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state, care must be taken not to disturb the pubmind.

gen is, of course, blessed with the presence of a
royal family; and this family, Die Herrschaf-lic
ten,' that is, 'The Masters,' as they are called
- have always been in the habit of dining at
three o'clock, and in old times they kept a pub-
lic table that is, a table to which every sub-
ject might come, not to eat, of course, but to see
the princes eat, and to make sure that they did
it just like other men. It seems, however, that
in the winter the royal family found this hour of
three rather too late for dinner, for they wished
always to dine by daylight. A great question
now arose - how this was to be managed? A
raw young fellow, who had no experience in
court affairs, thought it was very simple, and
said, Can't they dine at two? But there
was almost a scream at this revolutionary sug-
gestion. 'What's to become of us?' said the
courtiers; what's to become of the world, if
the ancient order of things is to be overturned
in this way?'

"Then an old Hofrath arose, and taking a pinch of snuff, and waving his silk pocket handkerchief like a banner, said, 'It has long appeared to me, that the pretensions of mere learned men to fix the time is nothing but a piece of presumption. We alone, your highness, have a right to settle what is the time of day.'

"This speech was received with great applause, and orders were immediately given that all the church clocks should be put an hour forward; but it was to be done quite quietly, in the middle of the night, when everybody was asleep; for above all things, in a well-regulated

"No one knew anything of the great progress that had been made during the night; but in the morning there was terrible confusion in Little Residenzlingen, for all the maid-servants, it seemed, lay a-bed too long, and all the boys were too late at school, and all the parlor clocks and watches were wrong, and had to be set. Next winter, however, government was wiser than to run the risk of altering the time by an hour all at once; they did it by a few minutes at a time, so that it was scarcely noticed; if a stranger came to the capital, his watch was, of course, found to be different from those of Little Residenzlingen, but he got so unmercifully laughed at that he was glad to alter it — just as some people do their consciences, when they differ from those of the rest of the world. Things went on very smoothly for some years; but now came a terrible change in the position of affairs at Little Residenzlingen. A railroad was made to it; and lo! it appeared that for years together all the clocks had been wrong. The ministers set on foot negotiations with all the neighboring courts, to get them to agree to their reckoning of time, and even tried to organize a secret conspiracy among the sextons, who had the care of the clocks; but it was all of no use; and so the ministry of Residenzlingen resigned, for they declared it was all over with them if the people should once come to know really what o'clock it was.”- Westminster Review,

THE CONQUERORS OF THE NEW WORLD AND THEIR BONDSMEN.

The Conquerors of the New World and their | himself, and add a most instructive and valuaBondsmen: being a Narrative of the Prin- ble book to the historical library. Considercipal Events which led to Negro Slavery ing the absorbing interest which attaches to in the West Indies and America. By the the subject, the amplitude of the existing maAuthor of "Friends in Council," The terials for such a work, and its great impor Claims of Labour," &c. Vol. I. Pick-tance as a contribution to the History of Sociering. ety, it is matter of some wonder that no one has as yet devoted himself to the task. Here is a theme fit for the greatest mind to grapple with; a subject grand and vast as Gibbon's,

A real history of slavery is a desideratum in literature. The writer who shall give a philosophical view of the progress of this strange social institution-showing its nature and the extent to which it was found prevailing at the dawn of the historic ages,tracing its history through the great states of antiquity, in all the conditions of society and in the midst of changing ethics and religious creeds, the influence of civilization upon it, the causes of its decline, and, the certainty of its extinction, will make a reputation for

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The task would be not less difficult to do than noble when done. Industry in working data, skill in narration, constructive power in making out one story from a multitude of widelyscattered fragments, are only a few of the more ordinary qualities that such a work would demand in the person who should attempt it. He must have, also, a large and eclectic mind, free from the thraldom of periodic modes of thought, and above the region of merely conventional morals; a reason cool and judicial, wedded to no intolerant system, but quick to find and ready to acknowledge the elements of good necessarily inhering in all long-lived institutions.

