full extent the principle that conducted their fathers to America. It was the boast of those fathers that the Almighty, in giving them the heritage of the new world, had distinguished them by a specialty of divine favour akin to that by which the land of promise was granted to the people of Israel: and it is the opprobrium of their descendants, as it was of the degenerated children of Israel, that "He looked for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry." The race of white. men must acquire and exercise the truly Christian virtue of Forgiveness-not that spurious copy of the virtue, better deserving to be termed a proud selfglorious disdain of other men's real or imagined trespasses against us, but a hearty repentance of our trespasses against them, with humble forgiveness of the moral superiority over ourselves to which our injustice has elevated them, and of the abhorrence of ourselves with which it has inspired them. We have seen that Jefferson, in alluding to the separative influence of the American prejudice between the two races of people, deduces his melancholy conclusion of the hopelessness of its cure, as much from the juster resentment of the blacks as from the less just but equally natural and far stronger fear and fearbred hatred of the whites. I am convinced that he is mistaken. Proprium est humani generis, says Tacitus, odisse quem laeserit: And, with fuller expression of the same sentiment, a tuneful moralist of Britain has said that "Forgiveness to the injured does belong : They never pardon who commit the wrong :" certainly, they neither do nor can, till (seeking and finding) they are endowed with the strength of divine sentiment from on high-till the full knowledge that they are themselves at once indefensibly guilty and divinely forgiven, generates the full virtue of forgiveness in their minds. If the whites will forgive the blacks for having been socially degraded and for having resented their degradation, the blacks will undoubtedly forgive the whites for having been their degraders. Emancipation of slaves is an act of beneficence: but, like other beneficent acts, it is one which is too often erroneously estimated, and marred in the performance. Human benefactors of their fellows delight to account their benefactions, and to have them regarded by the world as noble gratuitous effusions of superior worth and liberality, rather than as humble and truly generous recognitions of duty and equality. "Let the brother of low degree," says the precept of inspired wisdom, "rejoice in that he is exalted: but the rich in that he is made low"-that he has descended from the false elevation of a brief, unjust, and delusive superiority. No man can feel a warmer or more friendly interest than I do in North America, where already great things have been done for human welfare and dignity, and where the mighty problem of Republicanism is in process of solution for the benefit and glory or the detriment and humiliation of the whole human race. But my regard cannot separate her virtue from her happiness and renown and highly as I prize her favour, I would (if the choice must be made) far rather deserve than obtain it. Her solid and lasting fame is ill consulted by those flattering friends who deny or palliate the faults which sully its lustre and impair or pervert its just impression on mankind. Were the dark and horrible blot of negro slavery obliterated from the surface of her great commonwealth, the brightness of its social aspect would awaken universal admiration, and shed a cheering and ameliorating ray through the whole expanse of human nature and society. The rise and early progress of every one of her primitive States is a noble monument of fortitude and virtue. Her war of Independence casts the historic glories of Greece, of Rome, of Switzerland, and of Holland into the shade. The G scene disclosed by the Philadelphia Convention that assembled in 1788 for the establishment of the American Constitution,-maugre the acts and omissions respecting slavery and the slave-trade, this scene, I say, in its main transactions and their general issue, does in dignity, wisdom, and worth, transcend the highest conception suggested by the political annals of any other people in ancient or in modern times. A clear, just, and lively portraiture of it, I think, might be sufficient (beneficially) to revolutionize the world, to awaken throughout the whole range of humanity a force of sentiment and opinion incompatible with the subsistence of unjust and tyrannical authority. But, while the national flag that was unfurled with such happy promise, floats in expanded pride and glory along the stream of time,— a black cloud, like the monitory slave in the car of the victorious Roman, o'ercasts while it pursues the triumph, and taints while it partakes the gale. POSTSCRIPT. a THE foregoing sheets were ready for the press, when four remarkable Works reached my hands1st, a Pamphlet recently published at Paris entitled "Essai sur les moyens d'extirper les prejugés des Blancs contre la couleur des Africains et des sangmelés," by Mr. Linstant, an accomplished negro inhabitant of Haiti, to which a prize has been awarded by a French philanthropic society, circumstance which, if it had been prophesied to the French people sixty years ago, they would have scouted as a baseless and extravagant vision.-2d, A Pamphlet published at London in 1840, bearing the strange and melancholy title of "The American Churches, the Bulwarks of American Slavery," and though anonymous, yet sufficiently known to be the production of James Gillespie Birney, a zealous American Abolitionist who once possessed negro slaves, but emancipated them all,like Zaccheus, who no sooner beheld the Redeemer G 2 |