desire to promote any measures calculated to improve the condition, elevate the minds, or purify the morals of the labouring poor. It is not therefore from indifference to the Negroes, but from a sincere interest in them; not from a love of slavery, but from an anxious wish to do what may really mitigate its horrors, that we make the following observations, the result of thought and research into the condition. of the labouring classes in all parts and ages of the world.

Slavery,--though unquestionably an evil, if it is perpetuated in circumstances, and in a population, susceptible of free habits, and capable of maintaining itself, is not only not an evil, but a positive advantage, and a necessary step in the progress of improvement in the early ages of mankind. This truth is demonstrated by the universality of slavery in rude nations all over the world, and the extremely slow steps by which the process of emancipation has gone forward in all the nations which now enjoy the blessings of general freedom. Survey the globe in ancient and modern times, you will find slavery co-existent with the human race, and continuing, though with mitigated features, through all the glories of ancient civilisation. The ages of Pericles and Antonine, of Cicero and Socrates, of Fabricius and Justinian, were equally distinguished by the universality of this distinction among the labouring classes. Twenty thousand freemen in Athens gave law to 400,000 slaves; and in the decline of the Roman empire, when it was proposed in the senate that slaves should wear a particular dress, it was rejected, lest, as Tacitus observes, it should be discovered how few the freemen were in comparison.

For a

The case was the same in the modern world. thousand years, slavery was universal in Europe, and it still obtains in many of the most extensive of its monarchies. Wherever the Mahommedan rule is established, slavery is to be found; it exists from one end of Africa to another, and is to be seen, with a few exceptions, over the vast extent and amidst the countless millions of the Asiatic continent. It is the influence of Christianity alone, the long establishment of civilisation, and the permanent subjugation of human injustice by the sway of religion, which has enabled mankind to get quit of this painful distinction; and it will be found, upon examination, that it never can remain absent

for any length of time, but in those states whose governments have charity enough to impose, and power sufficient to collect, a general poor-rate for relief of the indigent. It is in vain to say, that an institution so universal, so unvarying, and so permanent, is an unmitigated evil, the abolition of which would confer nothing but blessings upon mankind. Nothing exists generally, or for ages, but what is indispensable in the stage of society in which it is to be found, and is founded in the universal and unvarying circumstances of our condition.

Protection from violence, maintenance in sickness and old age, and secure employment for their offspring, are the substantial and immense advantages which more than compensate to men, in rude or civilised ages, all the hardships of slavery. If they are free-that is to say, if they do not belong to some powerful lord—they are liable to be massacred, plundered, and ruined with impunity; no one will take care of them; no one will maintain them; no one will relieve them, unless he has some lasting interest in their labour; and this lasting interest can only be obtained by their becoming his property. Slavery is the return made by the labourer for the advantages of permanent protection, maintenance, and care, which can never be obtained but in the highest stages of civilisation on any other conditions. Accordingly, it is observed by Sismondi,* that when the barbarians settled in the Roman empire, the great proportion of the free inhabitants, after a few years, voluntarily submitted themselves as slaves to some powerful lord; having found by dear-bought experience that, when in the unprotected condition of freemen, they could not, in those unruly times, reckon for a day either on their lives, their property, or their employment.

When we say that slavery is such a dreadful evil, we always figure to ourselves what slavery would be, established in a civilised country such as this, where law is established, indigence relieved, violence restrained, and industry protected. That is the source of the greatest errors in political thought. We imagine, without being aware of it, that the condition of the people in other states is similar to what it is in our own; and, this being done, the subsequent conclu

* Hist. de France, vol. i. 432, 439.

sions follow as a matter of course. But if we would accurately view the condition of the unappropriated poor in the early stages of civilisation, their condition here is to be taken not as a portrait, but as a contrast. Destitute of protection, exposed to rapine, murder, and violence, unable to provide a fund for the maintenance of old age, without a market for their industry, or an employer to furnish them with bread, they must speedily perish, or give some powerful chieftain a lasting interest in their preservation, by giving him a right of property in their labour. So universally has this necessity been felt that, in all ages and parts of the world, slavery, or the right of property in the labouring poor, has been established when society existed in its earlier stages.

