We have just issued "The Child's Pictorial Scripture Question Book" designed for the smaller children in Sabbath School. By Minnie S. Davis.

It contains twelve beautiful and simple lessons on the following subjects,— God our Father; The Saviour; the Birth of Jesus; The Life of Jesus; Jesus and Little Children; Prayer; The Golden Rule; The Bible; Forgiveness; The Resurrection; The Sabbath; The Young Christian. It is illustrated with fifteen fine engravings, and is pronounced by all who have seen or used it to be just what has long been wanted. One entire edition has been sold in four weeks, and the demand is still increasing. Sent by Mail, postage prepaid, 15 Copies for $1.00.

JUST PUBLISHED.

The Universalist Register for 1863.

This annual Register and Companion contains the usual amount of interesting reading, a complete Almanac for the year, full Statistics of our Order throughout the United States and British Provinces, and a full Obituary Record of all Preachers who have died during the past year. A small edition only has been published, and all who desire copies should order at once.

This Register will do a good work for our cause wherever it is circulated. We will send them by mail, post-paid, at the following rates,

All orders should be sent directly to the Publishers,

10 cents.

$1.00

3.50

6.50

TOMPKINS & CO. 25 Cornhill, Boston.

THE ALTAR.

A New Sunday School Service Book.

BY REV. J. G. BARTHOLOMEW.

By the publication of this Book, we propose to meet a want of our Order,to furnish a practical work at a low price.

The superiority of this Book will consist in the variety and number of the Services, the absence of superfluous Hymns, and the consequent low price as which it can be sold. It will contain Twenty-Six regular Services, with Ten Special Services; and a number of Services for the Closing of the School. Every Hymn in the Book will be set to Music. The price will not exceed $2.00 per dozen, thus placing it within the reach of all Schools, and making it the cheapest and best Book of the kind in our Order.

We shall issue it November 1.

New Edition of a Valuable Work.

The undersigned will publish a New Edition of

THE NAMES AND TITLES OF JESUS. BY CHARLES SPEAR.

12 mo. With engravings. Price $1.00.

It is over sixteen years since the 16th edition of this valuable work was printed, and much inquiry has been made for it since. We have arranged with the Author for the publication of this New Edition.

It is one of the ablest Works in our Order, and has been so pronounced by many of our best critics. Dr. Ballou speaks of it as follows:

"It is with much pleasure that I recommend the Names and Titles of Christ' to the religious community. The reader will find it a work carefully prepared, and well written, containing much scriptural instruction, and breathing the purest air of piety throughout. The influence it will exert on the affections, as well as the understanding, cannot fail of being salutary." We will send it by mail, post-paid, on receipt of $1.00.

TOMPKINS & CO., Publishers, 25 Cornhill, Boston

ART. XXV.

Who will be Harmed by Emancipation?

The Ordeal of Free Labor in the British West Indies. By William G. Sewell. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1861.

The Condition of the Free Colored People of the United States. Christian Examiner, Art. VII. March, 1859.

The Record of an Obscure Man. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1862.

THE Slaveholder's Rebellion has accomplished this good if no other-it has torn off the mask from American slavery and shown it to be the wicked and despicable thing it really is. No longer will any sane man in the Northern States, dare apologise for a system of oppression so inherently vile and barbarous. More than this. This war has brought the whole subject before the American mind for discussion. Many, not much inclined to favor anti-slavery views in times past, are now saying, "Slavery has pillaged our treasury, stolen our forts and involved us in one of the most destructive wars the world ever saw, why not strike, cripple and extirpate it, so that no root of it shall be left to poison the ground?" This question with a more and more burning heat, as the war goes on, is leaping from the hearts of our people.

This war is hastening the overthrow of slavery. Already it is wiped away from the District of Columbia, and hereafter our Congress is to have a clean place to sit in, and pure air to breathe. The day predicted with so much sarcasm by John Randolph, when masters would run away from their slaves, has arrived in a part of slavedom. Then too, the President by putting his hand to the most important document which ever emanated from the Executive Department, has adopted the word "emancipation" into his vocabulary, and thus inaugurated before the world, a new national policy. Henceforward, let the immediate result of this war be as it may, inroads are to be made upon slavery. It is not to be strengthened nor let alone, but weakened. We begin to feel that there is now a golden. VOL. XIX. 28

