a court of justice; but no one has yet contended, that, till IE can FEEL THE OBLIGATION OF AN OATH, till YOU HAVE at least FOUND SOME SYMBOL FAIRLY TO SWEAR HIM BY, his evidence shall be regarded as credible. What will the slave then have gained? The MOCKERY of being produced NOT to be believed. Better for him that he should remain as he is, than exchange a technical disability for a public exhibition of his incompetence."

Nothing can be more sensible than the more general observation of the same writer, that,

"Moral improvement is the hinge on which everything must turn. When that is sufficiently advanced, civil rights may be freely granted, and emancipation will have no danger. But moral improvement will not be accomplished by vain recommendation to the colonies to do what they have not the means of effecting.

"Nothing, indeed, could be easier than for the colonies to pass specious laws, which would remove every reproach from their statute books; but if, from existing circumstances, these laws could not have any practical effect, it were better that the evil should remain open to public view, than that it should be thus disguised."

We have already said a great deal more as to these matters than we intended when we began; and yet we have, comparatively speaking, done nothing in the way of detail. We have referred, however, abundantly to the sources whence the most accurate and most overwhelming information may be derived by any one who will take the trouble of looking for it, and having done this, and having most assuredly said nothing but what we have satisfied our own minds is true and uncontrovertible, we now call upon our readers to say, what is their opinion of the Mitigation and Institution Agitators? These people profess to be the best Christians in the world; indeed they will allow nobody to be a Christian at all but their own set; they profess, also, to be the very princes of philanthropy. Has their conduct been such as might be expected from the open assumption of such characters ? Have not these Christians-these par excellence Christians-been deliberately, and are they not now unabashedly, the suppressors and distorters of facts? Are they not helpless as children in logic are they not beggers of the question, and putters of the cart before the horse at every turn they make? Are they not idle, irrational declaimers--frothy exaggerators

blind in reality-or affecting blindness, in order that the tricks of lynxlike perspicacity, as to self-interest, may not be suspected by the ignorant multitude, for whom alone their style of procedure, their tone of language, their reach and grasp of intellect, are in any measure adapted. These men are all, take their word for it, so many HOWARDS. Yet, has any one of them all either visited the regions of which they all talk so much, in order to check, by personal examination, the risk of false information? or, in point of fact, paid one jot of price in the shape of personal pain and privation, for that all-adorning, that all-sanctifying, that all-subduing, all-silencing NAME of peerless philanthropy, to which every one of them conceives himself to have as good a right as any one of the uninitiated conceives he has to the character of an honest man, or of a loyal citizen-and in which, best of all jokes that ever were jested, THEY, (never dreaming but that they may, without impiety, say, "whoever is not with us is against us,") will allow no man whatever to have either part or lot, except he has kissed their private symbols of coherence and co-operation, and renounced virtually every other principle of social compact, but theirs?

We apprehend that we have done enough to justify these expressions; but to attack individuals we have no wish whatever, nor is there, we are persuaded, the slightest necessity for our doing so in this instance. The truth is, that the knowledge is everywhere and in every hand: the only thing that is needful, is, to call upon men of common understanding to turn their eyes outwards and inwards, and consider what has been going onwhat they themselves know to have been going on. Time has been when the House of Commons would have been the natural sphere for such discussions to take place in, and for such hints to have emanated from. But there, as we have said ere now, and as all that have sense to feel anything have felt long ere now, things of this sort are in these glorious days of smooth speaking entirely out of the question. There, every one is the honourable member

"So are they all, all honourable men." There, MOTIVES must not be even glanced at: there, if the LIE be given,

the word, the honest word, is only uttered to be eat again in the fast coming qualm of the all-levelling en demic. It is on paper only that TRUTH can be hinted. The only comfort is, that when truth is hinted anywhere, there is a principle not yet entirely eradicated, which renders that one golden atom more powerful than a thousand tons of the blown-up soulsickening verbiage that would fain oppress and smother it.

