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free, is an evil; but wherever the climate does not permit him to work, it is not an evil, if properly regulated. It is better that countries thus situated should be cultivated, producing, as they do, so much that adds to the wealth of the world. Without negro labor, they must be a wilderness, and in them, negro labor implies slavery. In the northern slave States, slavery is gradually disappearing. With them, emancipation is possible and desirable, and must happen in the progress of wealth and agricultural improvement; for skilful, intelligent labor always drives inferior labor out of the market. Thus, natural causes are withdrawing slavery from the North to the South; from the region of wheat and grass, where the white man can work, to the region of cotton and rice and sugar, where he cannot work; from the farm to the plantation. There it must remain, or the land must be abandoned; and there, if under humane and just direction, it may be rightfully maintained, to the advantage of the country and of civilization.

Thence, too, it seems likely to extend. Vast prospects are opening to the South, vague and dim now, but becoming daily more definite in the nearing future. Regions of undeveloped resources, and inexhaustible fertility, lie around the Gulf of Mexico, our Mediterranean, awaiting the hour when the valor, enterprise, and knowledge of a superior race shall call forth their stores of boundless wealth, to give fresh springs to industry, wider scope to commerce, new materials for the arts, immense increase to the accommodations, luxuries, and refinements of civilized man. All this may be won, and, in those climates, can only be won by the labor of the negro, guided and directed by Saxon intelligence. But it must be rightfully won. It is a rich harvest; but it cannot be reaped by tyrants and oppressors. For such, no harvests ripen. By the eternal law of God, failure, disaster, decay, and misery are forever linked to cruelty and injustice. This truth shines with divine light on every page of human history. Wellbeing comes only of well-doing; and if, in the reckless greed of gain, the callous calculations of avarice, the Anglo-American, in that day when he shall lead the negro to these new fields of labor and wealth, should disregard the welfare of his

humble companion; if he care only for himself and his gold, and, carrying with him the arts and the cultivated mind of civilization, forget the moral virtues that can alone sustain him, the negro will be terribly revenged. Out of his wrongs will come the punishment of his oppressors. Fear will dog their steps; the hatred, enmity, and opposition of the world will meet them in all their enterprises; their energy of character, their intellectual power, will wither and decay in the foul atmosphere of selfishness and crime, and they will themselves share the degradation they impose;

"Thus even-handed justice

Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips."

They may succeed for a time; they may grow cotton and rice and sugar, and make money; but, like all ill-gotten wealth, it will prove; not a blessing, but a curse. The punishment will be sure to come at last. As Carlyle says:

"Foolish men imagine, that, because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice but an accidental one here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed, some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death. In the centre of the whirlwind, verily, now, as in the oldest days, dwells and speaks a God. The great Soul of the world is just."

The fate of St. Domingo, of Cuba, and of Jamaica is full of instruction and warning.

One word more. It is said, perhaps truly, that the existence of this Union depends on the execution of the fugitive slave law of 1850. That law is not liked at the North. By some, it is openly and vehemently denounced and opposed; by many, it is reluctantly acquiesced in, as a hateful necessity. There are very many whom this law places in a most painful conflict between their reverence for right, and their love and duty to their country. They appreciate fully all the evils of disunion; they also appreciate fully all the shame and misery of living under a law that shocks their sentiments of humanity and justice, and of giving to it their aid and support; for "whoso consents to wrong doeth wrong." A law which is thus revolting to the conscience of a large portion of the people, and

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the best portion too, those who have a conscience to be revolted, is a narrow foundation on which to build the existence and safety of a great nation;-a narrow and weak foundation, which must constantly need the props of self-interest and party management, the underpinning of "compromises," to keep it up. Self-interest, party drill and tactics, commercial relations, railroads and telegraphs are not the stuff out of which can be made the bands which unite man to man as a brother. When alienated feeling has been produced by moral disapprobation, there is already disunion. The invisible central cord is broken, and its outside wrappings of paper constitutions, commercial ties and party ties, will show what they are made of at the first strain. The main timbers of the house are rotten, and the next tempest will prostratę it to the ground. The people of the North, not the mob, or the worshippers of mammon in the cities, but the people who dwell on the peaceful farms, who plough the hills and valleys, and reap their harvests, who are daily accustomed to the sight and the companionship of free, hopeful, happy, and law-guarded industry around them, are no admirers of slavery, because they consider it another name for cruelty, oppression, and tyranny. When they see a man escaped from such a state, their first impulse is to assist and protect him, not to send him back. When they see him seized by the officers of the law; when they are told that he is a piece of property; that they must help to send him back, or give their support and encouragement to those who do; that this law must be executed on pain of disunion, on pain of national death, - there arises at once a hard and doubtful struggle in their minds, between their sense of duty as citizens and their feelings as men; between their love of country and their love of humanity and justice; between the claims of the law and all the influences and teachings of their habits and lives.