opportunity to cleanse our escutcheon of the stain that has so long blotted it. "The stone which the builders rejected," and for want of which the whole national edifice has been weak, we now have strength to lift into its place. It is the opinion of some, we may say, of nearly all the ablest statesmen of the day, that the President, under the war power, has the right to emancipate every slave in the land. It is true, many interpose Constitutional objections. There are many, it is to be regretted, who have a constitutional love for slavery. These affirm there is no special clause in the Constitution by which slavery can be abolished. In reply, it is enough to say the spirit of the Constitution warrants it. When the prosperity of the nation demanded that the outlet of the Mississippi should be in our possession, Louisiana was purchased, and the Constitution was stretched to cover the act. So, when the growing internal commerce of the country called for the improvement of rivers and harbors, the Constitution was again stretched to meet the exigencies of the times. It is not pretended there is any specific clause authorizing such steps. Now, the President recommends the taking of public monies to purchase the slaves of Delaware and Kentucky. Where is the provision in the Constitution to sanction such an act? It is not there. But in the duty which that instrument imposes upon the government to establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity and promote the general welfare, a sufficient sanction is found for such a beneficent proposition. So, if the President shall take that greater and sublimer step for which the popular heart of the nation is now beating, he would be sustained by the same clause. It is utter and complete fatuity to bind our hands by the letter of the Constitution, and see the frame work of our national fabric torn down, without lifting a finger to prevent it. Our Constitution, and so the wisest statesmen of our country have interpreted it, is what the popular will and the imperative wants of the nation demand. It is not a fixed and rigid series of articles and sections, but a vital thing capable of expansion to suit new emergencies that may arise.

Perhaps nearly all will agree that in times of peace, neither the President nor the Congress has power to free a single slave in any State. But we are now in war, and this changes both executive powers and duties. In time of

peace no person can be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law. But to-day, any person whose liberty is thought to endanger public safety, may be taken without "due process of law," and lodged in Fort Warren, and kept there during the pleasure of the President. In time of peace, each State may make her own laws, provided they do not conflict with the Constitution, and elect her own Governor. Now, in time of war, Andrew Johnson is sent to Tennessee by the President, with the power to trample the statutes of Tennessee under his feet. He can act a military despot. What is the President's justification? Public good demands it. The law of nations recognizes the plea as valid. Military necessity has struck down the writ of habeas corpus, the trial by jury and State sovereignty, shall it spare alone the right to hold slaves? Is that more sacred

than these?

But some plead considerations of a social and industrial nature to stay the hand of the President. They have a feeling that somehow or other, great harm will come from. immediate emancipation. A single consideration ought to dispel such a fear. Is there not a divinely implanted love of freedom in every human heart? And further, is it not naturally just that every human being should enjoy his liberty? Certainly. Then, what justice and the Godgiven instincts of the soul demand, must be good and safe. Moreover, we think the history of our country for the last twenty-five years, ought to make us pretty certain, that it will be vastly easier to take care of four million emancipated slaves than three hundred and fifty thousand slaveholders.

But if the above fear is still pressed, let the inquiry be instituted, Who will be harmed by emancipation?

The government will not be. Southern leaders, it is true, assert that slavery is "the corner stone of a Republic. But William Pinckney, of Maryland, said in 1789, "to me, nothing for which I have not the evidence of my senses, is more clear, than that the system of human bondage will one day destroy that reverence for liberty which is the vital principle of a Republic." To-day that prophecy is fulfilled before our eyes. Slavery has destroyed in the South, that love for liberty upon which our Republic was established. Surely, then, the government will suffer no injury by banishing this element of discord and danger.

Will the abolition of slavery harm the slave-holders? Not morally. Jefferson, who had ample opportunities for observation, said:

"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it. . . The

parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, .. and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it, with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances." 1

A knowledge of what slave-holders have recently done, shows us that the prodigies are rare among them. The warning of Lamartine was, "if you put one end of a rope around your fellow's neck, you fasten the other end around your own." How fearfully true is this. A community that persistently drags down one third of its population to slavery, plundering them of their wages, insulting their aspiration for liberty and intelligence, denying them the right of marriage and the delight of home, has dragged itself down lower than words can measure. Accordingly we find the South full of vice and crime. Life is insecure; violence, force and the most loathsome forms of licentiousness there bear sway. And if we need further testimony to the debasing and barbarising influence of slavery, witness the treatment our sick, wounded and dead soldiers have received at the hands of southern soldiers. What has made them such? Slavery. It cannot then do any harm to the slave-holder in a moral point of view, to sever the relations that exist between him and his slave.

Not only would the abolition of slavery remove from the slave-holder one great danger that constantly threatens his moral safety, but it would lift the whole community on to a higher plane of intelligence.

The free States had in 1850 about twice as many whites as the slave States, while they had nearly five times as many pupils in public schools, six times as many volumes in public libraries, and five times as many newspapers which were as much superior in quality as they were greater in number. Why is this? There is but one answer to be

1 Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, p. 169.