of the next by a partition not thicker then a piece of writing-paper. The seaman, as he beholds the ruin before him, vents his spleen against the little tribes that have produced it, and denounces them as the most mischievous vermin in the ocean. But a tornado arises-the strength of the whirlwind is abroad—the clouds pour down a deluge over the mountains— and whole forests fall prostrate before its fury. Down rolls the gathering wreck towards the deep, and blocks up the mouth of that very creek the seaman has entered, and where he now finds himself in a state of captivity. How shall he extricate himself from his imprisonment? - an imprisonment as rigid as that of the Baltic in the winter season. But the hosts of the teredo are in motion :-thousands of little augers are applied to the floating barrier, and attack it in every direction. It is perforated, it is lightened, it becomes weak; it is dispersed, or precipitated to the bottom; and what man could not effect, is the work of a worm. Thus is it that nothing is made in vain ; and that in physics, as well as in morals, although evil is intermingled with good, the good ever maintains a predominancy. J. M. GOOD, M.D.

REMONSTRANCE ON AMERICAN SLAVERY.

HAVING read with much satisfaction the following energetic remonstrance addressed by the excellent Editor of the Leeds Mercury" to the Editors of Newspapers in Boston, Massachusetts, we are of opinion that by transferring it to our pages, we shall gratify many of our readers, and to some extent aid the righteous cause of the oppressed and down-trodden.

GENTLEMEN,

Dejected, astonished, distressed, and all but despairing, after the perusal of the Boston newspapers relative to the capture of Anthony Burns, the fugitive slave, in your city, I take up my pen, at the simple impulse of duty, and in the feeble hope that you may not be uninterested in learning "how it strikes a stranger."

Known to few in your great Republic, I may be permitted to introduce myself as one of the warmest friends to a perpetual brotherhood between New and Old England, as an earnest admirer of the founders of American Independence, as one who venerates the heroic Pilgrim fathers, as a lover of popular education, of voluntary religion, of temperance, of representative government, and of freedom. I am not a Republican, and I do not approve of all your institutions; but from my heart I sympathise with the spirit of progress which is carrying on the United States to a foremost place among the nations, and I wish you all prosperity.

With no shadow of prejudice, then, still less of unfriendliness, and far removed from all the passions of American party, I ask you to listen to the impressions produced on an Englishman-I may confidentially say, on all Englishmen by the events which have lately agitated your city, and still more by the passing of the Nebraska Bill in Congress. Honourable and good men cannot be indifferent to the opinion of a whole Christian nation. Wise men cannot but admit that the judgment of disinterested parties is entitled to some respect.

It is, then, Gentlemen, with pain and astonishment not to be expressed, that the best friends of the United States in England have seen Boston on the brink of revolution, and Congress torn with desperate strife, the first, on occasion of sending back a fugitive slave to bondage, and the second in enacting a law which gives up the vast centre of North America to be the domain of slavery. That such causes should have produced such conse

quences has not surprised us; but that such causes could exist in a land of democratic liberty, of Christian institutions, of general education, and a free press, is only to be credited on irresistible evidence.

Englishmen are not so unjust as to forget that the institution of Slavery existed in the United Provinces before they became the United States. Nor are they so unreflecting as to be blind to the enormous difficulties which must attend the removal of such an institution. They can understand the struggle of interested planters, accustomed to regard their slaves as property, and as indispensable to the cultivation of their estates. They can appreciate the forbearance which a Free State may feel even towards a Slave State, linked with it in a great political confederacy. But they would have thought that an evil so crying and a wrong so flagrant as Slavery must ere this have been extinguished, under the influence of that spirit which tore a comparatively slight yoke from the neck of your fathers, and still more of those principles which have covered your land with the means of Christian ordinances. It has been so with us and with several European nations, and we hoped it would have been so with you. Our Colonial Slavery withered before the advance of Christianity. It only required that the facts should be known to a people who prized freedom for themselves, and who acknowledged the just, merciful, and loving spirit of the Gospel, to become perfectly untenable. Neither the people nor the Parliament could endure it. As you know, they bought the freedom of all the slaves in the British colonies, at the price of a hundred million of dollars. We therefore looked for an equal, if not a more rapid and splendid, triumph of justice among you. It seemed as if, by moral necessity, justice must continually be gaining ground upon injustice,—as if the cause of right must by an innate force mount over all obstacles, and destroy the cause of oppression. Your noble Declaration of Independence appeared, like the pillar of fire and cloud between the Israelites and the Egyptians, to smile upon the sons of freedom, and to frown darkly upon the oppressor. You were, therefore, expected to seek out and find some means of delivering the slave from his bonds. Without pronouncing how the end was to be accomplished, its actual accomplishment was thought to be inevitable. If money was required, you, who have bought half a continent, could not lack the pecuniary means. If either gold or territory was needed, the owners of California, and of the almost boundless expanse of virgin soil from the Mississippi to the Pacific, were in a condition to offer any price. Or if this was not the right way of proceeding, the difficulty should not have conquered the unconquerable spirit of American freemen. At the very least, it was believed that you would not allow the territory of Slavery to be extended by a single league, —that you would gradually contract, if you did not suddenly annihilate it, that Slavery would soon dwindle, pine, and sink ashamed into its grave, that the spirit of liberty and Christianity would achieve another and higher triumph on your soil, to win the admiration of mankind.

