rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Behold, the hire of your labourers, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth, and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth."

This murderous diminution is, I readily admit, not so much chargeable upon individuals, as it is the crime of us all, for it is undoubtedly indispensable to the continuance of the system. Increase is destructive of slavery. Did slaves multiply in any thing like the natural proportion of a race of men who, without any prudence or forethought of their own, receive their daily food in exchange for their daily labour, there would soon be an excess of labourers above all demand, and no price beyond his ordinary food could be afforded for the hire of a servant. By this easy process, I apprehend, villanage was terminated in England, and most of Europe; and we have with us the testimony of all history, ancient and modern, when we assert that, wherever slavery is perpetuated, this great and benevolent law of Providence has been, and must have been, though always with harsh measures and intense misery, reversed and abrogated.

The multiplication of the Israelites in Egypt was nothing contrary to the course of nature, when a politic, though cruel king, saw the necessity of checking its progress. His first scheme was to make their lives bitter with hard bondage; but bondage must be hard, and life must be bitter indeed, to secure the diminution of a servile race; though, demonstrably, had there been the sugar-works of Jamaica instead of the brick-making of Goshen, this project of severe labour would have proved successful. The tampering with the midwives was not more cruel than are the secrets of slavery in every age.

Who does not know, that slavery was perpetuated throughout Greece by various modes of destroying the servile race? Who has not heard of the infamous institute of the Crypteia, by which the youthful Spartans were bound at certain seasons to engage for the assassination of the Helots, as their sacrifice on the altar of patriotism? Who is at any loss to account for the servile wars of the Romans and other western nations? Who does not see that even now, in North America, through the facility of procuring food and comparatively easier toil in cultivating cotton and tobacco, the increase of the slaves is so augmenting the amount of labour as silently, but certainly, to diminish the money value of each: and though the timidity or avarice of the American is attempting every scheme to convert humanity into brutal nature-though he holds two millions of human beings, among whom marriage is unknown, the protection of law denied, schools prohibited, and, I am ashamed to add, in some States, by recent enactments unparelleled in Moscovy or Spain, religious instruction forbidden; yet the fecundity of the negro is working out the emancipation of his race; every child from its birth is melting some link in the monstrous chain; and though the scheme of colonizing Liberia, by abstracting slavelabour from the market, may faintly oppose this formidable influence, and the thousands transported yearly to die in the cultivation of sugar amidst the swamps of Louisiana may defer the doom of this hateful system, yet even now the mass is growing too heavy for its foundation; and those dissonant murmurings of bondage in the temple of freedom,

and of penal laws worthy of the inquisition in the land of religious liberty, and of awful impiety in the country of revivals, will issue in an explosion, the reverberation of which over the Mexican Gulph, unless anticipated by wise and Christian legislation, may shake society into atoms through all our islands, and involve in the ruins of slavery the property and lives of the whole white population. America to be safe must be virtuous enough to emancipate her slaves, or wicked enough to introduce the midwives of Egypt, the Crypteia of Lacedemon, or the night-work of Jamaica.

But I check myself. Who are we to reprove the Americans? We must wash our own hands of the blood-stain before we dare hold them up as witnesses against them. We may not be so bad as they are; yet we are far too deeply involved to reprove, rebuke, and exhort with all authority. We, therefore, entreat you, we conjure you, by every principle, both of humanity and religion, in the crisis of approaching discussion, to circulate information, and, personally merging all political considerations, to aid those who are determined promptly and conscientiously to do this great work of justice and mercy. Let us be determined to dash to shivers this frightful likeness of "Molock, horrid king, besmeared with blood," which avarice, the besetting sin of a commercial community, has raised in every sugar-plantation throughout the British dominions. Very much will depend upon the attitude assumed by the religious public. It is known to be our cause. In the recent elections, the efforts which were so eminently successful in procuring attention and support for this cause, were made, I believe, exclusively by religious people. The ark of the Lord has, once more, amidst the strife and conflict of parties, become the depository of justice, mercy, and freedom.'-pp. 21–24.

