year, Mr. WEBSTER took the Chair in place of Mr. CLAY, whose health did not permit his acting. Mr. WEBSTER showed that he well understood the character and purposes of the Society, and made it the occasion of fortifying his bid for Southern votes for the Presidency. He gravely pronounced the exportation of the blacks from this country a physical and moral necessity for their preservation. He declared it to be an impossibility, decreed by the instinctive repulsions of a thousand years, that the black and white race can live together in a state of equality. The separation of the two races, so as to enable each to pursue its own ends and institutions and functions alone, was, in his judgment, absolutely required by considerations of humanity to a race of men who can never be treated, among the whites of the continent, as other than an inferior class, and must consequently inevitably decay! This language on the part of the Whig Prime Minister was fitly rewarded by raising him to the Presidency of the Colonization Society, though it failed of securing him that of the United States. At the Annual Meeting of 1853, not long since past, the successor of Mr. WEBSTER in the Premiership, the Hon. EDWARD EVERETT, made the Great Speech of the occasion. He urged the Scheme in view of its great benefits to Africa. He did not dwell on the inferiority of the colored race; but, on the contrary, proved by arguments and examples the high degree of cultivation and ability to which they could attain and which he wished to be transferred to Africa for her regeneration. We cannot but think that such men were quite as much needed in America. We apprehend the tone and character of Mr. EVERETT'S Speech will not commend it to the approbation of the Slaveholders, for whose benefit the Society exists.

The American people enjoy the general reputation of being sharpsighted and unscrupulous, wherever they think their interests are concerned. No nation gets such a general reputation for lubricity and cunning as the Universal Yankee one possesses, without deserving it in some good degree. What all the world says, of nations as well as of individuals, is very apt to be at least half true, if not a little more. Like other cunning people, to be sure, we are apt to over-reach ourselves and to be overtaken in our own craftiness. But to our own notions of our interests we seldom, if ever, fail to be true. And none the less selfishly so when we think it best to wrap up our designs in the folds of saintseeming hypocrisy. The devil is never so dangerous as when disguised as an angel of light, and a Yankee is ever most mischievous when he assumes the garb of humanity and religion.

These disguises, indeed, are as material to our success in our business as is the knowledge of tongues to a merchant in the foreign trade. The concealment of our ideas being the chief end for which speech and action are employed, there is no time when an American needs to be looked after more closely than when he sets up goodness as the sign under which his business is to be carried on.

This trait of our national character was never more fully displayed than in the conception and growth of the Colonization Scheme. Assuming that Slavery is a good thing for us, as a means of creating wealth, its safety and comfort were proper things to be seen to. Of course, our premises were false; but that is nothing to the purpose. All we are considering is the fitness of our means to the ends we thought desirable to compass. The near presence of the Free Colored people was ever a source of annoyance and apprehension to the Slaveholders. It was not agreeable to the bulk of the Northern people, because it was a perpetual reminder to them of the injustice of their fathers. It was, therefore, a problem of no mean interest, the question of what should be done with them. They were increasing and multiplying. The apparent unavoidableness of the evil had made men accommodate themselves, in some degree, to it, and the condition of the Free Blacks throughout the country, but especially in the region of Slavery and its borders, was certainly better than it is now, before Colonization was. But a Demand is sure to create a Supply. If a thing is to be done, there will never be wanting inventors or contractors to contrive and to carry into effect the means of doing it. A method of disposing of the Free People of Color, and of such Slaves as rendered themselves formidable to their masters by their intelligence and ability, was desired and, obedient to the wish, the Colonization Society sprung into existence.

Like its Father, the Devil, it was a Liar from the beginning. It professed, at the North, to have for a main purpose the Abolition of Slavery, and it succeeded, in a good measure, in absorbing the sympathies and money of those who hated Slavery at the North, and especially in the Middle States. We have been assured that the reason why it never took an equal hold upon the New England mind was the prompt exposure of its true character, when its claims were first presented, by TIMOTHY PICKERING and other men who saw Slavery and its devices with eyes which had been watching both for more than fifty years, and whose old experience had attained

7

"To something of prophetic strain."

At the South, it made no secret of its true designs, and appealed to their obvious utility, as a safeguard of Slavery, to induce States and individuals to promote them. As soon as the Anti-Slavery Movement arose, it proved a true touchstone of this, too, as well as of most of the other opinions, practices, and characters it encountered. The natural and inevitable antagonism of Ideas, the one of which contemplated the Immediate Extinction of Slavery, and the other, its indefinite continuance and well-being was at once developed. They could not consist together. With many honest exceptions, who very fast took themselves out of the category of exceptions, as a general thing, the promoters of the Colonization Scheme proved themselves the bitterest and most unscrupulous enemies of the Colored Race and the sternest opposers of its deliverance. And so it hath remained unto this day. A Colonizationist and a Pro-Slavery man of the most venomous description may be taken for synonymous and convertible terms. Who are the main supporters of Colonization now? The framers and supporters of the Fugitive Slave Law, and its kindred abominations. HENRY CLAY has just yielded its Chair to DANIEL WEBSTER. The Slavecatchers, honorable and reverend, clerical and laic, are its foremost supporters and friends.

The instincts of the Colored People, however, were too true for all charming of politicians and priests to overcome, charmed they never so wisely. The most intelligent and well-instructed knew that sweet waters never flow from bitter fountains. They refused to seek for grapes of the thistles which their natural enemies had planted for them, or to hope for figs from the cruel thorns from which they had with such difficulty escaped. They knew that America was their Native Land as truly as of those that asked them to abandon it, and they clung to it as their birthright. The better portion of the Colored men saw that here was the place allotted to them, where they were to work out the problem of the fortunes of their Race. Their fathers had been brought here against their will, to be sure. And so, in some sort, were the ancestors of the White Races; for most of them would have staid at home, could they have had their own way in matters religious, political, or pecuniary, that they deemed paramount. But having been born upon the soil, it was their native soil, as truly as it was that of WASHINGTON, or JEFFERSON, or Jay, or HANCOCK. And it seemed to them as absurd to propose to remove them back again to the golden coast of Africa as it would to the descendants of those driven hither by the persecutions of JAMES or the dragooning of Louis to suggest

their deportation to England or to France.

And to the more ignorant

and unthinking, it appeared as plain as it could to any white philosopher, that bad as were the ills they had, it was better to make the best of them than" to fly to others that they knew not of."

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Thus, for one reason and another, the Colored people have withheld their own consent (the illusive condition, only meant to blind silly philanthropists) from the plan which would take them from the homes, however humble, they had won for themselves here and set them down on a strip of coast, with the Ocean on one side and savages made more barbarous by intercourse with white men on the other, and with a deadly atmosphere overhanging it. And so measures have been, from time to time, taken to win this preliminary consent. The Slave States

have made the contrivance of measures for the discomfort of their Free Colored population a part of their State-craft. And this devilish Machiavelism has extended itself to the Free States nearest to them. They are placed out of the pale of the law by the rejection of their oaths in Courts of Justice. They are denied the right of suffrage, entirely in some States, and with qualifications difficult to acquire in others. Into some they are refused admittance. The Common Law, the Constitution of the United States, the dictates of the simplest humanity are set at naught, so that these benighted heathens may be converted from the error of their ways. And in addition to all this, and more than it all, the social condition of this unfortunate class is everywhere made as uncomfortable and unhappy as possible for the same beneficent purpose, in part, of bringing them to a sense of what is good for them. At this time, the designs of the Slaveholders and their tools, at Washington and elsewhere, are becoming more and more apparent. The scheme for the establishment of National Steam vessels on that route, the cruel legislation proposed in Virginia, the many propositions for direct assistance to the Colonization Society, all show in which direction the popular, or rather the governmental, gale is setting. And it is just at this moment that a new ally of the oppressor appears. His heart is comforted and his hands strengthened from an unexpected quarter. At this critical juncture, Mr. JAMES G. BIRNEY, once a Slaveholder, then a Colonizationist, next an Abolitionist, after proceeding through the stages of New Organization and Third Partyism, at last returns to the point of Colonizationism! We trust he will not slide back the further step and become again a Slaveholder! And yet it would hardly be more strange, in view of all that he has known and said, than what he has done. It is many years since we entertained a high

opinion of the principles of Mr. BIRNEY. His humanity in freeing his Slaves we honored. His deliverance from the delusions of Colonization we respected. But his cooperation with the base and sectarian assaults which were made in 1839-40 upon the life of the Anti-Slavery Movement, and, especially, his participation in the spoliation of the American Anti-Slavery Society, have diminished the surprise we could feel at any new demonstration of his. The whole tone of his argument indicates a want of faith and of appreciation of the true signs of the times, a weakness of observation and of reasoning. He assumes what the Slaveholders and the enemies of the Colored Race have always assumed, that it cannot remain in this country. He virtually admits the perpetuity of Slavery. His arguments, if good at all, strike at the very root of all moral, or even political, agitation against Slavery. It is the philosophy of despair. Mr. BIRNEY is unlike the Bourbons, inasmuch as he has forgotten much, if he has learned nothing, during his experience of Fifteen Years.

The Abolitionists have no objection to Colonization, as one mode of improving the condition of any class of men. They do not, as Mr. EVERETT intimates, dissuade the Colored People from going to Africa, from any fanatical determination that they shall stay in this country and suffer the hardships and disabilities to which their abode here exposes them. The enemies of the Colonization Scheme would not dissuade a Colored man from emigrating to Africa or to Nova Zembla, if he really thought it for his advantage to do so. They are continually encouraging and assisting a far more numerous Emigration to Canada, than the Colonization Society, with all its popularity and command of means, has been able to promote to Liberia. Our objection is not to Colonization, but to the assumption that the two races cannot live together in this country, an assumption contradicted by the experience of two hundred years, and to the consequent adoption of laws and customs intended to make their condition so uncomfortable that they shall be compelled to fly in their own defence. This we denounce as inhuman and abominable. Mr. EVERETT compares our opposition to the measures of the Colonization Society to that of men who should dissuade the suffering Scotch, Irish, Swiss, Germans, Norwegians and others from emigrating to America, "kindling in their minds a bitter nationality or morbid patriotism, urging them to stay and starve, rather than emigrate and find employment, position, and prosperity for themselves and their children on this side of the Atlantic." Now we apprehend there is no parallelism between the cases. We do not dissuade