But, alas! how have these reasonable hopes been dashed to the earth! Instead of a contraction of the Slave territory, we see a mighty extension of it. Instead of the system languishing, it has received a dreadful accession of strength. Instead of the Free States becoming so pervaded with the true spirit of freedom that they could not endure the existence of a slave on their soil, they have become abettors of the wrong-doers, and lend themselves-must I say, with something like eagerness-to drive back the panting fugitive to bonds and punishment. Instead of the shade of Bunker Hill proving an inviolable sanctuary, the foot of the slavehunter has polluted it; and in the face of day, with the forms of law, and under the martial array of Boston, the poor refugee has been dragged from the very altar of liberty.

And you, Gentlemen Editors, what have you done in the face of such events? Answer not, "Am I my brother's keeper?" The Maker whom you worship, the Redeemer in whom you trust, reply, "You are!" If the Press exists for any purpose above mere pelf, it is surely for the diffusion of truth and the defence of right and liberty. On such an event as the capture of Burns, one would have expected every Boston newspaper to be filled with protestations against the outrage. One would have looked for the most conclusive arguments, or rather for instinctive bursts of indignation, against the system which thus violated the rights and prostrated the dignity of man. From so many organs of public and of Republican sentiment, one would have anticipated a perfect crash of denunciation, making it far more impossible for a Virginian slave-holder to drag his captive through Boston streets, than for Brigham Young, the Mormon Governor of Utah, to parade his hundred wives through those streets, as he is said to have done, in his own capital. In place of such virtuous indignation, what do we read? Alas! many of you, I fear a majority, a great majority, have sympathised more with the slave-catcher than with the slave, -have denounced more bitterly the abolitionists than the public crime which stung the abolitionists almost to frenzy. I am no lover of violence: but of all places in the world surely Boston was the last, where violence for freedom's sake should be denounced as an unpardonable crime. It is not on the blue waters of your lovely bay, once strewn with the merchandise of China, flung overboard by a population which revolted against a mere tax, that a vessel should ever afterwards have floated bearing the unutterably offensive burden of a slave-hunter and his slave: still less should a Boston population have borne to look upon it. Such things might have been done formerly at Algiers-the victim being a white man, instead of a black in Massachusetts they should have been impossible. It is true the thing that was dragged along your streets was a chattel, which by Virginian law you may buy, you may sell, you may work, you may flog, you may treat as a beast of burden, destitute equally of soul and affections as of every human right: but in the eye of his Maker he. was a man—a Christian man-we are told, a Christian minister dowed with the priceless treasure of an immortal spirit-made in the image of his Maker, and ransomed by that blood which flowed for black men and white alike. Oh! Gentlemen, you think us in England less the friends of freedom than yourselves: but I assure you, in all sincerity, that such an outrage on freedom as many have looked upon coolly in Boston, makes our ears tingle and our souls shudder.

en

We are not insensible to the political importance of maintaining the Union. But we believe no political advantage can justify a moral wrong. No man in England, that I know of, has the slightest wish to see the Union severed, unless, indeed, the severance should appear to be indispensable to check the extension of slavery. The prevailing belief here is, that slavery itself is the only thing which endangers the Union. We see, indeed, the danger on both sides. It is possible, that to contend for the abolition of Slavery, might provoke the Slave States to declare themselves independent. But it is also possible that to resist that abolition may extend and perpetuate the system of Slavery, which is even now rending your churches and your population into embittered factions; whilst, in addition, it is polluting the moral sense of the people throughout the Free States, exercising an influence antagonistic to that of Christianity, and thus spreading poison through the veins of your commonwealth. Which of these two dangers is the greater? Which would it be more honourable to confront? It is obvious that the present state of things cannot be perpetual. The fever cannot always continue to rage. Yet it is morally impossible that the Christianity of the North should cease to be hostile to