Whether the author before us possesses these qualities, we are not about to discuss. The frank avowals of his Preface afford some hints by which the reader may judge. He has not attempted the large thesis of which we have sketched the outline; even when completed his work will be only a monographthe history of one aspect and epoch of slavery, the slavery dealt in at Exeter Hall. The book, at best, will be only a fragment; and a fragment which can be ill understood without a knowledge of the precedents of the thing described. As a part of the history of society the history of slavery has a sort of unity-like the history of a science, of art, or of law - which is necessary to its thorough comprehension. Without tracing the past of an institution, without knowing the course of its evolution, it is profitless to study its present. How unintelligible, for example, would be the annals of astronomy in America written without any reference to the prior astronomical studies of Egypt, Greece, England, Germany, and so forth! Yet this is precisely what is here done in the matter of slavery. Now, this is no more indigenous to the American soil than that: nay, the institution has had a wider diffusion and a larger share in the history of other lands- ancient and middle-age than the science. To confine the view of it to one country or to one age, is to commit a great historical anachronism. It is to put a special fact in the place of a general law, to invest one age with the responsibility of an evil which belongs to all ages, and to cast the odium of a foul practice upon a nation which inherited, but did not create it. This is unfair and unphilosophical. To write of Negro slavery as if the negroes were the first servile race, and the New World the first land loaded with the curse of helotry, is as mischievous as it is false, for it disturbs the faith of the unlearned in the progressive improvement of mankind. History cannot be cut up into squares and fragments. For ourselves, we

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prefer no information to mis-information: and, in its present form, we think this account of the conquerors of the New World and their bondsmen quite as likely to do harm as good.

We are aware that the writer may say, his plan did not include the history which we demand; his object being only to show how the Black race came into America. Perhaps, though we might have better approved of a design somewhat less locally limited, we have no right to object to this. The author follows his own idea: we must suppose that he presents his subject in what he considers to be a complete and attractive form. But we have a right to complain of, and to warn the reader against, the one-sidedness with which this is done. In his Dedication the author says that before studying the subject specially for this work, he had no knowledge of what may be supposed to be the wellknown facts of the case.' This assurance we can readily accept—as well from the implied as from the asserted evidence. But we might not unreasonably have expected that the man who proposed to chronicle the events of an institution as old as history and universal as the ancient world, would have dipped into the pages of a few of the great historians and jurists of antiquity, and have told his readers out of them that slavery did exist in the world, before the discoveries of lower Africa and America, in various shapes, and that those important discoveries only gave a new direction to a traffic already well known.

When every allowance which the severest regard to historic truth demands, is made, a vast weight of opprobrium still rests upon Spain and Spaniards: - they cannot afford to have any injustice done to them. Our author begins his account by a long, and, as it appears to us, superfluous detail of the course of Portuguese discovery on the western coast of Africa, marking the periods when the Negro first came, in his own country, into contact with Europeans, and the first dawnings of the slave trade. A few lines would have conveyed all the information on this subject really to the point; the remainder of the space might have been much more profitably employed in showing how the idea of slavery was inwoven in the texture of the Iberian mind. It was so; and the trade in negroes grew up in Spain with no violence whatever to the sentiment of the people. In the palmiest days of Hellenic civilization and Roman dominion, this institution prevailed universally. Lycurgus sanctioned, the decemvirs recognized, its existence. Christianity did not forbid it. Mohammed found it prevailing, and

did not oppose it. An oriental can barely yet conceive of a society without it. It was a social condition, as well as a political order. The highest races and the supremest intellects were sometimes involved in it. Greeks were slaves in Greece, and Italians in Italy. Reverses in wars gave armies — nations, even — unto bondage. No man was exempt from such a fate, and it was calmly submitted to because the practice was universal. Had any of the Southern races Hellenes, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabians - permanently maintained dominion over the world, slavery would perhaps have been its perpetual heirdom.

