given to the industrious poor. It should follow at some distance the birth and active operation of those physical and moral agents by which man is impelled onwards in the road of general improvement; if it precedes, it may prevent their existence at all, or at best, it will infallibly protect the period of their birth. Now the negroes in the West Indies are not an industrious poor; they are indolent by nature, as their brethren in Africa are at this moment, in whatever part of that continent they may have been examined, and this natural indolence is justified in their eyes and rendered inveterate by a climate and soil which not only indispose to labour, but almost make it unnecessary. You exhort a man to work, to till the fertile ground, and to aspire after the possession of the obvious comforts of opulence; he answers that he does not want them, thanks God that the yams and plantains will grow abundantly for his eating, and that new rum is very cheap at the grog-shops; any thing beyond this cannot be worth the trouble to be undergone for it. What has the philanthropist to do? Not to set up a bank for his savings certainly, or at least not to rely upon it; he has no savings; he may indeed very likely plunder his master or his neighbour, and you will not be improving him by giving him four per cent. upon such a deposit. Suppose he were to accumulate in this manner a sum large enough to purchase his freedom, which some have done, have you really benefited that man? Not in the least. All that you have done is this, that whereas the slave was compelled to labour and was thereby kept within certain bounds of sobriety, the freedman becomes the first week a vagabond, the second a robber, and the third a grinder of corn by the sweat of his legs in the jail of Port of Spain. The philanthropist has one object to effect and only one; he must civilize the negroes. He cannot do this by force, for the sources of barbarism are in the mind, and the mind even of a negro is intangible by violence. He cannot take the Castle of Indolence by storm, for it will vanish before his face to re-appear behind his back. He must make his approaches in form and carry a charm in his hand; he must hold steadily before him the mirror-shield of knowledge and cause the brutified captives to see themselves therein. He cannot disenchant them, until he has first inspired into their hearts a wish to be disenchanted, and they shall no sooner have formed that wish than the spell which hath bound them shall be broken for ever. Although the bank is nearly nugatory at present, I am not sorry upon consideration that it exists. There may be some slaves so far advanced beyond their fellows as to become legitimate and beneficial depositors; and as freedom may be purchased in Trinidad, it may in such cases prove a valuable assistance to a regular and voluntary industry. At all events the institution is ready to act whenever civilization shall render it advantageous. His rebuke to Mr. Buxton, for the expression of a passing silly wish, is extremely well conveyed; it is the rebuke of reason to fanaticism: I am told indeed that Mr. Buxton, a good man, but, unfortunately for his own true fame and the interests of all parties concerned, very imperfectly informed of the actual state of things in the West Indies, has said in substance, that he wished the affairs of the planters were even more embarrassed than they are, because, if sugar or other staple were not worth the growing, the slaves would necessarily have less work, and so live a trifle more comfortably. Now this seems to me a simple speech; a very small quantity of political or even domestic economy might have taught a man of so much sense better. Without crossing the Atlantic Ocean, in Freemason's Hall itself, (and it is not easy to remove oneself farther from light of every description,) a person might have reasoned, that if the planters, being, as they are written down in the Reports of the African Institution, a cruel and selfish race of men, could no longer feed themselves, their wives and their children in the manner they were wont, they would be little likely to take much trouble about feeding their despised slaves at all. If the slaves were rendered useless, they would not and could not be maintained at the expense of their masters; and if they were not so maintained, the slaves would of course maintain themselves by open violence. Now if any one wishes this last to be the case, I will be bold enough to say that he wishes in reality not only the entire destruction of the colonies as sources of commerce, but also the demolition of every imaginable chance of ultimately converting the slaves into good citizens and enlightened men. But if Mr. Buxton, as a great and heroic act of devotion to the cause of humanity, would go across this ocean stream and see what he is so often talking about, (and upon my word I believe the planters would receive him with civility,) he would then know as a fact that about which there could be no dispute, that the condition of a slave in the West Indies bears in its comparative comforts or sufferings a pretty exact relation to the independence or indigence of his master. This in its appropriate degree is