vigorously almost as ever, and under circumstances of even greater cruelty, I cannot join our author in her rejoicing.

The truth is, all the efforts of France and England to suppress the trade have only aggravated it. Their intervention was prompted, I am willing to believe, by a good motive, but it has been a signal and notorious failure, from the beginning.

As far back as 1826, in the ninth report of the American Colonization Society, (p. 23,) I find the following: "The extent and atrocity of the slave-trade remains, it is believed, undiminished, and in more than one instance during the year, has the flag of our country been seen to wave over vessels employed beyond all doubt in this traffic."

In the following year, Mr. Clay, in a speech before the society at its annual meeting, uses this language: "Notwithstanding the vigilance of the powers now engaged to suppress the slave-trade, I have received information that in a single year, in the single island of Cuba, slaves equal in amount to one half of the above number of 52,000, have been illicitly introduced."

How it was with the other great slave-market on this side of the Atlantic, we learn from Mr. Walsh's notices of Brazil in 1828-9: "It should appear, then," says he, "that notwithstanding the benevolent and persevering exertions. of England, this horrid traffic in human flesh is nearly as extensively carried on as ever, and under circumstances, perhaps, of a more revolting character." He then adds, that from June, 1819, to July, 1828, only 13,281 Africans were recaptured from the slavers by the British cruisers, being an average of less than 1500 annually, while the annual shipments, during that period, were 100,000, and from 15 to 20 per cent of these were lost or thrown overboard, to elude those cruisers; being a far greater annual sacrifice of life than had ever before accompanied the traffic.

In 1833 came West-India Emancipation, giving a fresh stimulus to the trade in Cuba, to make up for the falling off in the other West-India islands; large numbers being imported into it annually, notwithstanding the Spanish treaty, and the importation winked at, it is said, by the local authorities, for a consideration.

This trade is still going on. Even while I write, the Post brings information of the arrival of the Baltic, with Liverpool dates to the 17th inst., (November,) and the very first paragraph of English intelligence is the following:

"In the House of Lords, on the 16th, Lord Brougham presented a petition from Jamaica, praying for more active measures on the part of Government for the suppression of the slave trade. Lord Palmerston moved to demand a return of the slaves imported to Cuba and Brazil. Mr. Hume complained of the infraction of the slave treaty by Spain and Portugal."

And yet we are told, in the face of all this, that the world has outlived the slave-trade. If so, then it has outlived slavery also, and "Uncle Tom" is a work of supererogation. (See Appendix, C.)

But enough of the preface: let us come to the body of the work.

NOTE 4.-THE SLAVE CODE;-WHAT SLAVERY IS.

This is not the first subject in the order of the narrative, but it is the first in logical order, in the body of the work, and so I take it up first. Here is our author's view of what slavery is: "This cursed business, accursed of God and man, what is it? Strip it of all its ornament, run it down to the root and nucleus of the whole, and what is it? Why, because my brother Quashy is ignorant and weak, and I am intelligent and strong, because I know how, and can do

it,—therefore, I may steal all he has, keep it, and give him only such and so much as suits my fancy. Whatever is too hard, too dirty, too disagreeable for me, I may set Quashy to doing. Because I don't like work, Quashy shall work. Because the sun burns me, Quashy shall stay in the sun Quashy shall earn the money, and I will spend it. Quashy shall lie down in every puddle, that I may walk over dryshod. Quashy shall do my will, and not his, all the days of his mortal life, and have such chance of getting to heaven, at last, as I find convenient. This I take to be about what slavery is. I defy anybody on earth to read our slave-code, as it stands in our law-books, and make anything else of it." (Vol. ii. p. 11.)

Well, if this be so, then I have two observations to make; first, that slavery is not confined to the Southern States, but is coextensive with Christendom, not to say Heathendom; and second, that if this be "about what slavery is, then it is not so very bad, after all.

No doubt it strikes at the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence; but then, it is because that paragraph strikes at common sense, and common observavation; unless, indeed, it be considered a rhetorical flourish; in either of which cases, it is sadly out of place, the American Revolution needing no such false philosophy to justify it. Men are not born free and equal in any practical sense of the terms; neither have they any such inalienable rights as are here asserted. No man has an inalienable right to life, or to liberty, (for men may, and often do, forfeit them both,) or even to the pursuit of happiness, except so far as it is involved in the pursuit of virtue. No. Man's inalienable rights, (for inalienable rights he has,) are of an altogether different class; as, for instance: Every man has an inalienable right to love the Lord, his God, with all his heart, and soul, and mind, and strength, and his

neighbour as himself. Every man has an inalienable right to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with his God. Every man has an inalienable right to keep himself unspotted from the world. Every man has an inalienable right to love his enemies, to bless them that curse him, to do good to them that hate him, and to pray for them that despitefully use him and persecute him. These, and such as these, are man's inalienable rights, and if every man would assert them, by acting upon them, the world would be a great deal better than it is. These, and such as these, I say, are man's inalienable rights; if there is any inalienable right of another class, it is that so ably set forth by Carlyle,-the right of every man to be compelled to do what he is fit for, if he won't do it voluntarily; and this brings us back to Quashy, who is doing here in the United States, just what Quashy is fit forQuashy himself being judge. But on this point, Aunt Chloe shall speak for us:

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'Yer mind dat ar great chicken pie I made when we guv de dinner to General Knox? I and Missis, we come pretty near quarreling about dat ar crust. What does get into ladies sometimes, I don't know; but, sometimes, when a body has de heaviest kind o' 'sponsibility on 'em, as ye may say, and is all kinder 'seris' and taken up, dey takes dat ar time to be hangin' round and kinder interferin'! Now, Missis, she wanted me to do dis way, and she wanted me to do dat way; and, finally, I got kinder sarcy, and, says I, "Now, Misses, do jist look at dem beautiful white hands o' yourn, with long fingers, and all a sparkling with rings, like my white lilies when de dew's on 'em; and look at my great black stumpin hands. Now, don't ye think dat de Lord must have meant me to make de pie-crust, and you to stay in de parlour? Dar! I was jist so sarcy, Mas'r George." (Vol. i. p. 45.) And if Auguste St. Clare, in the passage before us, had been "jist so" sensible, he would have given us a little less rhetoric, and a good deal more logic.

Aunt Chloe evidently understands Quashy's capabilities. She sees clearly his inferiority to his white brother, and she speaks out what she sees. Witness her observation on "Mas'r George," (vol. ii. p. 41): "How easy white folks al'us does things!" And again, (vol. ii. p. 58): "I wouldn't hear to Missis givin' lessons nor nothin'. Mas'r's quite right in dat ar; 'twouldn't do, no ways. I hope none our family ever be brought to dat ar, while I's got hands." Witness also the way she addresses her own sable offspring, (vol. i. p. 42): "Here you Mose and Pete! get out de way, you niggers !"-a mode of address, not, by any means, peculiar to her; for we have it again, with an additional epithet, in Andy's address to black Sam, (vol. i. p. 71): "So she would,' said Andy; 'but can't ye see through a ladder, ye black nigger?" And any one who is familiar with the negroes at the South, knows that their standing compellation of disparagement is, "you nigger!" and, when they would be particularly disparaging, "you black nigger;" showing thereby their own sense of their inferiority to the whites, and of their adaptedness to the work that is put upon them. And in this I have no doubt that they are in the right of it.

Certain it is that there is a good deal of "hard," and dirty," and "disagreeable" work to be done, and that somebody must do it; and certain it is, too, that there is a good deal of work that is neither hard, nor dirty, nor disagreeable, and that somebody must do it. Now it so happens that the work that is hard, and dirty, and disagreeable, requires little skill and less brains; and it so happens, too, (unfortunately for Quashy,) that the work which is neither hard, nor dirty, nor disagreeable, requires a modicum of both.

Now, then, comes the question: Shall Quashy be set, or rather, set himself, to do the work which requires brains, and for which he has no brains, and Quashy's master have