, and put it into the hand of the Spaniard or American. There are two ways of keeping a slave; either by feeding and lodging him that he may till your own ground, or paying another certain moneys for keeping and working him. Britain emancipated the West Indian slaves: the sugar produce of her colonies declined; she opened or kept open her markets to slave-grown sugar; precisely the quantity of sugar she could not receive from the West Indies, she received from Cuba and the Brazils. What occasioned the diminution of sugar in the British Colonies? The diminution of toil bearing on the slave. What enabled the other slave-holding sugar-lands to increase their produce, so as to meet the new demand of the British market? One of two things, or both, exhaust the possibilities of the case: addition to the number of slaves, or an increase of toil, imposed on slaves already possessed, exactly equivalent to the diminution of work in the British plantations. We are not here, reader, laying down any thing difficult or abstruse; we are not even arguing; we are expressing an absolute common-place; we defy any man, who has ever read a book or reflected an hour on political economy, to question what we state. By the continual communication of all parts of the commercial world, by an action and reaction inevitable and speedy, when you have any article of commerce for which there is a known and steady demand, the withdrawal of a body of laborers from one field where it is produced will occasion their addition in another field. When Britian set free her Negroes in the West Indies, and still kept open her market to slave-growing sugar, she simply appointed a set of Spanish or

Brazilian overseers to starve, to lash, and to murder her slaves. It was by the laws of commerce impossible for her really to emancipate a body of slaves equal in number to those employed in her colonies, to withdraw her contingent from the slavechain of the world, in any but one way-by closing her markets to all slave-grown sugar. By any other expedient, she simply exchanged one body of slaves for another. The Emancipation Act was noble in intent, fine in example, and beautiful as a proof of national generosity; but in mitigating the woes of the Negro race, considered as a whole, it was then, and has since been, null, and worse. We appeal to any political economist in the British Empire, whether this conclusion is not a mathematical certainty.

When we consider the amount of injustice, of useless, senseless, gross injustice, inflicted on our colonies in this businesswhen we think of the state of those glorious islands flung to rot there on the ocean, while Britain, like an insane beldame, cherished elsewhere that for which she had ruined them—we can say only, in sickness of heart, that it is unspeakable. Mr. Carlyle rails at the "Dismal Science;" but we can not cease to lament, despite his scorn, that there was not even that faint knowledge of the simplest laws of the commercial system of the world in the public mind of Britain, which would have saved us this humiliating state of affairs.

Let all who desire Slave Emancipation rally to one cry, and demand one measure, The exclusion of slave-grown produce from the British Isles. We have no choice, if we would do any thing, beyond this; keep your market open, and your number of slaves is the same. India may give us cotton; our own islands, if rightly managed, will give us enough of sugar: but, however we do, there is now blood on our hands-blood most cruelly, most inhumanly shed. As matters stand, all our abol

ition lecturing will not abate the minutest particle of slavery; if we have the national heroism to pass the above measure, we may entertain a good hope of giving slavery its death-blow over the world.

Let no one here desecrate the name of Free Trade, by making it a plea for oppression and iniquity. It is not a question either of free trade or protection; it is simply whether we are to have slaves or no: we can emancipate them only in one way.

But we turn now to the Negroes in our Indian Colonies. Were the great measure passed which we have specified, there would be hope for them; while matters are as they stand, we can hardly entertain any. The only admissible mode of procedure, however, seems simple enough. While recognized, in an unqualified sense, as our fellow-subjects, Negroes must certainly be taught to imbibe habits of industry worthy of British citizens. It is competent for every government, in a mild but resolute manner, to put in force the ancient rule, that he who does not work shall not eat. As Mr. Carlyle says truly, the Negro has no right to run riot in idleness, and live on soil which British valor, at least in one sense, won, without paying a fair price for it: no British subject has such a right, and he can plead no allowable privilege. This is the first step which renders an industrial education practicable. A whole system of such education might gradually arise, and, by a natural, easy, and benign process, a free and industrious, a healthful and joyous colored population might again make these islands like polished and glittering gems on the breast of

ocean.

And it is our decided opinion that there might, with the best effects, be an importation from Africa of free blacks into the West Indies. Mr. Carlyle's argument against this is singular.

It proceeds on the hypothesis that, because something is required to be done in measure, it will be done in hideous and probably impossible excess. Ireland, such is his reasoning, does, or did suffer from, too large a population; the West Indian Islands suffer from one by much too small: therefore, if you introduce more men into the West Indies, you make it a black Ireland. Under which form of the syllogism is this to be ranged? The case is rendered the more absurd by the fact that, since the project in question has reference solely to Blacks who would voluntarily push their fortune in the West Indies, the great danger would be, that the influx would stop far too soon. The Dismal Science could have given Mr. Carlyle a hint here too.

But what errors soever we have fallen into since the measure for the emancipation of our West Indian slaves was passed, and how ineffectual soever the ignorance of its framers may have rendered that measure itself, its value as a national act was not lost. To the principles we have stated, it did testify; Britain did, to the best of her knowledge, free her bondmen; and if it is now found to be an undeniable fact, that her knowledge was so defective that her attempt, instead of being an alleviation of the miseries of the negro race as a whole, was, strictly speaking, the reverse, let us hope the cause of real Slave Emancipation may again meet a response in British generosity, humanity, and valor, and again find Christian champions like Clarkson, Buxton, and Wilberforce.

There has been not a little discussion as to the respective exertions of Clarkson, Wilberforce, and others, in the attainment of their common object. To this controversy we shall contribute not one word. We saw that Wilberforce accepted, as part of the work appointed him by God, the conduct of the struggle for the abolition, and we saw him, when the Slave

Trade was no more, devoutly thanking God for having honored him to bear his part in the work. But, in what shares soever the trophies of the victory be distributed to individuals, it is just to claim the whole achievement as a triumph of Christianity. Ramsay, whose book, published toward the close of the last century, was the prelude to the agitation, was a Christian pastor; Clarkson and Wilberforce both toiled under the direct commission of Christian love. To such an extent, Christianity did color our national councils. In the former century, the love of the Gospel had shed its mild light in the dungeon; it now spoke an emphatic word against slavery, a word which, however little it may have yet availed, will assuredly not die away until that foul stain of shame and guilt is wiped from the brow of humanity. All that was of real value in the measure was its testimony, on the part of the first nation in the world, to justice and love that testimony was priceless; and it was the might of Christianity which drew it forth. What was defective and neutralizing in its provisions was unseen by all; the divine principles which acted in its attainment were perfectly independent of that; all the world, as well as its Christian movers, thought it was a real emancipation, and not an exchange. But every noble mind, every heart touched with poetic fire or raised by philosophic ardor, hailed it with instant and exultant applause. Cowper, Coleridge, Byron, Schlegel, Fichte, and a list of such, embracing, with probably not a solitary exception, all the greatness and nobleness of the close of last century and the commencement of this, declared Slave Emancipation to be a high and glorious aim and achievement; Mr. Carlyle was, we think, the very first man of genius and nobleness, both unquestioned, to hint a doubt regarding the fundamental principles which animated Clarkson and Wilberforce. And whatever scorn or gratuitous insulting pity may accompany her path, we accept it as an