of bettering his condition, and torment for reward, as the stimulus to the labourer's exertion; and in which wealth exists only in its rudest forms, because the natural division of employments has no place, and only the rudest instruments of production can be used. Adam Smith had previously examined the milder conditions of feudal servitude, demonstrating that the backwardness of mediæval Europe was attributable to these and similar discouragements to industry, and showing how it was forced into unnatural channels by such obstructions. For, through every part of his philosophy, Dr. Smith sought,' as Dugald Stewart relates, 'to trace, from the principles of human nature and the circumstances of society, the origin of the positive institutions and conditions of mankind.' The Wealth of Nations contains the substance of the last division of a complete course of lectures upon moral science, in which Adam Smith expounded, in succession, Natural Theology, Ethics, Jurisprudence, and Political Economy. His lectures on Jurisprudence have not survived; but his pupil Dr. Millar states, that he followed in them the plan suggested by Montesquieu, endeavouring to trace the gradual progress of jurisprudence from the rudest to the most refined ages, and to point out the effect of those arts which contribute to subsistence and to the accumulation of property, in producing corresponding improvements or alterations in law and government.' From this it is clear that his conception of the true scope and method of jurisprudence agreed with his conception of the true scope and method of economic inquiry. And in the Wealth of Nations, accordingly, he traced the operation both of the causes which rescued Europe from barbarism and occasioned its progress in opulence, and of those which impeded the action of the natural principles of preservation and improvement. In short, his treatise included an inquiry into the causes of the poverty as well as of the wealth of nations, and an investigation of the actual constitution and career of industrial society. He showed how rural industry and progress were thwarted in the middle ages by such impediments; that, but for the happier circumstances of its towns, Europe could never have emerged from the calamities which befel it after the dissolution of the Roman Empire. The servile and insecure

position of the cultivators of the soil prevented industry from achieving its first triumphs in the country according to the course of nature, which makes agriculture the primary, because the most necessary, business of mankind. Order and good government, on the other hand, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals, were established in cities at a time when the occupiers of land in the country were exposed to every sort of violence. But men in this defenceless condition naturally content themselves with a bare subsistence, because to acquire more might only tempt the injustice of their oppressors. On the contrary, when they are secure of enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better their condition, and to acquire, not only the necessaries, but the comforts and elegancies of life. That industry, therefore, which aims at something more than necessary subsistence, was established in cities long before it was commonly practised by the occupiers of land in the country.' In this manner, Adam Smith has traced the causes of the actual and, as he calls it, the 'unnatural' course of industry in the slow and chequered progress of modern Europe. He investigated the phenomena of what was, happily for us, on the whole, a progressive society. Mr. Cairnes, on the contrary, has investigated those of a retrograde one.

In the Slave States of America Mr. Buckle might have seen the economical results of a society based upon selfishness instead of justice. The negro shows elsewhere his capacity to take

*The following statement, affording evidence as to the character, capacity, and enterprise of the negroes, is contained in a letter to the writer of this paper from one of the principal English residents in Victoria, the capital of Vancouver's Island. It formed part of a general description of the Colony, furnished without any reference to the question of slavery:-'Before the gold excitement, but during the same year (1858), the Legislature of California passed a law forbidding the immigration of negroes. This caused the latter to appoint a deputation, which visited the British Possession of Vancouver's Island; and so favourable was their report, that it not only caused many coloured people to leave California, but also aroused general attention, particularly that of British subjects; for by all who had occasionally heard of the island before, it was considered a sort of petty Siberia. While people were reading accounts of the climate, soil, and low price of town lots in Victoria, there came rumours of rich gold sands on the banks of the Frazer River in British Columbia. Two or three small coasting vessels had previously sailed with coloured passengers; but the demand for passages by white people became so great, that large steamships departed every

his part in the free division of labour, and the consequent multiplication of the productions of the different arts, which occasions, in the words of Adam Smith, in a well-governed society that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. In the squalid and comfortless homes even of the higher ranks of the people in the American Slave States, we see the consequence of oppressed and degraded industry. 'It may be,' says Adam Smith again, that the accommodation of a European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation. of the latter exceeds that of an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.' The American slave-owner is, as it were, a petty African king, and in real penury, as well as in power, resembles such a ruler. It is said, indeed, that we owed to slavery the produce which supplied the principal manufacture of Great Britain. But the whole of this production was in truth to be credited to free industry, while all the waste and ruin which accompanied it must be ascribed to slavery. The possibility of the profitable growth of so much cotton was caused by the commerce and invention of liberty, while the barbarism of the poor whites, the brutifying of the negro population, and the exhaustion of the