certainly the case in England, and really I cannot understand why any body should suppose it to be different in the colonies. It is not my humour to fill this page with a detailed account of the management of slaves on an estate; it may all be found in Macdonnell or Macqueen, and it is just as much a matter of course as poor rates and a parish doctor in England. If any one can deny this to be the general and accustomed practice, let him do so, and distinctly prove his assertion; if he can do this, he will effectually put the West Indians to silence; if he cannot make it good, then, as an honest man, he will never repeat such assertion, never argue upon such assertion, nay, will gainsay those who continue to do either. This is a point unconnected with the grand question of slavery in the abstract; there are many evils in that state more pernicious than short commons, but this is a topic which is infinitely harangued upon and usually makes the deepest impression. That there are degrees in slavery is true; the different education and more different tempers of the masters will operate in various ways upon the condition of the slaves, and between the highest and the lowest stage there will be often a greater space than between freedom and some states of slavery itself. The well-dressed lady's maid or gentleman's butler and groom, seem scarcely beneath the same classes of people in England; they receive no wages indeed, and cannot leave their service; but it must be recollected that they enjoy under their master's protection almost every thing which they could buy with money, and that their country is so small, and society so uniform in it, that the wish to see the unknown world and to try other services, which would render such a restriction tormenting in England or France, can affect their contentment in a very slight degree. The other extreme of servitude comprises the slaves belonging to the petty land-proprietors, and the white and coloured tradesmen, mechanics, and keepers of hotels in the towns. The servi servorum, the slaves of slaves, occur so rarely as not to be worth taking into the account, except for the purpose of instancing a curious right of slavery, and reprobating its allowance. I am far from meaning to condemn all these classes of masters by wholesale; it often happens, I am told, that they are even too indulgent, and admit their slaves to a familiarity which can do no good to either party; but I am bound to say that the only cases of cruelty which I either met with or heard of in the West Indies, were one and all perpetrated by persons of this description. As the owners live worse, the slaves must of necessity live worse also; as their owners are less enlightened, less affected by public opinion, nay, oftentimes so barbarous or even more so than themselves, they the slaves must of course profit less under the instruction, and be more completely at the mercy of the passions of such their masters. These are the two extremes; the average condition is that of the labourers in the field upon respectable estates. These constitute seven or eight tenths of the whole slave population. In point of ease and shade their life is much inferior to that of the planter's domestic; in food, care in sickness, instruction and regular protection, they are incomparably better off than the wretched thralls of the low inhabitants of the towns. The positive amount of their rights and privileges is, as I have occasionally remarked, various in various islands; in none is it greater, in few so great as in Barbados. There are many things in the slave management of that colony which might be advantageously imitated by the planters of other islands, but at the same time this is a matter which depends so much upon local circumstances that it would be presumptuous in any one to condemn, upon general principles alone, those who do not avail themselves of the example. We now give a passage on the condition of the sleek West Indian slave as compared with the toil-bent, half-starved British peasant; it is written in a spirit which we respect, (though we are not so enthusiastic as to share in it,) and very happily and vigorously expressed. I would not sell my birthright for a mess of pottage, yet if my birthright were taken from me, I would fain have the pottage left. So I scorn with an English scorn the creole thought that the West Indian slaves are better off than the poor peasantry of Britain; they are not better off, nothing like it; an English labourer with one shirt is worth, body and soul, ten negro slaves, choose them where you will. But it is nevertheless a certain truth that the slaves in general do labour much less, do eat and drink much more, have much more ready money, dress much more gaily, and are treated with more kindness and attention, when sick, than nine-tenths of all the people of Great Britain under the condition of tradesmen, farmers, and domestic servants. It does not enter into my head to speak of these things as constituting an equivalent, much less a point of superiority, to the hardest shape of English freedom; but it seems to me that, where English freedom is not and cannot be, these things may amount to a very consolatory substitute for it. I