Mr. Tupper. His notoriety, hereafter, will hang upon his oratory, and not his poesy.

Says the American Whig Review, "At a late visitation of 'eminent men,' legislators and others, to the various public institutions in and about the City of New-York, the Mayor made an English poet, M. F. Tupper, visible at the Institution of the Blind." The following is from the Tribune:

"Mr. Tupper was introduced to the pupils and the audience by his Honor the Mayor, as a distinguished English poet, and the author of Proverbial Philosophy.' Mr. Tupper said, he did not expect to be thus called upon, and should not attempt to make a speech. He was not prejudiced against the Americans, for he looked upon them as Englishmen. He would, instead of making a speech, deliver a few verses written by himself. They were composed, some time since, in London, and a copy of them was solicited by Mr. Lawrence, our distinguished representative, who lived in a style of princely magnificence in London, and they were published in this country before his arrival. If he could not remember them all, the audience would forgive him. The poem was entitled "The Union, written by a Unit.' He gave the first verse, and the remainder appeared to have escaped his memory, but, after a determined effort, they came back, and he was enabled to complete the recital."

But we have another version of this speech in the Herald. In that paper it is reported thus:

"On Mr. Tupper's introduction he said: I have not prepared a speech-all that I have to say is, that I love you. I have come over the Atlantic Ocean to say-I love you. You have some faults which I do not mean to flatter: but you deserve to be called Englishmen.-(Cheers mingled with suppressed murmurs.) I find no difference. I have crossed the ditch, and I find you are Englishmen at the other side. (Cheers and hisses.) Yankee Englishmen, I mean. (Cheers and laughter.) I wish to write a book about you.'

A voice-Not in the Dickens style.'

I will protect you,

Mr. Tupper- I want to tell the truth about you. though I am aware you do not need protection. I find England as great here as at home. I have come into the land of orators and statesmen. I want to say a few words about this Institution. I have come among you' -(Interruptions, with cries of go on,' amid which, Mr. Tupper sat down, while a horn was sounding in vain for silence.")

Amid the thunders of Demosthenes, the lightning of Sheridan, the red-hot lava from the tongue of Randolph, was ever such eloquence as this? Burke, Fox, Pitt, Canning, Brougham, hide ye your diminished heads, lest your glory be consumed by the "great light which has suddenly shone around" the head of Martin Farquhar Tupper!

Well, it was in good taste indeed for Tupper to go to telling the Americans he was not prejudiced against them, and it was very comfortable and very flattering to be told that he looked upon them as Englishmen. What glory, what honor for the people of this country! And then to go to reciting one's own half-forgotten poetryhow modest! And how apropos to tell Republicans-ay, to give them the comfortable assurance- —that their minister lived in princely

style in London! Was this all he could say of Mr. Lawrence?— that he lived in princely style?

But it seems there is one other commendation of our minister. He procured from Mr. Tupper a copy of his verses, and had them published in this country before his arrival. How fortunate for both the gentlemen that we have not seen them!

Why did not Mr. Tupper head his poem, "The Union, written by a Cipher," instead of a "Unit?"

Mr. Tupper said, all that he had to say to the Americans was, "[ love you. I have come over the Atlantic Ocean to say, I love you." How important an object for which to cross the Atlantic! How cheering to Americans! We now know the good for which he made his visit that good to do which he had such "simple fervors."

"I love you."-We are reminded of an anecdote told us by an esteemed friend-a dental surgeon. There was once a Methodist preacher, who was, besides being a clergyman, an M.D., and a singing-master. He was in the habit of "flying around, and making himself generally useful," by preaching at camp-meetings-teaching singing-schools on Saturdays and Sundays-charging only for Saturday, and not at all for Sunday, though he charged as much for Saturday as others did for both Saturday and Sunday, and doctoring the sisters of his persuasion, who thought there was some great virtue in being doctored by brother Singsong. Well, it so happened that our friend, the dentist, was called upon to draw a tooth for an old sister-Sister Phoebe, a fictitious name-at whose house, for the purpose of devouring her chickens and pies, brother Singsong was stopping. Sister Phoebe could not string her nerves to the sticking point for having her tooth extracted, but would flinch every time the cold iron came in contact with her decayed molar. Thereupon brother Singsong, for the purpose of inducing sister Phoebe to sit still, and have the operation performed, told her-yes, actually told her-that "if she did not sit still-he would not love her!" Gods! what a stroke that was to the old sister's heart! To be told by brother Singsong that he would not love her! Oh, pains of such a purgatory-oh, pangs of such a perdition!

The consequence was, sister Phoebe sat still, and her tooth was extracted! And now-oh, full fruition of hope deferred, which made the heart sick—and now, said brother Singsong, "I love you."

Says Mr. Tupper to the Americans, "I love you." Oh, highly favored nation, how wilt thou express thy gratitude?

"I will protect you."-In the day when America was in her infancy she needed a protector. She found several in the British Parliament, and a protector par excellence, in the great Lord Chatham. Of this man, who towered above his fellows, it has been said, that the "terrors of his beak and the lightnings of his eye" were insufferable. The thunders of his voice, as his eye leaped, like lightning, from victim to victim, in the angry storm of debate, were terribleindeed, "the terrible was his peculiar power. Then the whole house sunk before him."

Such was the man who thought it an honor to be-though he did

not assume to be-America's protector, before she had, as a nation, even put on swaddling clothes to hide her new-born nakedness. Since then, like the war horse, her neck is clothed in thunder. But yesterday she lifted her voice, and a nation owned herself conquered and dismembered. To-day, the voice of her prime minister rebukes one of the "Great Powers" of Europe, and that power cowers in the dust before her. And just at this juncture comes Martin Farquhar Tupper across the Atlantic, and says to Americans, "I will protect you!"

In the volume of Mr. Tupper's Poems before us, is one called the "Assurance of Horace," and one the "Assurance of Ovid." The first is a translation of the ode commencing:

and the other is a translation of some verses of Ovid, in which that bard promises himself immortality from his writings. We copy the last, because it is shorter than the first-make some slight alterations in it, and apply it to Mr. Tupper, heading it,

66

There is a good deal of speculation as to whether Mr. Tupper will write a book about America. In the Herald, he is reported in his speech to have said he did intend to write one, but not in the Dickens style. The gentleman who had the pleasure of a long conversation" with him in Washington, and who reported it for the Telegraph, says that he has declared he would not write a book about America, and that he is very much annoyed at its being said that he would do so. We do not pretend to have any opinion, as to whether he will write such a book; but one thing we are well assured of, and that is, it is very silly to promise that he will not do so. If he has, however, we hope he will retract, and write his book, if it pleases him to do so. Speaking in the abstract, and Mr. Tupper aside, of course, we would say, that when an intelligent foreigner visits our country, we would not have him come with a promise not to write about us. Let him write by all means, if he wishes to do so, and just as he pleases to write. Mr. James, we believe, has also said that he did not come among us to write a book. We know why both he and Mr. Tupper are careful upon this point. They think to win the favor of Americans, by assuring them they will not write about

them as Dickens and Trollope did. Now, all this is unnecessary, and defeats its own objects. Let English authors, or visitors, without being authors, come among us unpledged, leaving themselves to write or not write, just as circumstances suggest. Independence is the best and most sensible policy, and will best meet our favor.

And if Mr. Tupper should write a book about us, for Heaven's sake, let it be rather like Dickens's and Trollope's than like his American Odes and his New-York speech. When a person writes as Dickens or Hall, we see something manly, though malicious. It shows that they have sense enough to see that we are something more than objects for complacency and protection, and we can despise their malice. But when one comes, like Tupper, with his patronizing manner, we are forced to believe, either that we really are objects of charity, or that the person with the patronizing air is a simpleton and a fool.

As to the protectorate of Mr. Tupper in America, we will simply say, that, though it be for the good of our country, we can't help regretting it, because we fear its history may give Carlyle and Headley an excuse for writing biographies of the second Cromwell.

