criminality of the parent in cases of treason and suicide? "Judges, parties in their own cause, finders of the fact in which themselves had been sufferers, and makers of the punishment which visited its conviction." Marry, Sir, your pardon; we thought, so aptly have you painted the character, that you were speaking of our own game-preserving magistrates, who first make the law in the House, and then judge the cause in which they are a party, and find the fact by which themselves have suffered;-to wit, the loss of a partridge, and lastly, adjudge the penalty. The Reviewer is horrified at the bugbear which his lively fancy conjures up under the awful name of " DEMUS, that jealous sovereign, who constructed treason out of the eyes,-[it is as easy and as consistent with strict justice, to construct treason out of the looks of a sober man, as to fabricate it out of the speeches of a drunken onee-(mem., the case of Frost)], whose right to do all this was admitted in the widest terms of which human language is susceptible." And what are these terms, so wide, that the force of language can no further go? Simply an incontestible statement of Demosthenes, that "the Athenian people are the supreme power of the state, and have a right to do what they please!" Ὁ γαρ δῆμος ὁ Αθηναίων, κυριώτατος ων των εν τῇ πόλει ἁπάντων, και εξον αὐτῷ ποιειν ο, τι αν βουληται: Who is so hardy as to venture to maintain, that our own supreme power, which is understood to reside in Kings, Lords, and Commons, may not also, in the widest sense of the words, do what it pleases? Yet this language, used towards the supreme power of Athens, is "adulatory," and such as "the ears of the great despot were continually regaled with." "Of Grecian oaths (and some of those in the courts of law were strongly worded enough) we may observe generally, what Stiernhook quaintly remarks of certain practices introduced by Popish ecclesiastics into the old Swedish or Gothic constitution having sown a plentiful crop of oaths in all judicial proceedings, they reaped an ample harvest of perjuries."" This man is no Janus; he at least has a blind side; or he could hardly have failed to perceive that all our own public proceedings are so bestrewed with oaths, that a man can scarcely go through the common routine of business, without treading upon and cracking some of them. Not to mention the courts of law, there is Oxford, or, still better for the purpose of enlightening Mr. Mitchell on his blind side, there is Cambridge, which not a man leaves without a sore burthen upon his conscience, (if he ever reflects upon the matter at all,) in consequence of his being obliged to swear, and this too in terms "worded" quite as "strongly" as any Greck oath on record, that he has bona fide performed what he well knows he has done only in mockery. "The dicast stood alone, no law could touch him; HE WAS, as we once before observed, HIMSELF THE LAW." This legal flight of pure fancy reaches almost the pitch of what a late head of a college used to say of himself, when administering the customary oath to the newly elected scholars: "The oath must be interpreted, gentlemen, according to the animus imponentis. Now, I am the animus imponentis!" "Even at Athens...there was [were] the whip and the scourge, the stout flogger, who relied on his strength, and the connoisseur flogger, who prided himself upon his art, [a variety created entirely by Mr. M.'s forgetive imagination, out of a line of Plautus: "Tortores acerrimi gnarique nostri tergi"]; there were chains for the foot, chains for the hand, and a separate compartment for the neck; or the distinction between man and beast was lost by putting them to the"-tread-mill? -no, not absolutely the tread-mill, but to the "grinding mill," A man then, who is placed on a machine moving in a vertical plane, and is thus made to work in spite of himself, is still a man, because such is the practice of England; but if he and his machine move horizontally, he is no longer a man, but a horse, for such was the practice of Athens. How plaintively the Reviewer now talks of flogging, and stout floggers, and knowing floggers, as if he had never heard of similar goings-on among Englishmen at home-freeborn Englishmen, not slaves; or as if he had not himself stood forward but two numbers back, and for ourht we know in the present one likewise, the advocate of the cart-whip as employed in the West Indian plantations, or at least the assertor of the necessity of that infliction. "With a most cold-blooded indifference the orator stated the arguments for and against the use of torture." What is the flogging practised in the West Indies, or in the barracks at home, but torture? and with what other epithet can the Reviewer's balancing of the pros and cons, in regard to the use of it, be qualified than, that of cold-blooded or indifferent. "But for the slave or his feelings, not a word of commiseration ever dropped from the hard-hearted speaker. Why should there? there was a taint, forsooth, in his blood, nor could he reckon among his race those who had fought at Marathon, the battle of Marathon! Let us not be the dupes of great names; nor