suspect that if it were generally known that the slaves ate, drank, and slept well, and were beyond all comparison a gayer, smarter and more familiar race than the poor of this kingdom, the circumstances of their labour being compulsory, and in some measure of their receiving no wages for it, would not very painfully affect the sympathies of the ladies and gentlemen of the African Institution and the Anti-Slavery Society. say, in some measure the slaves receive no wages, because no money is paid to them on that score, but they possess advantages which the ordinary wages of labour in England doubled could not purchase. The slaves are so well aware of the comforts which they enjoy under a master's purveyance, that they not unfrequently forego freedom rather than be deprived of them. A slave beyond the prime of life will hesitate to accept manumission. Many negroes in Barbados, Grenada, and Antigua, have refused freedom when offered to them; "what for me want free? me have good massa, good country, plenty to eat, and when me sick, massa's doctor physic me; me no want free, no not at all." A very fine coloured woman in Antigua, who had been manumitted from her youth, came to Captain Lyons, on whose estate she had formerly been a slave, and entreated him to cancel, if possible, her manumission, and receive her again as a slave. "Me no longer young, Sir, and have a daughter to maintain!" This woman had always lived by common prostitution, a profession which usually indisposes for labour, and yet she was importunate to return to slavery. Surely she must have known the nature of that state, and the contingencies to which she exposed herself by returning to it, at least as well as any gentleman in England. Every one who has been in Barbados knows, as I have said before, that many of the wretched white creoles live on the charity of the slaves, and few people would institute a comparison on the respectability of the two classes. The lower whites of that island are, without exception, the most degraded, worthless, hopeless race I have ever met with in my life. They are more pressing objects for legislation than the slaves, were they ten times enslaved. Our author remarks that the French colonies are more prosperous than the English; industry receives an impulse in the former, which is wanting in the latter, and he points out the cause with much acuteGive a man, to use a hacknied illustration, a garden for a short term, and he will make a desert of it; give him a rock, in perpetuity, and he will make a garden of it. ness. The French colonists, whether creoles or Europeans, consider the West Indies as their country; they cast no wistful look towards France; they have not even a pacquet of their own; they marry, educate, and build in and for the West Indies and the West Indies alone. In our colonies it is quite different; except a few regular creoles, to whom gratis rum and gratis coloured mothers for their children have become quite indispensable, every one regards the colony as a temporary lodging place, where they must sojourn in sugar and molasses till their mortgages will let them live elsewhere. They call England their home, though many of them have never been there; they talk of writing home and going home, and pique themselves more on knowing the probable result of a contested election in England, than on mending their roads, establishing a police, or purifying a prison. The French colonist deliberately expatriates himself; the Englishman never. If our colonies were to throw themselves into the hands of the North Americans, as their enemies say that some of them wish to do, the planters would make their little triennial trips to New York as they now do to London. The consequence of this feeling is, that every one that can do so, maintains some correspondence with England, and when any article is wanted, he sends to England for it. Hence, except in the case of chemical drugs, there is an inconsiderable market for an imported store of miscellaneous goods, much less for an assortment of articles of the same kind. A different feeling in Martinique produces an opposite effect; in that island very little individual correspondence exists with France, and consequently there is that effectual demand for books, wines, jewellery, haberdashery, &c. in the colony itself, which enables labour to be divided almost as far as in the mother-country. In St. Pierre there are many shops which contain nothing but bonnets, ribbons, and silks, others nothing but trinkets and toys, others hats only, and so on, and there are rich tradesmen in St. Pierre on this account. Bridge Town would rapidly become a wealthy place, if another system were adopted: for not only would the public convenience be much promoted by a steady, safe, and abundant importation, and separate preservation of each article in common request, but the demand for those articles would be one hundred fold greater in Bridge Town itself than it now is on the same account in London, Liverpool, or Bristol, when impeded, and divided, and fritted away by a system of parcel-sending across the Atlantic. Supply will, under particular circumstance, create demand. If a post were established in Barbados, or a steam-boat