few days with from 300 to 1,000. Among them were some coloured people, and they have increased in number until, I think, we may safely estimate them at 500. The occupations of these coloured people in Victoria are, to the best of my recollection, porters, sawyers, draymen, day-labourers, barbers, and bathkeepers; eating-house keepers; one hosier, as black as a coal, with the best stock in the town; and two or three grocers. Some of them went to the mines, and were moderately successful. Their favourite investment is in a plot of ground, on which they build a neat little cottage and cultivate vegetables, raise poultry, &c. Nearly all had been prosperous, and a few had so judiciously invested that they were in receipt of from £10 to £40 a month from rents. They are industrious, economical, and intend to make the colony their permanent home; the outskirts of the town are well sprinkled with their humble but neat dwellings, and their land is yearly increasing in value. By this showing they are a quiet, industrious, and law-abiding people; but there is a drawback, taking them altogether as citizens, which arises from their earnest desire to be on a perfect social equality with the whites at church, the theatre, concerts, and other public places of assembly. When you consider the strong disinclination for their company, not only of our large American population, but also of Englishmen, who very quickly inabibe the American prejudice, you can readily conceive that a number of disagreeable scenes occur.'

American soil, are the net results of slavery. In truth, to Watt, Hargreaves, Crompton, and Whitney-free citizens of England and the Northern States-the southern planters owed the whole value of their cotton. What slavery may really claim as its own work is that, by exhausting the soil it occupies by a barbarous agriculture, which sets the laws of chemistry as well as of political economy at defiance, it hastens its own extinction from the day that its area is once definitely and narrowly circumscribed. This its own advocates admit, but with a singular inference: 'Slavery has, by giving to the laws of nature free scope, moved over a thousand miles of territory, leaving not a slave behind. Why should good men attempt to check it in its progress? If the laws of nature pass slavery farther and farther south, why not let it go, even though, in process of time it should, by the operation of natural laws, pass away altogether from the territory where it now exists?' Why, we may ask, should devastation be suffered to spread? Should fires in a city be suffered to burn themselves out by advancing from street to street until not a house remains to feed the conflagration? The slaveholder, as he moves southward or westward, not only carries moral and material destruction with him, but leaves it behind for those who come after him. The rich slavebreeder follows him with his abominable trade, and the poor white sinks back into barbarism in the wilderness the slaveholder has made. The order of European progress has been reversed. In Europe, justice, liberty, industry, and opulence grew together as Adam Smith described. In the Slave States of America, as Mr. Cairnes has shown, the Slave Power constitutes the most formidable antagonist to civilized progress which has appeared for many centuries, representing a system of society at once retrograde and aggressive-a system which, containing within it no germ from which improvement can spring, gravitates - inevitably towards barbarism, while it is impelled by exigencies inherent in its position and circumstances to a constant extension of its territorial domain.'

ἄνω ποταμῶν ἱερῶν χωροῦσι παγαὶ

καὶ δίκα καὶ πάντα πάλιν στρέφεται.

For the perpetuation and extension of the system to which

is owing this retrogressive movement of the English race in a region endowed with every natural help to progress, the slaveholders are in arms. They have not been slow to point, indeed, at General Butler's misrule in a southern city, and to ask if the cause of their adversaries is the cause of liberty? But such men as General Butler are living arguments against a Slave Power. General Butler was absolute master at New Orleans; and, even in the words of an ardent apologist for slavery, that cruelties may be inflicted by the master upon the slave, that instances of inhumanity have occurred and will occur, are necessary incidents of the relation which subsists between master and slave, power and weakness.”* There was never a more striking example of the ease with which men are cheated by words, than the generous sympathy given in England to the cause of the slaveholders, as the cause of independence, and therefore of liberty! It is the cause of independence, such as absolute power enjoys, of every restraint of justice upon pride and selfish passions. The power of England is in a great measure a moral power, founded on the respect of the civilized world for the courageous opposition of her people for centuries to such independence both at home and abroad. And, if the public opinion of England and the leaning of her policy be found ultimately upon the side of the maintenance and extension of the Slave Power in America, she will sustain in the end as great a loss of actual power, as well as of moral dignity, as if she entered into a league with the despots of Europe, and closed her cities of refuge against their victims. The Slave Power fights against all the principles of civil and religious liberty on which England rests her glory, and all the principles of political economy to which she ascribes her wealth. In policy, as well as in justice, England must refuse her countenance to that Power, as the enemy of the liberty as well as of the wealth of nations.

*The South Vindicated, p. 82.