measure the altitudes of nations only by one standard." Now what commiseration does the Reviewer feel for the slaves of this “ Christian Empire," at page 573 of the present number, where he argues, in the case of a compulsory manumission of the slaves, for compensation to the slave-owner, in addition to the fair value to be assigned by the appraisers? Starting with a similitude that levels the slave with the quadruped, he reasons on the supposition that the slave, if entitled by law to his freedom provided he can purchase it, will " do his best to sink his value in the eyes of his master," just as a jockey when he purchases a horse, is certain to cry down its value! Ingenious contrivance of poor nigger, to emaciate his body and stupify his faculties, and absolutely to deteriorate in all respects, in order that he may buy himself of his master for less than his real worth! "Will his master have no reason to go home," asks the Reviewer in conclusion," with the money in his pocket, and yet say to himself, all this is very well as far as it goes; [i. e. the manumission of the slave at the price calculated, upon his average usefulness during a certain time;] nevertheless, my property is at this moment less than it would have been had no regulation ever come from England to make it possible for a slave to procure his freedom [at a price, be it observed, fixed by a third party,] invito domino?" What is it but cold-blooded indifference, or something much more positively worse, that would obstruct the slave's efforts to emancipate himself, by thus propagating ideas of imaginary losses, and supplying the planters with pretexts for holding back that which they are already but too well disposed to withhold? But in this "Christian empire" we have authority for slavery, which the democrats never enjoyed. "Personal 66 slavery is twice mentioned in the Decalogue," but they knew it not. The Hebrew people, under the guidance of Joshua, when they took possession of the promised land, reduced the whole population Slaves were which they found on the soil, to personal slavery." moving up and down the streets of Jerusalem, "when our Saviour appeared on the earth." All these make in favour of the "Christian empire," but do not for one moment countenance a heathen democracy in the practice of slavery. "We venture to add, that no calm and impartial man can compare the two cases, [ancient and modern slavery,] without being satisfied that, in every circumstance of importance, the modern example is surrounded with difficulties that embarrassed the ancient one." As for the diffigreater than any culties, England has brought them on herself;-she was at the pains to make slavery where it did not exist to fit out fleets for the purchase of slaves-to transport them over the wide ocean to be in slavery:-and what right has the Reviewer to talk of difficulties? Will he pretend that the ancient system of slavery was thus violently, suddenly, and gratuitously erected? The difficulties in which England is involved being so clearly the consequence of measures which it was in her power originally either to adopt or let alone, they ought to weigh less in her favour than those with which the ancient states were encompassed, among whom slavery grew with their growth and strengthened with their strength. But let us see some more. "There the opponent of sudden and sweeping measures of emancipation could not assuredly have pointed to any such broad and decisive facts as"-what?" a totul and visible line of demarcation drawn by the hand of Nature herself between the master race and the vassal-a distinct, 'absolute, immeasurable inferiority in regard to civilization." It may admit to question, whether in point of civilization the advantage is on the side of the slave, or the slave-driver; but we shall content ourselves with schooling the Quarterly Reviewer with his own words, and applying to his back the scourge he has put into our hands. For the West India planter every jesuitical art of perplexing a simple question is practised to pervert the purposes of justice; but for the negro, or his feelings, not a word of commiseration ever drops from the hardhearted Reviewer. Why should there?—there was a TAINT, forsooth, in his blood; [more fortunate than the Reviewer, we can lay our hand," this very moment, upon the passage where this is insinuated] nor could he reckon among his race those who had fought at Waterloo. The battle of Waterloo! Let us not be the dupes of great names; nor measure the altitudes of nations only by one standard. The lesson which the Quarterly Reviewer has given to the Quarterly Reviewer, is the "more important, because of the prodigious numbers of those who may benefit by it." "The proportion of the slave to the free population of Athens, seems on the very lowest • Ακηκόατε, ἑωρακατε. ΠΕΠΟΝΘΑΤΕ. έχετε δικαζετε, is the energetic conclusion of the most powerful of Lysias's pleadings;" [be it remembered also that it was against the murderer of his brother, and one of the thirty tyrants.] "What the word dikaZETE signified under such circumstances, no one will be at a loss to know, who is versed in the code of a