compelled to levy a forced loan as an advance and in account of the taxes to be raised in the next session. Whatever was the skill with which the king and his advisers attempted to mask their proceedings, it was signally frustrated; the public mind was roused, a decided national stand was made, and the forced loan system was annihilated by the famous bill of rights. In the forms adopted with regard to the grants of taxes, which rendered it incumbent that the bill for the latter should originate with the House of Commons, and from them be sent for approval or rejection by the lords and the crown, we again trace the accidental influence predominating above the designs of legislators. A grievous complaint tendered by the commons against the resolution of the lords, which went to the issue of a writ on their own authority, in concert with the king, merely notifying to the commons the simple circumstance, induced Henry IV. (in the ninth year of his reign) to declare the necessity of the lords and commons' reciprocal consultation and decision in the matter of the requisite supplies of which the state might be in need, and that no report should be made on the subject to the crown until it had received the sanction of both houses. Thus may be perceived the cause of what gradually led to exclusive right of the commons to originate and order the taxes-a right which succeeding ages have proved to have been maintained more by the steady perseverance of the commons than the consent of the lords or the good will of the crown. This question was subsequently agitated at York, in the great assembly of peers convoked by Charles I. at that place. Clarendon tells us that one of the members of that class advanced the point, whether the lords alone were not entitled to grant taxes to the king; a question which, we think, would scarcely have been raised, had the right of the commons been so firmly established and so formally acknowledged. Even as late as the year 1671, a further attempt was made by the peers to stem or turn aside that right. In the bill of taxes which was sent to the peers from the lower house, the former proposed to annex some additional clauses, but the latter annulled them by a formal protest; from which period no further attempts were made to dispute with them this, in fact, arrogated right. It was not until a very late period that the operations of parliament extended themselves to other branches of administration. Soon after the restoration, the need of money in which Charles II. was incessantly involved completed the dependence of the crown on the parliament, at least as far as taxes were concerned. The right of wardship and purveyance, which had been treated for with James I. and £.200,000 offered as an equivalent, and refused by that prince, were now purchased for the annual sum of £.100,000; and an act of parliament of the year 1670 empowered the crown to dispose of the free-farm rents, the last remnant of the old independent revenues of the kings of England. About the same time fell into disuse the form of subsidies: the last are of 1663. Government, however, continued still to receive the necessary supplies for all the departments of administration in general, without parliament ever venturing to specify the amount of the sum to be appropriated to each division separately. The evils arising from such a summary and vague proceeding are sufficiently characterized in the reign of the Stuarts, who appropriated the sums they received to any purposes rather than those for which the money had been raised. The finishing stroke to a complete and consolidated form of government under the jealous eye of parliament, was at length given by the revolution of 1688. From that period a certain sum was granted specifically for the civil list, and the rest of the revenue of the state was appropriated to the expenditure of the several departments of administration, with direct and precise orders for their use; also account to be rendered of the expenditure to both houses of parliament the next session. The best effect to the ameliorations and reforms of the following century, was finally given in 1689, when it was resolved that the grant of taxes should be renewed every year, by the introduction of a new bill each time; a circumstance that rendered all the officers of the administration, receiving salaries, completely dependent on the representatives of the nation. Thus, by the historical glance we have made, we find the English constitution was for many centuries, and even down to comparatively modern times, nothing more than a sort of confused monarchy, destitute of any thing like fixed rules or regulations. For many centuries the king, barons, clergy, and the people, were ever in discord, clashing against and yielding to one another by turns, according to the force of circumstances. Indeed, the earlier history of England is only a register of revolutions, in which every thing was either in rise or decay, the victorious party always destroying the work of the vanquished. Only in feeble and formless outlines do we see the first sketches of the noble creations of subsequent ages; and in nearly all of them the proof is palpable that chance and accident, even in the profoundest inventions of legislators and politicians, have had more share than the light of human sagacity. VOL. X., NO. XXIX. 31 238 SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE. BY JAMES ROSCOE. "Yet, yet, degraded men! th' expected day, Which breaks your bitter cup, is far away.”