Let Us Hope That The Generous Principles Which Have So Long Animated The Legislatures Of The Northern Parts Of The

United States will extend by degrees southward and towards those western regions where, by the effect of an imprudent and

Fatal law, slavery and its iniquities have passed the chain of the Alleghenies and the banks of the Mississippi: let us hope that the force of public opinion, the progress of knowledge, the softening of manners, the legislation of the new continental republics and the great and happy event of the recognition of Hayti by the French government, will, either from motives of prudence and fear, or from more noble and disinterested sentiments, exercise a happy influence on the amelioration of the state of the blacks in the rest of the West Indies, in the Carolinas, Guiana, and Brazil.

In order to slacken gradually the bonds of slavery the laws against the slave-trade must be most strictly enforced, and punishments inflicted for their infringement; mixed tribunals must be formed, and the right of search exercised with equitable reciprocity. It is melancholy to learn that, owing to the culpable indifference of some of the governments of Europe, the slave-trade (more cruel from having become more secret) has dragged from Africa, within ten years, almost the same number of negroes as before 1807; but we must not from this fact infer the inutility, or, as the secret partisans of slavery assert, the practical impossibility of the beneficent measures adopted first by Denmark, the United States and Great Britain, and successively by all the rest of Europe. What passed from 1807 till the time when France recovered possession of her ancient colonies, and what passes in our days in nations whose governments sincerely desire the abolition of the slave-trade and its abominable practices, proves the fallacy of this conclusion. Besides, is it reasonable to compare numerically the importation of slaves in 1825 and in 1806? With the activity prevailing in every enterprise of industry, what an increase would the importation of negroes have taken in the English West Indies and the southern provinces of the United States if the slave-trade, entirely free, had continued to supply new slaves, and had rendered the care of their preservation and the increase of the old population, superfluous? Can we believe that the English trade would have been limited, as in 1806, to the sale of 53,000 slaves; and that of the United States, to the sale of 15,000? It is pretty well ascertained that the English islands received in the 106 years preceding 1786 more than 2,130,000 negroes, forcibly carried from the coast of Africa. At the period of the French revolution, the slave-trade furnished (according to Mr. Norris) 74,000 slaves annually, of which the English colonies absorbed 38,000, and the French 20,000. It would be easy to prove that the whole of the West Indian archipelago, which now comprises scarcely 2,400,000 negroes and mulattoes (free and slaves), received, from 1670 to 1825, nearly 5,000,000 of Africans.

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