Nor is it only in the early ages of civilisation that the necessity of this appropriation of the poor exists. Few are aware of the advanced state of government which is required, and the descent of civilisation in the ranks of society, before it can be dispensed with, or the poor left to shift for themselves amidst the injustice and the storms of the world. The Greeks and the Romans, the Persians and the Egyptians, never reached it. No state in modern Europe attained that stage till within these three hundred years. A thousand years of a beneficent religion; the long establishment of law and regular government; the progressive subjugation for centuries of the passions by a powerful and impartial central government, were necessary to enable the poor to derive any benefit whatever from their emancipation. It is not sufficient to have civilisation merely existing in a high degree in the upper classes of society; to have luxury, ornament, and opulence among the rich, or the warlike virtues resplendent amidst the chivalrous nobility: it is indispensable to have beneath them a numerous, opulent, and industrious middle class of society; a body of men in whom prosperity has nourished sentiments of independence, and centuries of security developed habits of industry, and ages of regular justice extinguished savage passion, and long-established artificial wants vanquished the indolence of savage life. Till this obtain, it is in vain to attempt the emancipation of the labouring classes: the overthrow of the authority of their lords would only annihilate industry, unfetter passion, exterminate improvement.

The horrors of the revolt of the Jacquerie in France, the hunting down of the seigneurs like wild beasts, the conflagration of their chateaus, the formation of all the serfs into bands of robbers, the total cessation of every species of industry, the resolution of society into its pristine chaos; a famine of unexampled severity, a pestilence which cut off one-third of the population of that and every other country which it reached, signalised the growth of the democratic spirit among the serfs of that great kingdom, and wrote in characters of fire the perils of precipitate emancipation.* Dangers not less dreadful awaited this country from the same insane spirit; the insurrection of Wat Tyler in the time of Richard II. was begun in the true spirit of this frightful anarchy; and had it not been crushed by the efforts of the feudal chieftains, the glories of British civilisation would have been drowned, perhaps for ever, in the waves of servile insurrection.

Many estimable persons are influenced by the consideration, that the Christian religion has proclaimed the universal equality of mankind; and thence they conclude, that it is not only wrong but impious to retain any portion of our subjects in a state of servitude, or withhold our efforts from the general emancipation of the species. There never was a more mistaken idea. It springs from a benevolent intention, but it is fitted to devastate society by its consequences. Considerations of religion lead to a directly opposite conclusion; they support, in a manner the most convincing, the arguments for which we contend.

If immediate emancipation from slavery, or its abolition in the early stages of civilisation, had been intended by Providence, or deemed consistent with human welfare in those ages, why was it not communicated to mankind at the Tower of Babel, or amidst the thunders of Mount Sinai? Why was a religion, which declared the equality of mankind in the sight of Heaven, and was fitted ultimately to effect the universal abolition of private slavery by influencing the human heart, reserved for the highest era of ancient civilisation, the age of Cicero and Augustus? Why was it cradled, not on the frontiers of civilisation, not amidst barbarous tribes, but in the centre of refinement; SISMONDI, Hist. de France, Vol. ix. 231-269.

midway between Egyptian learning and Grecian taste; on the confines of Persian wealth and Roman civilisation? Why, when it did come, was it made no part of that religion to emancipate the slaves by any general or sweeping measure, but that change was left to be slowly accomplished during centuries, by the silent influence of religion on individual hearts? Why, but because its Author knew that the precepts it enjoined, the changes in society it would induce, were suited not to an infant but to an advanced stage of civilisation; and that the equality it declared could obtain only amidst the safeguards from violence, which an ancient and highly-cultivated state of refinement afforded.

Why, if immediate and unconditional emancipation from servitude was intended to follow the Christian religion, did it subsist unmitigated for fifteen hundred years after the introduction of that faith? Because the mere promulgation of its precepts is by no means sufficient to warrant such change; because it is necessary not only that churches should be built, and bishops established, and nobles baptised, but that savage indolence should be overcome, and barbaric violence restrained, and rude depravity coerced; because it is necessary, before such a change is introduced, not only that the seeds of religion should be scattered over the surface, but that its roots should have struck and its fruits be shed through the whole strata of society; because civil freedom and habits of order, and the desire of civilisation, must be long established before it can be either practicable or beneficial; and because these effects require the growth of many hundred years.

Let, then, the friends of speedy Negro emancipation follow the steps of Providence in the past extrication of the human race from the restraints of servitude; let them bring up the West India Negroes to the level of ancient civilisation at the period when the gospel was promulgated; let them cause the rude inhabitants to rival the age of Pericles and Cicero, of Ptolemy and Darius, of Cæsar and Alexander, and then they have brought the human mind to that stage when the Author of nature deemed it practicable to relax the fetters of private slavery. Or let them imitate the workings of the same unseen hand in modern times; let them establish, under the sun of the tropics,