—CAMPBELL. SLAVERY may be defined as the condition of an human being who is the property of another. The existence of such a relation between man and man as this definition implies, is perfectly indefensible on any ground of humanity or justice; it is utterly and equally opposed to the original dictates of conscience and reason, and to every article in the code of christian morality. For natural and revealed religion agreeing in all things, differ not in this, that they proclaim personal liberty the right of all men, to be forfeited alone on the commission of crime and for the protection of society. The earliest inspired record of our race informs us that dominion was given by the Creator to man over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. Man has thus by divine revelation, no less than from the clear intimations of Nature (each a magnificent commentary on the other), an undoubted right to exercise power over the inferior animals; and full authority is conferred upon him over their liberties and lives, so far as necessity dictates and humanity allows. For his own use they were formed, and he has a consequent right to appropriate them to his own use accordingly. But that man should create for himself a property in any of his fellow creatures, is not only neither enjoined or permitted by, but is utterly opposed to every standard of morality acknowledged by christians. Even were a man so degenerate as willingly to become the bondsman of another, it would be but an aggravation of the crime, arising from the wilful insult offered by the slave, through himself, to the Deity, in thus degrading his Maker's image to a level with the brutes. That of nations is another, and the remaining, law to be considered (more particularly with regard to the manner in which the African slave trade is supplied), and is, indeed, but the spirit of the natural and revealed laws; consisting in the application of the principles enjoined by them for regulating transactions between individuals, to the intercourse between nations. The key-stone of this system of jurisprudence is stated by good authority to be the golden maxim of doing unto others as we would be done by; and slavery involving a manifest and gross violation of this maxim, is, consequently, no less opposed to the law of nations than to the dictates of reason and religion. Slavery thus evidently being the consequence of an unauthorized exertion of power, and the right of personal liberty being undoubtedly the original privilege of all men, be it ours now to consider whether any tenable grounds exist, on which may be based a denial of this common right to the African—our immediate object of regard. The only justification urged for such an exclusion is an alleged inferiority, consisting in colour of his skin and the weakness of his mental faculties. The former of these allegations of inferiority may seriously and safely be said to resolve itself into what may vulgarly, yet with propriety, be termed a mere matter of taste: at least, that the accident of colour alone does not necessarily involve inferiority, every unprejudiced mind will, I think, acknowledge. But, admitting now that the intellectual faculties of the negro have as yet proved only by exceptions their susceptibility of that degree of cultivation common among ourselves, I yet utterly deny that such inferiority precludes him, in the remotest degree, from participating in the right of personal freedom-a right universal as humanity! The folly of an affirmative assertion becomes evident if we imagine the principle it would countenance to be carried out and acted upon generally, thus extending it to all members of our community. A slight deficiency of intellect would then undoubtedly be a sufficient justification for depriving any of its members of their rights as men and citizens ! The principle which appears so absurdly unjust when applied to the case of individuals in this manner, without restriction, when transferred as unrestrictedly to the case of nations, can admit of no palliation; for, as before stated, the transactions of individuals and nations are subject to the same general rules. How, then, can be justified the practice of making expeditions into the territories of nations, although remarkable for inferiority of intellect, seizing their unoffending inhabitants, and with aggravating circumstances of cruelty conveying them to a distant land, and dooming them for the rest of their lives to a state of hopeless slavery? I do not consider it expedient to dwell at any further length on this portion of our subject relative to the inferiority of the African race; for, thanks be to heaven! the day is gone by in which it was necessary to counteract opinions such as were once promulgated by some who attempted to reason down the negroes to a level with the ourang outangs, or rather the ourangs up to, or above, the negroes." I think there can now be very few, I earnestly hope there may be none, who will not be disposed to admit the possession by the African of every attribute pertaining to an accountable being; his possession of an intellect sufficient for his guidance through this world-of a soul capable of immortal happiness in the next. He is indeed a negro, but he is also a MAN; and he is not the less a man by being a negro ! "A Briton knows, or, if he knows it not, The Scriptures placed within his reach, he ought, Alike important to their Maker's view; That none are free from blemish since the fall, And love divine has paid one price for all."-COWPER. To prove the illegality of a practice is rarely sufficient alone to raise public indignation against the crime it involves; and the present object being to enlist the sympathies of the public in the cause of the still injured African, would have led the writer to devote a few pages to some account of the cruelties inseparable from the abominable traffic in human flesh which African slavery generates, had not the recent publication of Mr. Fowell Buxton rendered such an account quite superfluous. His interesting publication has fully informed the public of the present dreadful condition of the slave trade, and proves that “the number (of negroes) annually landed in Cuba, Brazil, &c., is 150,000, being more than the whole draft upon Africa, including the countries where it had ceased, when the slave trade controversy began. Twice as many human beings are now its victims as when Wilberforce and Clarkson entered upon their noble task; and each individual of this increased number, in addition to the horrors which were endured in former times, has to suffer from being cribbed up in a narrow space on board a vessel, where accommodation is sacrificed to speed." It certainly is sufficiently disheartening at first to learn that all our efforts have so utterly failed in extirpating the slave trade, and that, on the contrary, the multitude of human beings annually ravished from their native land has so greatly increased since we ourselves abandoned the hateful traffic. We may, indeed, congratulate ourselves that the enormous guilt of countenancing a trade in human flesh and blood can no longer be |