Its death-blow came from the North. The hardy warriors from the German forests and Scandinavian seas, brought into the struggles of an expiring civilization new elements of domestic life, which cut the root of all servile conditions, and gradually, where their sway was most complete, emancipated the helot class. This process, however, even in the countries most thickly settled by the Northern races, was not rapid. It passed through various stages, from absolute slavery, through serfdom and villeinage, up to the dignity of freedom. In the South of Europe, the remains of the old slave system remained much longer; and while as yet all was chaotic and confused, the Arab conquerors- an Oriental race, to whom slavery was an historical institution-swept along the African coasts and fixed themselves in the European peninsula. To the long conflicts of the Moors and Spaniards for the possession of the country, may, perhaps, be ascribed the long continuance of slavery in Western Europe. The rival races made slaves of each other; each warrior, as he went forth to battle, looked to that condition as one of his probable contingencies, and regarded it with no greater dread than any other of the accidents of war. It was the same with every other people in conflict with the Ottoman-but, of course, would be least cared for by those born to its contemplation and constantly in face of it, like the Spaniards. To them it had few horrors, either to inflict or to endure.

The Moors, holding empire both in Spain and Africa, carried on a large and lucrative traffic in negroes long before any European state had the means of entering it. They exchanged their Barbary horses for negroes, at the town of Hoden, beyond cape Blancogetting from ten to eighteen for each horse,and carried them to the markets of Turin, Sicily, and Seville, where they brought vast profits; it being a point of pride with the wealthy Christians to have their households crowded with the sable skins. After the Moors

were driven out of Spain, the sentiment and habitual feeling which sanctioned the trade in man, the property in human blood, began to give way: but the eradication of a national idea domesticated for many centuries, and never entirely foreign, was, of course, very gradual; and, in the mean time, the New World was discovered, and the Spaniards carried to it and established in the empire which they founded there the political and domestic institutions to which they had been accustomed at home. However unjust and how disastrous soever these institutions proved, we must not, as we have said, charge the sin and guilt of them home to the men of that day. They perpetuated and without a proper knowledge of its guilt-the inheritance which their fathers had left them. So much blame attaches to them for the use which they made of their mastery the extermination of the natives by fire and sword, by starvation and compelled labor, by wanton waste and deadly cruelty, by the torch, the matchlock, and the bloodhound, that we need not heap upon them the sins of others.

That the institution of slavery was not repugnant to the moral sense, the religious feeling, or the intelligence of that age, our author furnishes abundant proofs. The greatest and most illustrious personages sanctioned itColumbus, Ferdinand of Arragon, and Prince Henry of Portugal. In an analysis of one of the Discoverer's despatches to Ferdinand and Isabella from Hispaniola we read.

"Columbus now touches upon a matter which intimately concerns our subject. He desires Antonio de Torres to inform their Highnesses that he has sent home some Indians from the Cannibal islands as slaves, to be taught Castilian, and to serve afterwards as interpreters, so that the in support of this proceeding are weighty. He work of conversion may go on. His arguments people away from Cannibalism, and to have speaks of the good that it will be to take these them baptized, that so they will gain their souls, as he expresses it. Then, too, with regard to the other Indians, he says, we shall have great credit from them seeing that we can capture and make slaves of these Cannibals of whom they, Such arguments must be allowed to have much the peaceable Indians, entertain so great a fear. force in them; and it may be questioned whether many of those persons who are, in these days, the strongest opponents of slavery, would then have had that perception of the impending danger of it which Los Reyes appear to have entertained, from their answer to this part of the be done; but let the Admiral see whether it document. This is very well, and so it must could not be managed there,' (i. e. in the Cannibal islands) 'that they should be brought to our sacred Catholic Faith, and the same thing with the Indians of those islands where he is.' The

