attempt to civilize themselves, the contact of a more civilized community subjects them to oppression and destitution. They perish if they continue to wander from waste to waste, and if they attempt to settle, they still must perish. The assistance of Europeans is necessary to instruct them, but the approach of Europeans corrupts and repels them into savage life. They refuse to change their habits as long as their solitudes are their own, and it is too late to change them when at last they are constrained to submit.

**

The Spaniards pursued the Indians with blood-hounds, like wild beasts; they sacked the New World like a city taken by storm, with no discernment or compassion; but destruction must cease at last, and frenzy has a limit: the remnant of the Indian population which had escaped the massacre mixed with its conquerors, and adopted in the end their religion and their manners." The conduct of the Americans of the United States towards the aborigines is characterized, on the other hand, by a singular attachment to the formalities of law. Provided that the Indians retain their barbarous condition, the Americans take no part in their affairs; they treat them as independent nations, and do not possess themselves of their huntinggrounds without a treaty of purchase; and if an Indian nation happen to be so encroached upon as to be unable to subsist upon their territory, they kindly take them by the hand and transport them to a grave far from the land of their fathers.

The Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they even succeed in wholly

* The honor of this result is, however, by no means due to the Spaniards. If the Indian tribes had not been tillers of the ground at the time of the arrival of the Europeans, they would unquestionably have been destroyed in South as well as in North America.

depriving it of its rights; but the Americans of the United States have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world.* It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity.

SITUATION OF THE BLACK POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES, AND DANGERS WITH WHICH ITS PRESENCE THREATENS THE WHITES.

Why it is more difficult to abolish Slavery, and to efface all Vestiges of it amongst the Moderns, than it was amongst the Ancients. In the United States, the Prejudices of the Whites against the Blacks seem to increase in Proportion as Slavery is abolished. - Situation of the Negroes in the Northern and Southern States. — Why the Americans abolish Slavery. – Servitude, which debases the Slave, impoverishes the Master. — Contrast between the left and the right Bank of the Ohio. To what attributable. The Black Race, as well as Slavery, recedes towards the South. Explanation of this Fact. - Difficulties attendant upon the Abolition of Slavery in the South. - Dangers to come. General Anxiety. - Foundation of a Black Colony in Africa. - Why the Americans of the South increase the Hardships of Slavery, whilst they are distressed at its Continuance.

THE Indians will perish in the same isolated condition in which they have lived; but the destiny of the Negroes is in some measure interwoven with that of the Europeans.

* See, amongst other documents, the Report made by Mr. Bell in the name of the Committee on Indian Affairs, February 24th, 1830, in which it is most logically established, and most learnedly proved, that "the fundamental principle, that the Indians had no right, by virtue of their ancient possession, either of soil or sovereignty, has never been abandoned either expressly or by implication."

In perusing this Report, which is evidently drawn up by a skilful hand,

These two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are alike unable to separate entirely or to combine. The most formidable of all the ills which threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.

Generally speaking, men must make great and unceasing efforts before permanent evils are created; but there is one calamity which penetrated furtively into the world, and which was at first scarcely distinguishable amidst the ordinary abuses of power: it originated with an individual whose name history has not preserved; it was wafted like some accursed germ upon a portion of the soil; but it afterwards nurtured itself, grew without effort, and spread naturally with the society to which it belonged. This calamity is slavery. Christianity suppressed slavery, but the Christians of the sixteenth century re-established it, as an exception, indeed, to their social system, and restricted to one of the races of mankind; but the wound thus inflicted upon humanity, though less extensive, was far more difficult of cure.

It is important to make an accurate distinction between slavery itself and its consequences. The immediate evils produced by slavery were very nearly the same in antiquity as they are amongst the moderns; but the consequences of these evils were different. The slave, amongst the ancients, belonged to the same race as his master, and

one is astonished at the facility with which the author gets rid of all arguments founded upon reason and natural right, which he designates as abstract and theoretical principles. The more I contemplate the difference between civilized and uncivilized man with regard to the principles of justice, the more I observe that the former contests the foundation of those rights, which the latter simply violates.

was often the superior of the two in education* and intelligence. Freedom was the only distinction between them; and when freedom was conferred, they were easily confounded together. The ancients, then, had a very simple means of ridding themselves of slavery and its consequences, that of enfranchisement; and they succeeded as soon as they adopted this measure generally. Not but that, in ancient states, the vestiges of servitude subsisted for some time after servitude itself was abolished. There is a natural prejudice which prompts men to despise whomsoever has been their inferior long after he is become their equal; and the real inequality which is produced by fortune or by law is always succeeded by an imaginary inequality which is implanted in the manners of the people. But, among the ancients, this secondary consequence of slavery had a natural limit; for the freedman bore so entire a resemblance to those born free, that it soon became impossible to distinguish him from them.

The greatest difficulty in antiquity was that of altering the law; amongst the moderns, it is that of altering the manners; and, as far as we are concerned, the real obstacles begin where those of the ancients left off. This arises from the circumstance that, amongst the moderns, the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united with the physical and permanent fact of color. The tradition of slavery dishonors the race, and the peculiarity of the race perpetuates the tradition of slavery. No Áfrican has ever voluntarily emigrated to the shores of the New World, whence it follows that all the blacks who are now found there are either slaves or freedmen. Thus the Negro transmits the eternal mark of his ignominy to all his de

*It is well known that several of the most distinguished authors of antiquity, and amongst them Æsop and Terence, were, or had been, slaves. Slaves were not always taken from barbarous nations; the chances of war reduced highly civilized men to servitude.

scendants; and although the law may abolish slavery, God alone can obliterate the traces of its existence.

The modern slave differs from his master not only in his condition, but in his origin. You may set the Negro free, but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the European. Nor is this all; we scarcely acknowledge the common features of humanity in this stranger whom slavery has brought amongst us. His physiognomy is to our eyes hideous, his understanding weak, his tastes low; and we are almost inclined to look upon him as a being intermediate between man and the brutes.* The moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack, and far less easy to conquer, than the mere fact of servitude, the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color.

It is difficult for us, who have had the good fortune to be born amongst men like ourselves by nature, and our equals by law, to conceive the irreconcilable differences which separate the Negro from the European in America. But we may derive some faint notion of them from analogy. France was formerly a country in which numerous inequalities existed, that had been created by law. Nothing can be more fictitious than a purely legal inferiority, nothing more contrary to the instinct of mankind than these permanent divisions established between beings evidently similar. Yet these divisions subsisted for ages; they still subsist in many places; and everywhere they have left imaginary vestiges, which time alone can efface. If it be so difficult to root out an inequality which originates solely in the law, how are those distinctions to be destroyed which seem to be based upon the immutable

* To induce the whites to abandon the opinion they have conceived of the moral and intellectual inferiority of their former slaves, the Negroes must change; but as long as this opinion subsists, they cannot change.