Finally, before taking leave of this subject, we must commend the keenness of Mayor Kingsland's optics in the discovery that Mr. Tupper is a "distinguished poet." Doubtless he had been told to say the Englishman was such, and this will excuse him.

ART. IV.-PROFESSOR DEW'S ESSAYS ON SLAVERY.

ORIGIN OF SLAVERY, AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION. CHAPTER II.

We will now examine into the right, according to the law of nations-the strict jus gentium—and we shall find all the writers agree in the justice of slavery, under certain circumstances. Grotius says,

that, as the law of nature permits prisoners of war to be killed, so the same law has introduced the right of making them slaves, that the captors, in view to the benefit arising from the labor or sale of the prisoners, might be induced to spare them. From the general practice of nations before the time of Puffendorf, he came to the conclusion that slavery has been established "by the free consent of the opposing parties.†

Rutherford, in his Institutes, says, "since all the members of a nation against which a just war is made, are bound to repair the damages that gave occasion to the war, or that are done in it, and likewise to make satisfaction for the expenses of carrying it on, the law of nations will allow those who are prisoners to be made slaves by the nation which takes them; that so their labor or the price for which they are sold may discharge these demands." But he most powerfully combats the more cruel doctrine laid down by Grotius,

L. 3, chap. 7, sec. 5. 4 Book, 6 chap., 3. t Book, chap. 9, sec. 17.

that the master has a right to take away the life of his slave. Bynckershoek contends for the higher right of putting prisoners of war to death. "We may, however, (enslave) if we please," he adds, “and indeed we do sometimes still exercise that right upon those who enforce it against us. Therefore the Dutch are in the habit of selling to the Spaniards as slaves, the Algerines, Tunisians, and Tripolitans, whom they take prisoners in the Atlantic or Mediterranean. Nay, in the year 1661, the States General gave orders to their admiral to sell as slaves all the pirates that he should take. The same thing was done in 1664."* Vattel, the most humane of all the standard authors on national law, asks-" are prisoners of war to be made slaves?" To which he answers, "Yes; in cases which give a right to kill them, when they have rendered themselves personally guilty of some crime deserving death." Even Locke, who has so ably explored all the faculties of the mind, and who so nobly stood forth against the monstrous and absurd doctrines of Sir Robert Filmer, and the passive submissionists of his day, admits the right to make slaves of prisoners whom we might justly have killed. Speaking of a prisoner who has forfeited his life, he says, "he to whom he has forfeited it, may, when he has him in his power, delay to take it, and make use of him to his own service, and he does him no injury by it." Blackstone, it would seem, denies the right to make prisoners of war slaves; for he says we had no right to enslave, unless we had the right to kill, and we had no right to kill, unless "in cases of absolute necessity, for self-defence; and it is plain this absolute necessity did not subsist, since the victor did not actually kill him, but made him prisoner." Upon this we have to remark, 1st, that Judge Blackstone here speaks of slavery in its pure unmitigated form, "whereby an unlimited power is given to the master over the life and fortune of the slave." Slavery scarcely exists anywhere in this form, and if it did, it would be a continuance of a state of war, as Rousseau justly observes, between the captive and the captor. Again; Blackstone, in his argument upon this subject, seems to misunderstand the grounds upon which civilians place the justification of slavery, as arising from the laws of war. It is well known that most of the horrors of war spring from the principle of retaliation, and not, as Blackstone supposes, universally from "absolute necessity." If two civilized nations of modern times are at war, and one hangs up, without any justifiable cause, all of the enemy who fall into its possession, the other does not hesitate to inflict the same punishment upon an equal number of its prisoners. It is the "lex talionis," and not the absolute necessity which gives rise to this.

The colonists of this country, up to the revolution, during, and even since that epoch, have put to death the Indian captives, whenever the Indians had been in the habit of massacreing indiscriminate

Treatise on the Law of War, Du Ponceau's Ed. p. 21.

+ See Law of Nations, Book 3, chap. 8, sec. 152.

On Civil Government, chap. 6.

See Tucker's Blackstone, vol. 2, p. 423.

Blackstone's Commentaries, in loco citato.