If, however, they could look on the runaway, not as a man unjustly claimed as a chattel, but as a person who has rights secured to him by law, as a servant who had fled from his master, as one who really owed" service and labor” in return for support and protection, and who had wrongfully and foolishly left a position well suited to his mental and moral con

dition, thousands of honest and well-meaning men, who now oppose, or refuse their countenance and aid to, the fugitive slave law, would with joy and alacrity give it their support. The abolitionists would dwindle to an insignificant faction; fanaticism would lose its chief source of excitement, and the demagogues a topic for agitation. The subject of slavery would no longer be regarded as a weapon in party contests, as a means of influence and power in the ever-recurring strife of President-making, to which our politics seem now to have degenerated. It would thus be left, where alone it can be placed with safety, in the hands of the Southern people, who would be responsible to the country and to the world for its just and wise management. According to that management will be towards them the feeling of the North, either coldness and aversion, or the sympathy, respect, and love due to worthy countrymen and brothers; and these are bonds stronger and more enduring than cotton and corn, than iron rails or iron wires, to preserve the Union, and to bind us together, not only as one nation, but as one people.

ART. VIII. — 1. England under the Reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, with the Contemporary History of Europe, illustrated in a Series of Original Letters, with a Historical Introduction and Notes. By PATRICK FRASER TYTLER. London. 1839. 2 vols. 8vo.

2. Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest, with Anecdotes of their Courts; now first published from Official Records and other Authentic Documents. By AGNES STRICKLAND. Vols. V. and VI. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard. 1850.

THE authoress of the latter of these works, by her lively yet learned treatment of a subject on which both her talents and her sex entitle her to be heard, has aided in disabusing the popular mind of a traditional prejudice which many historians

of great reputation had done their utmost to confirm. No impartial reader of her Lives of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor can believe that the elder sister deserved to have the ugly epithet of "Bloody” prefixed to her name, or that the younger, great as was her popularity, and glorious as was her reign, possessed any of those endearing qualities which the fond appellation of "Good Queen Bess" would seem to imply. But the fair writer's zeal has led her somewhat too far. She has done much to disseminate an error precisely opposite to that which she has labored to remove. If her representations should be accepted in their fullest extent, the objectionable epithets will continue to be used. The application alone will be reversed. The world will, hereafter, speak of" Good Queen Mary" and "Bloody Bess."

In all the sovereigns of the house of Tudor, the natural texture of the character, so to speak, was the same. The fibres were coarse and strong. In the women, we observe no beautiful or delicate trait, no grace of thought, no glow of feeling; in the men, there was no generosity, no magnanimity, no chivalrous sense of honor. In all, there was the same stubbornness of will, the same coldness of heart. It was a hard, unyielding nature, not reckless when impelled by passion, not gentle or amiable when controlled by principle. We abhor the insensibility with which it trampled on its victims, but admire the steadiness of purpose by which it triumphed over all obstacles. While the vacillation and want of energy inherent in the Stuarts, from the first prince to the last pretender in the line, twice lost them a crown, of which few wished to deprive them, and twice prevented them from regaining it when fortune was propitious; the constancy and resoluteness that so eminently characterized the Tudors enabled the founder of the dynasty to establish himself upon a throne to which he had not the shadow of a rightful claim, and his successors to maintain themselves in more than one crisis of extraordinary peril. With shades of difference in its manifestation, strength of will predominated in the character of every member of this family. It was displayed alike in the quiet and wary, but unwavering, persistence of Henry VII.; in the selfish, sensual obstinacy of Henry VIII.; in the conscien

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