people-king," or in that of a game-preserving and game-lawmaking magistracy. computation, to have been in the ratio of four to one." In what ratio is the slave to the free population of Jamaica? We profess not to discuss the subject of West Indian Slavery, or to deliver any opinion upon the question at issue between the slave and his master. We only object to those mercenary and ambidexeter pleaders, who are at one time all for white, and at another all for black now for the master, and now for the slave; and who wink at the deformities of Christian England, while they are extreme to mark what is done amiss by every other people. Neither do we profess to entertain any great respect for the Demus of old Athens, whom the Quarterly has so often hung in effigy by way of scaring away popular notions from the minds of our countrymen. But in the first place, it justly moves one's indignation to see a narrow-minded enquirer finding flaws where none existed, and hanging heavy accusations upon the peg of a single and very questionable authority, in order to make a scarecrow of a people who,whatever may have been their political crimes, were certainly the most intellectual of antiquity; whilst, with the spirit and purpose of a sycophant, he overlooks grosser faults in the government and constitution of his own country. In the second place, it moves one's indignation to see a writer employing disingenuous artifices, in order to instil " conscientious slavery" into the minds of his countrymen, by first giving an exaggerated view of the evils of a pure democracy, and then confounding it with the popular governments which are now founded, or in the act of being founded, on the modern principle of representation. Consider Athens in its proper light, with a population of slaves four times more numerous than that of the freemen, and it is nothing better than an extensive aristocracy, where the rulers were absolute, and their subjects politically as well as personally enslaved. "Democracy is to us only as an antiquated dowager, whose best days are gone by." What does the man intend by this?-that a democracy is not now to be found? What is the constitution of the United States? And why, with that before his eyes, is he pleased to draw all his pictures of a popular government from remote antiquity? His reasons for this are obvious. In the third place, it is an ingenious device of the enemy to draw the attention of the good people of England from the faults of their own constitution, to fix it upon those of a government of remote antiquity. This is safe ground; the Athenians may be drawn ad libitum; and while the people of England are congratulated upon the political miseries of another government, they are less likely to dwell upon those of their own. To conclude this fit appropriately: Aristophanes, in the Wasps, has amused himself with imagining the dicast's pleasures in another stage of existence. Behold the gloss upon this idle text, given by the Quarterly:-" Law was the first word he heard when he came into the world; life and judicial employment were convertible terms; and there were moments of enthusiasm when a dicast looked forward to dissolution itself without regret: for why? of two things it must necessarily be the cause of law; it might transport him to the isles of the blest, there to continue the task which he had performed on earth; or, at any rate, it might convert him into that piece of marl le on which his fellow dicasts were wont to cast the shells that ex pressed their suffrages and votes." If this be the only mode of advancing facts with a merry face in verse, we shall continue to rank among the obstinately incredulous, and believe nothing but what is said to us with a grave face in prose. Casting our eyes over an article, entitled, Fashionable Novels, which called aloud for castigation in more respects than one, they were greeted with the following sentence, which affords such additional evidence of editorial care and reading, that we think it worth while to append it even here, ad calcem :— "We cannot be supposed to participate in this sort of feeling," says the writer of the article in question, "and we can at least excuse these offences in the author, as Falstaff excused rebellion in BLUNT upon the ground that he took them upbcause they lay in his way." Now who can excuse an offence of this magnitudesubstituting a loyal gentleman, Sir Walter Blunt, in place of "illspirited Worcester ?" two characters whom even a schoolboy would not have confounded. WAYS AND MEANS. Two poets-'tis a fact I now rehearse- Paper and pens, and two un-pen-knifed quills. "Egad! have you a knife?" cried one to t'other- 66 Why, how the devil, then, shall we go to it?" "But really, is resource quite out of joint? But makes a point with all our hopes to mizzle? To make a pen, like poetry, why you Know any thing, Dick, now-a-days will do, From Southey's hatchet, down to Wordsworth's chissel." "Let's send them to the saw-pit yonder,* for, Tho' not a deal to see, 'twould be to saw Them into pens; but they might think us quizzers; The downy promise of your future beard?- * Visible from the window at which written. |