CURSORY REVIEW. These "If there be," said that generous friend of America and of human nature, Thomas Day, (chiefly known as the author of Sandford and Merton,)—" if there be an object truly ridiculous in the universe, it is an American patriot signing resolutions in favour of liberty with the one hand, and with the other, brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves." words express the sentiment of all civilized men— except the Americans themselves who, in reference to the system of negro slavery which they continue to uphold, so far from admitting the reproach of peculiar iniquity, boldly challenge a right to peculiar indulgence. In their Defence to the world, they allege discriminating circumstances from which they deduce in their own favour a plea of entire moral exculpation-appealing to a dire necessity that makes them the blameless doers of devilish deeds. In no age or country have tyrannical invaders and usurpers of other men's rights been without apologies and apologists. Tears have been shed to palliate the rapacity of Xerxes, and disguise the ambition of Cromwell. But time-born Truth has always unmasked the hypocrite and his hypocrisy, and disclosed the falsehood of the allegations on which the oppressor sought to rear his unsound and iniquitous plea. Perhaps the well known fable of the wolf and lamb would be rendered truer to nature,— at least to the new disclosures of nature that the new world has produced,—if the wolf were made to say to his victim, "I am sorry to destroy you; but can neither restrain nor condemn the appetite which I indulge. That appetite was awakened in me by the power and artifice of a stronger brute that once domineered over myself: and though I have exerted sufficient vigour to reject his tyranny over me, yet I feel quite unable to forego the evil appetite against yourself which he taught me, or to overcome the prejudice against you which his lessons impressed on my innocent, reluctant, but tenacious mind." The Americans, with continual application of flattering unction to their own souls, and ostentatious challenge of the world's admiration, plume themselves on being, of all the nations who have flourished in ancient or in modern times, the people by whom civil and political liberty has been most justly and nobly appreciated, most gallantly achieved, and most faithfully and successfully cultivated, preserved, and extended. To the plain uncorrupted understandings of honest men in every other country, this American claim appears seriously impeached in truth and value by the actual subsistence of negro slavery in America; and the Americans are everywhere taxed with the disgrace of peculiar treachery to those generous principles of which they profess themselves the most ardent and praiseworthy votaries. Manifold and various are the defensive pleas by which Americans attempt to repel, elude, or extenuate the heavy charge. The citizens of those States, members of the Federal Union, within whose territory negro slavery has been actually abolished, protest that their conduct is not only irreproachable, but deserves the praise of generous sacrifice of their private interests on the altar of universal justice and liberty:-a protestation of which I shall presently do my endeavour to ascertain the value. They further protest against any responsibility for the actual retention of negro slavery within the Southern confederated States,-on the plea that by the constitutional compact of their National Union, the federal government is debarred from all interference with the social economy and domestic concerns of the particular provinces,-to whose local governments respectively is reserved the paramount and exclusive power of regulating such matters within the limits of their own separate and independent jurisdiction. They claim at once the praise of piety for disallowing within their private limits a practice repugnant to the will of God and the rights of man; and the praise of justice for their faithful adherence to a voluntary compact that blends their national name, character, and power with the support and perpetuation of that practice. On the other hand, the citizens of those States in which negro slavery still subsists, repel the charge against themselves in a tone as confident as that of their slaveless colleagues, but with greater variety of pleading. At once seeking their own vindication, and retorting the implied censure conveyed in the language of their national though not provincial colleagues, they contend that negro labour is essential to the pecu liar culture of the soil whieh they possess; and that negro slave-labour, after having been employed in every one of the older American States (even in those whose soils demanded preferably the labour of free and white men) has never been abandoned in any one where the whites could retain it without manifest disadvantage to themselves. Some of them protest that, deploring the existence of slavery as a hated outrage on human nature, they acquiesce in it as a rooted and irremovable evil, of which the blame (if there be any) mainly lies with the Almighty, in creating its necessity by creating such climes and other circumstances of such potent invitation as to render the temptation to the practice irresistible by any exertion of the virtuous force which he has imparted to man. I have heard many of these persons profess, with every appearance of vehement sincerity, their desire to discover some practicable plan of abolishing negro slavery; but have almost invariably found that they required the impracticability of redressing long and enormous injustice without any atoning sacrifice or reparatory expence, of restoring and elevating, as if by magic, and without any surrender of interest or convenience, the rights and the dignity of a numerous race of men whom they and their fathers have ruined and |