started between the islands, a thousand letters would be written where there are one hundred now, and a hundred persons would interchange visits where ten hardly do at present. I want a book and cannot borrow it; I would purchase it instantly from a bookseller in my neighbourhood, but I may not think it worth my while to send for it over the ocean, when, with every risk, I must wait at the least three months for it. The moral consequences of this system are even more to be lamented than the economical, but I will say more about that at some other time. It is to be regretted, that a writer who can think so well as our author frequently does, and who can, when he pleases, present his opinions so forcibly, and with so good a grace, should at times assume the arrogant tone which offends in these pages. It would be a great service to impress on him the fact that he possesses no authority except that which his reason obtains for him; whereas he too often writes as if he were the acknowledged oracle of the universe, whose dicta are sure of reception merely because they are his dicta, which is extremely ridiculous. We can fancy how those whom he has made to smart under the force of his arguments, must scoff and triumph when they come to such lofty flights as these, Γελῶσι ἐχθροί, as our author himself would infallibly say. "I criminate no man's intentions; I acknowledge real difficulties; I am compassionate to hereditary prejudices. But there I stop; for compassion becomes party when prejudice degenerates into obstinacy," &c. &c. &c. p. 325. There is the insolence and verbiage of a Johnson here, but without his authority, and therefore the dogmatist is only ridiculous. He is the daw playing the eagle. There is not wanting in this book a seasoning of the odium theologicum. At a dinner given to the Bishop of Barbados, and his train, an Irish catholic priest was present, who gave the protestant bishop's health with the accompaniment of some complimentary phrases. A circumstance which gives the young person, whose book is under notice, occasion to put forth this bit of bitterness, which ought to have been whipped out of him by his preceptors at school at least two years ago— "Abbé O'Hannam, a tall Irish Romish priest, gave the health of the Bishop of Jamaica, and talked about our eminent prelate and so on. It was bad taste in Abbé O'Hannam to dine with us at all, but it was gross in the Abbé to give such a toast. The compliment was uncalled for from him, and nobody could think the Abbé sincere in what he said." Is this the spirit of charity which travels in a bishop's train? As we do not know the bishop, we do think it possible that the abbe's civil speech of him might have been deserved and sincere, and whether it was so or not, it was conciliating, and therefore decent and becoming. Priests should assume the virtue of good will to men if they have it not. No one quarrels with them for hypocrisy in this particular. Our author is, of course, severe on the methodists; but we must confess that his severity here is not without some show of justice. He remarks on their prying system-the espionage they have carried into families; but unluckily this subject reminds him, a true university man, of what Tom Smith (all the world of course knows Tom Smith) wrote about it. We give this precious jeu d'esprit, premising that we do not comprehend the introduction to it by reason of the peculiarity of the composition. I never come alongside of the methodist spy-system without thinking of poor Tom Smith's stanzas. Tom was always humming them by himself, as Johnson with "Aye! but to die." They allude to his own experience of a practice not uncommon in the present day. I knew a maid who did always command With the third gentleman's notions of grace. Three the third gentleman plucked, and the third, As I've been told, was hardly deterred, In arguend. about Hume et Calvinum, A currend. ad argument. baculinum. Last came a youth whom the third gentleman And all for because this silly young maid And duck him and souse in his nethermost lake! It is now high time that we should close our notice of this book, which we shall do, saying that if it were purged of its conceit, its arrogance, its college cant, and small pedantry, it would be a very useful and intelligent, as well as a smart and amusing very little work -very little we say, as the desirable operation we have supposed, would reduce its size, moderate as it now is, to the dimensions of a child's story book; but then the value of it would be increased in a proportion inverse to its diminished bulk. THE LAST AMERICAN NOVEL. THE "Last of the Mohicans" is clearly by much the worst of Mr. Cooper's performances. He has for several years past littered annually, and in fecundity at least, if in no rarer quality, has proved himself a genuine descendant of his great English father, beyond the saltwater lake. The family-failing too, is as conspicuous in the American, as in the parent tree-the produce has grown worse and worse every year; it is now dry, jejune, and frashy. No writer, indeed, be he great or little, known or unknown, can be trusted long with the duty of manufacturing fictions for the public. The workmanship, after a |