say,

The truth is, then, that slavery wherever it exists is an evil-an odious evil; but that the slavery to which the negroes are subjected in the West Indies is as nothing, compared with the slavery to which all negroes are born in the native country of their race: that in respect of physical comforts, the West Indian negroes are superior to almost all the labouring peasantry of the Old World: and that in those matters wherein these negroes are inferior to the labouring classes of European countries, the inferiority is not by any means, even take the worst times and the worst places, so great as it would have been had they remained in Africa. That the moral condition of these negroes ought to be improved, is evident; that it must be improved ere they are made free to do as they choose, is as evident ;-that is to if any regard whatever is to be paid either to the welfare of our colonies, as parts of our empire and instruments of our wealth; or even, laying these matters altogether out of view, to the true interests, moral and intellectual, of the negroes themselves. This, in so far as the negroes are concerned, is the truth. Have the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, the Macaulays have the Broughams, acted as if this were the truth? Have the Ellises, the Marryatts-ay, has even Canning, the orator and the statesman of the time primus absque secundo-has even he answered these men as if it were so? No.-The only man in the House of Commons who has ventured even to come within a hundred miles of any thing like the indication of his true feelings, is Mr ALEXANDER BARING. Observe the parliamentary style—

"With every respect for the motives of the numerous petitioners on this subject, he must confess, that he had witnessed too much the tricks and calumnies by which

these representations were collected, to ascribe much weight to them, and he con jured the Right Honourable Gentleman, as a Minister of the Crown, not to be led away by petitions so got up.-(Only con ceive of Mr CANNING really led away by sons, few of whom (mark the few!)-had these things!)-They were signed by perany means of information, and mostly by those, who were in the habit of annually quieting an over-timid conscience by a subscription to missions and to some petition about slavery, of the nature of which they knew nothing, but from the distorted exag gerations of enthusiasts. When it was considered that these petitions were, as is well known, brought in such loads to the table of the House, in consequence of a plan or ganized by a few persons in the metropolis, weight they deserved." gentlemen would ascribe to them only the

In regard to the interests of the colonies themselves, and their English proprietors, the TRUTH may be stated almost as briefly. Whatever may be the sin of slavery, it is no more theirs than it is that of Mr Wilberforce or Mr Buxton, or of any other given man or men now residing in England, and eating the fruits of English manors,to say nothing of English breweries, The slave-trade was not the child of our West Indian colonists. It was established in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, (who took a personal share in it,) before we had any of these colonies at all. James I., Charles I., Cromwell, Charles II., James II., but above all, William III., did their utmost to extend the slave-trade.* William was the king, and the great Lord Somers the minister, who concluded the Assiento treaty, with which our colonies had nothing to do, but by which England bound herself to furnish the Spanish colonies with 144,000 slaves, at the rate of 4800 per annum. During all this time, the West Indian colonists of England did nothing but buy slaves from the British merchants, the said merchants being 66 encouraged" in the said traffic by a regular sequence of Acts of Parliament. Nay, farther, however much the dupes may start, the fact is certain, that the said colonies began the attack on the said traffic, so favoured by the Government and Parliament of England. Three different acts were passed in the colonies for the restriction of the slavetrade between 1760 and 1774, and all

these acts were negatived by the English Parliament-the Earl of Dartmouth, President of the Board, declaring, on the last of these occasions, "We cannot allow the colonies to check or discourage, in any degree, a traffic so beneficial to THE NATION. All this was done because this traffic was supposed to be highly advantageous to the shipping and commerce of England. England was the guarantee to her colonies. What she sanctioned, they durst not call in question; how could they judge it to be wrong? The Mitigation Society say, that the West Indians ought to remember that they have had the advantage and the usufruct of the slaves." Not so: not they only. The shipping interest, the general commercial interest, the revenue, the political power of England, have all been equally gainers. But at any rate, the nation patronized the trade the nation created the slave population. The Acts of Parliament told the colonists that they were safe in buying-the Acts of Parliament entreated, almost commanded, them to buy. The Acts of Parliament of those days must be interpreted by reference to the mind of Parliament in those days; and, doing so, no human being can suspect that any one of those Parliaments ever contemplated negro slavery as a thing which ought not to be, or the contracts perfected under their eye in regard to that traffic as less entitled to the perpetual protection of their authority, and their successors' authority, than any other species of contracts entered into at the same time about land or stock in England itself. It is clear, then, that the nation is bound to protect these colonies from danger, and to compensate them if they sustain loss. Whatever experiments, therefore, are made, must, in common justice, be made at the expense of the nation. The Mitigators even they are indeed compelled to admit something of this; but it is always attended with a hesitating, detracting, envious, hypocritical sneer; insomuch, that the man who reads the Edinburgh Review or their Reports, and believes that they are speaking bona fide, without any mental pharisaical reserve-that they speak freely, and are ready to act fairly,—any such