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Admiral's despatch in the next paragraph goes much further: he boldly suggests that for the advantage of the souls of these Cannibal Indians, the more of them that could be taken the better; and that considering what quantities of live stock and other things were necessary for the maintenance of the Colony, a certain number of caravels should be sent each year with these necessary things, and the cargoes be paid for in slaves taken from amongst the Cannibals. He touches again on the good that will be done to the Cannibals themselves; alludes to the Customs duties that their Highnesses may levy upon them; and concludes by desiring Antonio de Torres to send, or bring, an answer, because the preparations here' (for capturing these cannibals) ' may be made with more confidence, if the scheme seem good to their highnesses.' A more distinct proposition for the establishment of a slave trade was never made, though we must do Columbus the justice to believe that his motives were right in his own eyes."

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Columbus had been brought up on the African coasts, and had there and elsewhere been accustomed to slavery; his motives, however, for he was an eminently wise and just man for his age, were to convert these slaves to Christianity and to civilization. How far man has a right to do this- to enslave the body under the pretence of saving the soul of his fellow-creature is a point which we are not to discuss here. Rightly or wrongly the world has made up its mind- and against the doctrine of the Discoverer. That Columbus proceeded on, for him, sufficing reasons, we need not doubtthough his argument may be unsound. We do not visit him with penal censures because his social ideas were not those of the nineteenth century, any more than we would denounce Plato for the difference between our ethics and his. Great men belong only to their ages, and are, like events, historical.

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The connection of Columbus with the establishment of slavery in America is strongly brought out by our author, -rather too strongly we think; but there can be no doubt as to his participation in the matter. At first, only prisoners taken in war were enslaved custom to which the conquerors had long been inured. But when more laborers were wanting, pretexts for hostilities were easily found, and the inhabitants of whole districts were cleared off and sent to work the mines, where they perished yearly by thousands. This was in the time of Ovando's government, after the disgrace and recall of Columbus. Events in Italy also hastened the ruin of the poor aborigines.

"The troublous and perplexed times in Spain from Isabella's death to Ferdinand's return from

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now

Naples to take the Regency, and for some time after, must have made many suitors for royal favor whom it were hard to deny. Ferdinand was not fond of giving, and with the great and costly affairs he was engaged in, seldom had much to give. Indians, however, were a sort of money. The courtiers asked for repartimentos of Indians some purposing to go themselves to Hispaniola and push their fortunes there, and others intending merely to farm their Indians out, as absentee proprietors. Ferdinand did not resist these applications; and though the Governor Ovando, probably aware of the mischief, and alive to the inconvenience, remonstrated as much as he dared, especially against absentee proprietors, there were many cases in which he must have been obliged to give way. The mania for gold finding was now probably at its height; and the sacrifice of Indian life proportionately great."

Indians soon becoming scarce in the island, it became necessary to import laborers from elsewhere. As yet the idea of transferring the sable servitors of the Spanish grandees to the mines of Hispaniola had not occurred: but workers must be had or the mines would be profitless,—and this was the way in which they were obtained.—

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"Ferdinand was told that the Lucayan islands good thing to bring them to Hispaniola that were full of Indians; that it would be a very they might enjoy the preaching and political customs which the Indians in Hispaniola enjoyed. Besides, they might assist in getting gold, and the King be much served.' The King gave a license. The first Spaniards who went to entrap these poor Lucayans did it in a way that brings to mind our English proverb 'seething a kid in its mother's milk' for they told these simple people that they had come from the heaven of their ancestors, where these ancestors and all whom the Indians had loved in life were now drinking in the delights of heavenly ease: and these good Spaniards would take the Lucayans in their ships to join their much-loved ancestors, and dearer ones than anhow the more simple amongst them, lone women cestors who had gone thither. We may fancy and those who felt this life to be somewhat dreary, crowded round the ships which were to take them to the regions of the blest. I picture to myself some sad Indian, not without his doubts of these Spanish inducements, but willing to take the chance of regaining the loved past, and saying like King Arthur to his friend Sir Bedivere upon the shore,

I am going a long way
With these thou seest
if indeed I go -
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)
To the island valley of Avillion;
Where falls nor rain, or hail, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns
And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.