6

The demand, Mr. Halley goes on to remark, must be for ' entire emancipation.' He does not explain in what sense he uses these words, which are susceptible of a strength of import which he did not probably intend. Emancipation must be so far 'entire' as to produce an entire change in the condition of the slave, raising him at once from a thing to a person, from a chattel to a man; and this is all that we understand him to mean. But entire in the sense of unconditional, prudence and humanity would forbid it to be; since the relation between the master and the slave must still be continued, for the sake of both parties, under the altered terms and conditions of employer and labourer, land-proprietor and cultivator; and the restrictions of law and police must be substituted for the irresponsible tyranny of the slave-driver. Into these considerations, however, we do not deem it requisite, on the present occasion, more distinctly to enter. Mr. Halley concludes his discourse with the following striking and energetic appeal.

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Freemen, patriots, philanthropists, Christians, lovers of the Sabbath, friends of missions, our appeal is made to you. For the sake of our country, what a weight of guilt does she bear!-for the sake of

our brother missionaries, whose chapels are in ruins, and whose flocks are scattered without a shepherd-for the sake of our religion, how reproached through the cruelties of its professors!-for the sake of our brethren and sisters in hard bondage, and their and our common Saviour, who will accept the act of kindness done for them, as though it were done unto himself,-promptly and firmly unite, in the benevolent spirit of your religion, to procure a legislative enactment, commensurate with the demands of justice and mercy; abandon the gain of oppression and hire of the labourers now in your storehouses. Wash you, make you clean, put away the evils of your doings; cease to do evil; learn to do well. So shall the blessing of him that was ready to perish come upon you. The great national reproach will be rolled away, and Britain become an example to the world, of the strength of religious principle nobly triumphing over the avarice and heartlessness of commercial speculation. The slavery of France and Holland would soon fall; and even America, with her mass of wretched bondsmen, could hardly fail to wash her hands in innocence, did she feel the execrations of a liberated world fall upon her crimes.

--

'But if we forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain: doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it?— and shall not he render to every man according to his works? Shall not he, who drowned the Egyptian slave-masters in the Red Sea, and doomed their house of bondage to become the basest of kingdoms,— shall not he, who condemned his people Israel to exile and silent anguish by the river of Babylon, for just so many years as they and their fathers had neglected the merciful provision of releasing their servants on the Sabbatical year,- shall not he, who called up the fierceness of the Medes against great Babylon, and brought down to the grave her king from the midst of his revels, because "he opened not the house of his prisoners,"-shall not he, whose providence in every age is a perpetual commentary upon that text, "Woe unto him that useth his neighbour's service without wages, and giveth him not for his work,”— shall not he, who in our own times humbled the eagles of Buonaparte before ill-disciplined negroes, when they made all Christendom tremble,-who, amidst the tears of us all, blotted out Poland from the map of Europe, when her serfs were slaves, and her nobles claimed to be their proud proprietors,-who has broken the bastions of Algiers, and quenched her fiery crescent in the blood of her sons, that she can never any more make gainful traffic by the man-stealing of her corsairs and the flesh of her captives ;-shall not he,--but I dare not anticipate his judgements, when he cometh out of his place to make inquisition for blood, which I hope our rulers and people are preparing, not to encounter, but to avert, by timely repentance, and listening to his voice, while it gives an awful sanction and emphasis of thunder to the piercing cry of the negro from across the Atlantic, "Am I not a man and a brother!" Yet now your flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as your children, and lo! you bring into bondage our sons and our daughters, and our daughters are brought into bondage already, neither is it in our power to redeem them.”

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Art. IX. Address on Slavery, Sabbath Protection, and Church Reform. By James Douglas, Esq., of Cavers. 8vo. pp. 66. Edinburgh. 1833.

THE preceding article was already in the printer's hands, when this pamphlet reached us, containing an Address to the Christian public, from one whose voice will command and reward attention, upon the three great topics which at the present moment share without dividing the general interest. The substance of this address, with some variations, was delivered at several meetings for the purpose of recommending signatures to petition for the Abolition of Slavery,-for Sabbath Protection,-and for 'Church Reform. It is now published, partly from notes taken ' down at one of those meetings, that it may reach in a printed form, those whom the Writer had it not in his power to address ' in person. Without further preface, and with little comment, we shall proceed to lay before our readers some extracts from this spirit-stirring appeal.