man must really be, as to the matter of intellect, almost worthy of adding one more to their phalanx. He must be the very same sort of person who lifts up his eyes in a pious tremor when he hears HENRY BROUGHAM, ESQ.!!! -Yes, BROUGHAM! talking in St Stephen's Chapel, about "an indignant Providence," and "the awful curse of Heaven on colonial iniquity !"* Euge! euge! euge!-We shall have him sporting a VIEW OF CHRISTIANITY of his own inditing by and by.

Mr Barham, from whom we have already quoted several conclusive passages touching the misrepresentations of the Wilberforce and Buxton party, is the only writer on the subject who has ventured to draw out a specific plan, whereby, according to the supposition, all the difficulties of the case are capable of being surmounted. Immediate emancipation, he agrees with every rational being in considering to be, what Mr Pitt once called it," sheer insanity," (by the way, the Mitigation Society chooses to render these words of Mr Pitt by" an extremely delicate measure.") Ere any emancipation can take place without the grossest injury to the negroes themselves, he says, as all must say, that a long course of moral and religious instruction is necessary. But what is his plan? Neither more nor less than that the Government of this country should, de plano, buy up the whole land and slaves of these colonies, at a cost, as he estimates it, of, at the least, ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-EIGHT MILLIONS STERLING. This trifling addition being made to the national debt, he proposes that the Government shall indemnify itself by commencing a monopoly of the trade of raising sugar, coffee, &c. in the West Indies. The Government, he says, (but what says history?) will be the cheapest and thriftiest, and therefore the most thriving and flourishing, of farmers and sugar growers. In short, we shall make immensely rich by our speculation, and out of our overplus of revenue be enabled to provide adequate means for improving the moral and religious, and thence, by consequence, and at no distant period of time, the political condition of the negroes.

Mr Barham is a man of clear views,

and an excellent writer; and, accordingly, whoever turns to his book will find this plan laid down in all due detail, and the thing made to wear a feasible enough aspect, primâ facie. But although it is at present impossible for us to go into the matter, we suspect our readers will really have no great difficulty in excusing us. To say the truth, we have mentioned the thing not so much with a view to the detail and merits of the plan itself, as with the view of letting plain people see what sort of difficulties they really are that environ a subject of which so many idle and ignorant fools are eternally chattering, without semblance or shadow of anything like modesty or diffidence. An addition of one hundred and twenty-eight millions to the national burden under which we already labour! The prospect of Mr Canning turning farmer-general of the West Indian islands, and of our making rich by means of his stewardship! And then the patronage and the Whig outcry!-But, ohe, jam satis!-And yet we cannot but smile at ourselves for having omitted to state, that it has been suggested, even by Mr Barham, that we might have a company of West Indian Directors! Perhaps the East Indian Directors would be kind enough to volunteer this slight additamentum to their present toils!

Mr Whitmore (the maker of the motion of the 23d of May) came to the support of the East Indian free-traders, &c., and to the attack of the West Indian colonists, on grounds and with arguments of an avowedly commercial character. This was all as it should have been nothing could be fairer than the principle of action which he, like others, acted on, and, unlike others, avowed in the House. But to what does his argument amount? Our steamengines, and other machinery, have, said he, enabled us to bring the cot ton of the East to England-manufacture it into cloth-send it back to Hindostan and, after all, undersell the Hindoo manufacturer on his own soil. For this, says the logical gentleman, we owe some reparation to the Hindoo; and that reparation ought to be made, by enabling him to come into the sugar market of Europe, on equal terms with the West Indians.

Now, in the first place, be it observed, that in spite of fine phrases, this was not a motion for making the su

gar trade free and open, but only for admitting the East Indians to a share in the monopoly which already exists.

But, secondly, we really are blind to the justice of the plan. What you take from the cotton manufacturers of India, pay back from the pockets of the planters of Jamaica. That is the simple proposition. Had Mr Whitmore proposed to restrain the manufacturer of England from competing with the manufacturer of India, as to the Indian market, we should have been compelled to admit, that there was at least a greater semblance of equity in the scheme. But the West Indians, what have they done about the East India cotton? Do they not themselves clothe every negro man, woman, and child, they have, in cotton goods of English manufacture?-and if you take from them the sugar trade, wherein, at the present moment, from a variety of circumstances over which they have as little control, as the Hindoos have over the machinery of Soho, they are not prospering, will no recompence be due to them in their turn, and will the East Indians be willing to pay that recompence exclusively out of their own pockets?

But what is the truth? The English cotton manufacturers are strongly represented in the House of Commons, and the West Indian planters can scarcely be said to be represented there at all.

This is the true root of all this evil. We have established these colonies deliberately-and we have given them colonial governments and assembliesand we have invested these with privileges and powers, which they have, for ages, exercised under our eyes, and with our approbation. With these colonial governments we are now beginning to deal exactly as if they were possessed of no lawful character or power whatever; and what the consequences of this interference may be, is a subject far above us. Will nothing, however, be accepted as a lesson? Have we managed all our colonies wisely and well? Have we kept them all? Is there nothing in the past history of our empire, to teach us prudence at least, if we must say nothing of justice? Are we prepared, either to see these colonies turned into negro-land, or into dependencies of some other Christian power? These are, at least, questions to which our rulers ought to be

meditating an answer. Or if they be already resolved to answer both in the negative, what avails all this idle and timid tampering? Why not speak out NOW?

In regard to the personal character, and for many of the former acts of Mr Wilberforce, we entertain feelings far more respectful, than some of the expressions into which circumstances of more immediate influence may have betrayed us, might seem to correspond with. We allude to the deep and most serious fears which we have been unable to throw aside, both as to the welfare of the British colonies, and the true interests of the West Indian negroes. It may be very true, that government was too long of taking up some of these matters, and that in so far thanks are due to those who urged and impelled the government. That the method of this interference, however, has been most unwise-that the benevolent spirit of Mr Wilberforce has suffered itself to be made both the dupe and the tool of people, with whom he has no natural bond of connectionof whose real objects he even now, perhaps, will entertain no suspicion that their machinations, backed by the

authority of his name, have already been productive of most fearful dan gers-that ere these pages see the light, they may have been productive of much worse-and that at all events there is no farther need for interference of any kind-these are propositions to which we anticipate no dissent from any rational mind, that has condescended to bestow due attention upon the important matter before us.

We would fain hope, that whatever pertinacity self-interest may dictate elsewhere, Mr Wilberforce at least will take warning, and deny to the chicaneries of the next session that support-that not much less than fatal support-which, from whatever combination of ignorance and zeal, he was led to bestow on those of the last. The public cannot be dangerously affected by the declamations, any more than by the calculations, of mere merchants; but there are others who sound a trumpet, to which the English ear is and ever should be alive, and who unfold colours that can never be too reverently honoured, provided only they be displayed under the guidance of Reason.

DEAR MR NORTH, You know it has been said by some one, "Let me make songs for a people, and I care not who makes their laws." If a song can be supposed to be so effective on the opinions of the public, how much more potent an engine is a popular Magazine! That your political lucubrations, diffused as they are far and wide throughout the British empire, have done the state service, I well know ;-as an Englishman, I acknowledge the useful labours of our northern brethren with gratitude, and I willingly offer my tribute of praise. Your essays on these subjects have an energy of expression, and a happy adaptation of humour, which, at least as long since as the days of Horace, has been observed to cut down an adversary with more effect than the most weighty argument. By these means, aided at the same time by forcible reasoning, the public mind has been guided in the right way, and a salutary antidote has been afforded to those

poisons which faction of the worst description is continually scattering in the way of the heedless, through the channel of a licentious press. In this beneficial labour the pen of your friend Tickler is eminently conspicuous. Like the Roman moralist, to whom I have already made allusion, he exposes his adversaries to ridicule. He excites, indeed, the smiles of his friends, but his touch is sharper than that of the Bard of the Sabine Villa; he brandishes the scalping knife of the Poet of Aquinum; and if he tickles, it is with a cat o' nine tails.

After this ample admission of the merits of this and other able contributors to your respectable miscellany, as well as those of your own composition, I cannot refrain from taking the liberty of pointing out one particular, in which I think that you, he, and all the rest of your critical and political fraternity, have fallen into an egregious error. Let us calmly argue the point, and I do not despair of convincing you that