Alfred Tennyson. Morte d'Arthur,' vol. 2, p. 15. This hideous pretence of the Spaniards did its work; but there were other devices, not men

tioned to us, which were afterwards adopted; | and the end was, that in five years forty thousand of these deluded Lucayans were carried to Hispaniola. Most men in the course of their lives have rude awakenments which may enable them to form some notion of what it was to come down from the hope of immediate paradise to working as a slave in a mine. Some lived on in patient despair; others of fiercer nature, refusing sustenance, and flying to dark caves and unfrequented places, poured forth their lives, and we may hope were now, indeed, with the blest. Others of more force and practical energy, 'peradventure the wisest,' as Peter Martyr says, made escape to the northerly parts of Hispaniola, and there with arms outstretched' towards their country, lived at least to drink in the breezes from their native lands. Those lands were now paradise to them."

This was one of the last acts of the monk Ovando's government. He gave place to Diego Columbus, son of the Discoverer. But things did not improve much in consequence of the change. We have noticed that the chief motive which Columbus had in taking possession of the natives, was to convert them this motive was also avowed by the King and Queen. Of the way in which converts were sought to be made we have an instance in one of the proclamations of Ojeda, which, after setting forth that the Pope had given to the Kings of Castile and Leon, &c, sovereign power and dominion over the New World, to christianize and to rule it, goes on to say —

"Wherefore I entreat and require you,' says Ojeda, or any other privateering discoverer, 'that after taking due time to consider this, you acknowledge the church' as sovereign lady of the world and the Pope in her name, and His

Majesty, in his place as Lord of these isles and continent, and receive these religious men. If you do, his Majesty will greet you with all love and affection, and leave you your wives and children free, and will give you many privileges and exemptions. But if you do not, by the help of God I will enter with power into your land and will subdue you, and will take your wives and children and make slaves of them, and sell them as such, and take all your goods and do you all the mischief I can, as to vassals that do not obey and will not receive their Lord."

It would be difficult to match the terms

says,

of this proclamation, even out of the most intolerant reigns of Mohammedan sovereigns: after this, we do not marvel to find Spanish soldiers gravely hanging thirteen natives, as Las Casas "in honor and reverence of Christ our Lord, and his twelve Apostles. As yet, the history before us is brought down only to the promulgation of the laws of Burgos. Another volume is expected to complete the narrative. Should a second edition be called for, we would counsel its author yet to give some account of the older slavery which existed in Europe, and particularly in the Peninsula, before the discovery either of the New World or of Negroland. Such an addition is necessary to the completeness of his plan-to the unity and consecutiveness of history-to the fair apportionment of praise and blame-and to the clear understanding of the question. The portion of the subject taste, and correct feeling. The book is not really treated of is touched with care, good and we would unlikely to become popular, therefore desire to have it as complete as possible. — Athenæum.

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THE FOOTPRINTS OF GENIUS.

In the busy haunts of crowded cities it is often refreshing to the mind to withdraw its thoughts from the actual and present, and to recall the memories of those men of genius whose lives have been connected with the particular locality. The hurry of business, and the perpetual flow of the stream of human life, are there, however, a powerful interruption to such contemplations. In the quietude of rural scenery we trace more uninterruptedly and agreeably the footprints of genius, live again in old memories, and realize and luxuriate in the past. This was strikingly experienced by a little party who, on a calm autumn

day last year, set out from the quiet old town of Abingdon, for a ramble of a few miles into the adjacent country.

Neither Abingdon nor its neighborhood boasts any marvellous beauties; indeed, the professed connoisseur (not lover-that is a different character) of the picturesque would pass the locality altogether as uninteresting. Abingdon is a genuine old town, with many genuine old defects-such as narrow streets ill-drained, and inconvenient houses ill-ventilated. However wise in their generation the monks of the rich abbey that gave its name to the town might have been in selecting for

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