The West Indies are an example that the laws of God are never neglected with impunity, and that no lasting prosperity can be based upon injustice and human misery. Whether we look to the wretched Slaves; the bankrupt planters; or their creditors, the merchants, who lend out their money upon usury, in vain sought to be wrung out of the tears and blood of wretched men; or to that portion of the British army, which, to the disgrace of this country, forms the only solid support of a system as impolitic as it is unjust,-we every where behold the curse of an avenging God pressing heavily upon the abettors of this slavish tyranny, which is without its equal in atrocity, either in ancient or modern times. The command of God to the parents of the human race, to replenish the earth and possess it, which has overcome all other preventive checks to population, disease, misery, and vice, is yet found too weak to resist the overwhelming evils of Colonial Slavery. The ill-gotten treasure of the planter is his gang of slaves, and these slaves are perishing under the lash of their shortsighted oppressors. While the West Indies are dispeopling of their inhabitants, their fertile soil itself is stricken with an increasing barrenness,-the necessary effect of slave cultivation. Britain, in addition to a new load of guilt, has a new load of taxes, in the shape of bounties and preferences, to the inhumanity and folly of employing slave instead of free labour; and its commerce is restricted, and its workmen unemployed, in order that the planters may continue to extort labour by the cart-whip, instead of paying the labourer his justly merited wages. If there is a spot in existence (except the regions of eternal punishment) where all things are contrary to the mind and laws of God, we must certainly find it in the West Indies, where property is robbery; labour, tyrannous exaction; law, merciless oppression; governors, murderers and men-stealers; and where all things are conducted, not according to the maxims of a wise and holy Being, but according to the devices of the enemy of human

happiness, the envier, in his own abyss of misery, of all prosperity, and who, in the triumph of evil over good in the West Indies, glories that he has still unlimited power in one corner of the world, though even there, while one well-wisher to humanity remains on earth, neither he nor his adherents can hope any longer to keep "his goods in peace."

< The slaves are claimed as the property of their owners. "Man can have no property in man." The very claim to such a property strikes at the root of all property whatsoever. God is the proprietor of all things, because he is the Creator of all things. Labour stamps a right of property upon the objects on which it is exercised, because it creates their value. God having only given the raw elements, and having appointed that the art and labour of man should work them into their useful applications, has thus given to man a right of proprietorship, by making him a fellow-worker with himself. God creates, and man forms. But no man can assert a right of property in the involuntary labour of other men, without vitiating the title on which all his own property rests. By such a claim he shakes the foundation upon which civil society is built, and introduces a universal system of robbery and wrong. Man can have no property in man. The slave-holders are therefore men-stealers, for wrong by repetition can never become right, but, by continuance, is only a more intolerable and excessive wrong.'

It is argued from the Bible by the slave-owners-who, alas! seldom quote the Bible to a better purpose-that slavery is permitted, if not sanctioned, in Scripture, not only by the example of the Patriarchs, but by the Mosaic precepts.

The truth, however, is, that the Bible does not sanction slavery; it only sanctions its mitigations and restrictions. The legislation of Moses on this head, goes to this one point-not to establish slavery, but to temper it, and, in many instances, to terminate it. God, by the hands of Moses, gave such a constitution to the Israelites, that even the most mitigated form of slavery could exist to no extent amongst them. By this constitution, after having once settled in Canaan, they were disqualified from carrying on offensive wars, till the changes in their government that occurred about the time of David, and had, consequently, no prisoners of war to dispose of as bondmen; and, by the agrarian law of Israel, slavery was rendered altogether unprofitable; for who in his own hereditary garden would employ the wasteful labour of the slave, when with ease he could cultivate his own estate by his own free, intelligent, and productive efforts? Slavery can only be profitable in an ill-peopled country, and in a new soil; but Canaan, before the Israelites entered it, was already fertile by artificial means, and, both before and after its conquest by Joshua, was crowded with population. The slave-owners appeal to the Bible when it suits their purpose so to do; but they would not, we presume, wish the laws of Israel revived, by which it was decreed, that "he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall