which I have written; and remember me to Dr. Deane, whose remark I often think of, and am consoled with, that "the Deity will not punish us in another world for not having understood in this what cannot be understood."

ART. IV.-TREATMENT OF SLAVERY AT THE NORTH.*

HERE was an honest man burning his life out by ardent indignation against the wrongs of the slave. The book leaves rather a sad and disagreeable impression on the mind. We sympathize with its noble enthusiasm for justice, but are too cold-blooded to enjoy the impatience and peevishness wrung from that soul of fire by the disappointments of its enthusiasm. Mr. Rogers, as is often the case with the passionately upright, was also excessively and morbidly downright. Evils which God and man have borne with for centuries he could not tolerate, no, not for an hour; and when he struggled manfully to remove them,-which was well, -but could not succeed at once, he showed himself as good a hater of his opposers as Dr. Johnson could have desired,and this we think was not well, in spite of the great English moralist." But far be it from us to join with the enemies of the cause he had at heart in drawing any inference against that cause from his imperfections. On the contrary, we charge upon slavery the wreck of this gifted and generous man's native gentleness and cheerful affectionateness to all the human family. His happiness was one more victim among the holocausts of that omnivorous Moloch. The Rev. John Pierpont, in a biographical preface, has delineated with touching affection the many excellences of his friend, passing with a light hand over his faults, and abundantly illustrating his singularly unselfish heart through all the ravages of lifelong disease and varied misfortune upon his

* A Collection from the Newspaper Writings of Nathaniel Peabody Rogers. Concord: J. R. French. 1847. 12mo. pp. 380.

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Nathaniel P. Rogers.

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temper. We have seldom read biography written in so sweet and mellowed a spirit. Rough and thorny experience in the same unpopular cause, which too often exacerbated the subject of the memoir, seems to have had a softening and maturing effect upon the judgment and temperament of its writer. The rest of the volume consists of selections from Mr. Rogers's editorial and other contributions to the newspaper press. They are written with a sharp and fiery pen, moving at almost the speed of a magnetic telegraph. As a newspaper writer," his biographer thinks him "unequalled by any living man"; and a glance at a page detects the strength, clearness, and quickness of his intellect, his ready humor, original fancy, and rich suggestiveness. He was an extempore man in all he did, with pen, tongue, hands, or feet; disdaining consistency, and therefore changing his opinions often rashly and precipitately, as we think, and making fatal mistakes. On religion he rushed into all extremes. The first article in this collection rates the "Christian Examiner " for being destitute of vital religion; but before we reach the end of the book, he has almost come to the conclusion that love to God is hatred to man. But his religion went as one of his many precious sacrifices before what he deemed the proslavery spirit of the community and the communion in which he lived. The Church had proved recreant to the cause of humanity, he thought, and therefore he hesitated not, but renounced it and all its works, and thenceforth seemed to consider it his chief mission to vituperate church and state, and all who upheld them. His talent for invective was not exceeded in the Antislavery ranks, and that is saying something; but we believe his purity of motive was equally preeminent. Few of those who professed opposition to slavery were acknowledged by him as coming up to the mark. The great mass of us lay weltering, according to his judgment, in the defilements and abominations of proslavery hard-heartedness. It would be well to let the admonitions of his spirited volume stimulate all who read it to the inquiry, how we really stand in that matter.

While we differ from Mr. Rogers in regard to many of his conclusions, and the temper with which they are pressed, we would say as earnestly as he, If not antislavery, let us at least not be proslavery. This is the lowest position that should satisfy the conscience of Northern Christians. If the North has nothing to do with the South about the

matter, hands off; but let our hands never be raised in defence of the institution that is peculiarly Southern. A most interesting question for us therefore is, What is it to be proslavery? Who is proslavery? The epithet is affixed with wanton facility by some where we should least expect to find it applied. It is almost amusing to see the undiscriminating readiness with which it is thrown about. Some of the best lovers of liberty, and some who have made sacrifices to it for which their maligners have had no opportunity, to say no more, have been so branded. One would suppose it was the perverse and impolitic object, to make out as few friends of freedom as possible, and thus to repel and discourage them. It is proslavery here, and proslavery there, and proslavery everywhere; reminding us somewhat of the man described by an uncomplimentary title, who scattereth firebrands, arrows, and death in sport. Or it reminds us, rather, of the facility with which any decent citizen became "suspect" under the reign of terror in France, when to be suspect was sure guilt and death. So now, if a cautious man is not entirely prepared for the dissolution of the Union, he is "suspect" of all proslavery abominations. If a clergyman is not heard to broach the subject in the pulpit on some day when the accuser happens to drop into the church, he is set down as proslavery. He may have uttered other and more expensive protests, he may have preached on the subject the Sunday before or the forenoon of that same day; but that goes for nothing, if he is not all the time dropping line upon line and precept upon precept touching one and the same sin. We know of one clergyman who preached about it every Sunday for a month, and before it was mentioned in any other Unitarian pulpit of this city; and he was published as an apologizer for slavery. More recently we read a letter in an antislavery paper from one of these sharp-scented hunters after proslavery guilt, who had attended once at an Orthodox church, because he had heard that the distinguished pastor had announced himself an Abolitionist, and he wished to test the truth of the report. On the strength of this one attendance, when some other topic in the vast and varied field of Christian duty had come up, he wrote the letter to assure the antislavery public that the rumor was a mistake, and that this eminent laborer in every form of philanthropy was undeserving of his fame, because neither through prayer, hymn, nor sermon did the word slave or slavery occur.

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Mischiefs of Extravagance.

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We object to this, among other reasons, because it is itself (if we may be allowed for once to join the suspectful) of proslavery tendency. It is adapted to aid and comfort the enemy." The design may be unexceptionable, and for this reason we have been reluctant to say a word against the well-meaning laborers in a righteous cause who have to toil against opposers quite numerous and strong enough already. Far be it from us to join in the contemporary, and only contemporary, clamor against these men: The clamorers may be Stentors, but they are not Calchases. They are not endowed with the gift of prophecy. They live for the day and read newspapers, unaware that history is of to-morrow, and unlike to-day's newspaper in its tone, that to-morrow will reconsider to-day's short-sighted judgments, and wonder indignantly at the doings of many who now wonder at themselves admiringly. Honor to the voices that are raised for the oppressed, though they are not always very musical voices! Honor to all who, with whatever mistakes, remember the forgotten and attend to the neglected!

But even for the sake of the cause they have so close at heart it is most important to inquire more discriminatingly than they are apt to, who are really the proslavery men? What is it that constitutes a proslavery man? A man may be proslavery in one aspect, who is not so in another. His actions may seem so, while his design is not; as his design may be so, while the effect of his actions accidentally is not. It is only he who wishes to be so that should be stigmatized by the epithet. The motive is the man. We are "justified by faith." He who "esteemeth any thing to be unclean, to him it is unclean." This disregard of motives, this confounding in indiscriminate reprobation all who happen, whether they intend it or not, and whether they know it or not, to uphold some injustice, is too much like that tearing up of the wheat with the tares so censured by our Master.

The most ultra abolitionists should not object to this distinction, when they consider, that, if the effect rather than the intention of our actions is to incur the brand of proslavery, they themselves incur it sometimes. How often are they told that by their extravagance they are riveting the fetters of the slave! And though this is not true generally, for hundreds have obtained freedom since the abolition movement for one who did before, yet it is undeniable that in particular cases slavery has been made a heavier burden VOL. XLIV. - 4TH S. VOL. IX. NO. I.

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through this excitement. Ever and anon, a slave, striving to roll off the stone that rested on his race, to apply here the beautiful metaphor of Mrs. Butler's sonnet to Pius the Ninth,

has had it fall back on him and crush him. Is therefore Mr. Garrison a proslavery man, because his powerful appeals have made that slave's heart burn within him at the view of his bruised and bleeding brothers? Is Henry C. Wright proslavery? Is Stephen Foster a bigoted foe to abolition? And yet, if they went South, and were allowed to live long enough to hear it, they might be told, as we have been, that such persons were the main stay and chief hope of the advocates for the perpetuity of slavery. They would be hung, there is little doubt of that, but it would be for what they wished to do. Their wishes, then, make them antislavery. And is not a wish as essential on the one side as on the other?

It

Again, the use of the products of slave labor appears to some persons a proslavery act. Its effect is to enrich and encourage the slave-driver. It braids the field-whip. sounds the daybreak horn. It prolongs the task till the sun is low. It brings crowds to the auction-block, on which the slave stands to be felt and handled like a brute, and show his teeth and tongue, and sometimes to strip himself for closer investigation of his capabilities. If there was no market for the fruits of his enforced toils, instead of being chained and driven in a "drove" to that block, he would be marched to the emigrant ship, or to the registration-office for record of his emancipation. And yet some who, as they think, go farthest for abolition, do not deem it worth while to abstain from slave productions. The inconvenience would be great, and the effect small, they think, and the pecuniary cost of such a rule of abstinence would cramp their means for more expedient antislavery measures. Therefore we do not stigmatize them as a "brotherhood of thieves." They may stir their tea to the saccharine satisfaction of the sweetest tooth among them, and no one moves a resolution that the body of abolitionists, like the body of the clergy, with a few honorable exceptions, are robbers, murderers, adulterers, pirates," etc., and, by way of softening amendment, adds the words, "or something worse." So, too, every act of kindness or respect to slaveholders is pronounced proslavery in its influence. Every common civility, every expression of tolerance, every neglect of an op