the Slavery of the South. A great alternative is before you-Christianity must conquer Slavery, or Slavery will conquer Christianity. Or it may be presented in another form-Freedom must extend its dominion to the South, or Slavery will extend its dominion to the North. There is, indeed, one escape from this dilemma, and that is by a separation of the Union, in which case Freedom would hold its reign in the North, and Slavery in the South. Thus three things seem possible in the future-1. That all the States should be Free States. 2. That they should all be Slave States. 3. That the Free States and Slave States should separate. Of these three eventualities, the first would be glorious, the second would be dreadful,and the third would be a lesser evil embraced to avert a greater evil. Whether, then, you seek the glorious good or the lesser evil, duty points to steady and constant (though of course peaceful) efforts on the part of the North to bring about the abolition of the fell crime of Slavery; and at the least, to repudiate on the part of the Free States and their population, any act or law tending to countenance Slavery.

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I apprehend the wise and right-thinking of your people cannot be indifferent to the opinion formed concerning them by other civilised nations. Though proud, you are sensitive. You would rather defy the world in arms than defy them in opinion. No effort could make you long impervious to the reproofs-given more in sorrow than in anger "-of a Christian and friendly nation, linked to you by bonds of mutual interest, as well as by religion, by language, and by a generous competition in deeds of philanthropy. If you could bear their reproaches, you could not bear the mournful entreaties of their Christian love. Were they even silent, you could not endure their sadness. America must be honoured, as well as mighty. Its hands must be clean, as well as strong. You pant for an honourable fame. You look with a natural, manly solicitude to what History is writing on the rock concerning you.

WHAT IS IT?

Spell the letters, and see if they form flattering words. If you find a dark blot there, soiling an otherwise fair inscription, O! blot out the blot, ere it be too late.

So far as I know, there is not a single newspaper in Britain that does not consider Slavery.as the cancer and curse of the United States. There is not a pulpit which does not condemn it. There is not a man in either house of Parliament who would apologise for it. The entire nation, I verily believe, deplores American Slavery as one of the darkest features of the age. And with the utmost sincerity I assure you, that those whose political sympathies draw them most strongly towards you, are precisely those who most strongly reprobate this revolting anomaly in your political and social state.

The Nebraska and Kansas Territories Bill is regarded as one of the greatest calamities that could have befallen mankind, because allowing of an indefinite extension of the system of Slavery. It has attracted less attention than it otherwise would, from the fact of the mighty territories represented by these Indian names being almost unknown. But where the merits of the measure are understood, it is looked upon with dismay,—1st, as being a violation of a solemn pledge given in 1821 by Congress, to limit the extension of Slavery; and 2nd, as devoting to that dreadful system a region four times as large as the United Kingdom, and one-fourth larger than the whole of the United States which obtained the recognition of their independence in 1783. If the heart of a great continent had been planted with the deadly upas tree, it would have been a natural evil somewhat like the moral evil of planting it with the institution of Slavery. You would be appalled, if you heard that all freedom was annihilated in England, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Sardinia. But, perhaps, one

or two centuries hence, such an event might appear a smaller disaster than the opening of all the central regions of North America to that domestic despotism which is far worse than any political tyranny.

In closing this address, let me entreat that it may be ascribed to no unfriendly object,-to no object but the simple and legitimate one which I profess. If unusual, I hope it may not be deemed unwarrantable. But should it be misinterpreted, my consolation will be, that it is a disinterested and conscientious attempt to influence an important class of public men, of the same profession with myself, in favour of the great interests of humanity. On such a question all mankind have a right to think and speak. I am, Gentlemen,

Your most obedient Servant,

Leeds Mercury Office, July 1st, 1854.

EDWARD BAINES.

SQUIRE D. AND THE PRAYING TEACHER.

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TRAVELLING in a mountainous region at nightfall of a tempestuous day, and having lost my road, I was directed for a lodging to Squire D's, who keeps the ferry." After supper, I had a pleasant talk with the father of Squire D., on whose head the snows of eighty winters had fallen, and soon the family were gathered round us, engaged in delightful converse. I had heard of the high handed wickedness of a neighbourhood not far off, with which my host was well acquainted; where, when a young man, who had wandered to a city, was to be hung for murder, his father and other relatives celebrated the day with a fine supper and a dance. No school could be kept; for the boys drove off every teacher who came among them; and meetings were frequently held in mockery of religious worship.

"Yes, yes," said the squire, with just enough of the Welsh accent to betray his origin, "and our neighbourhood here was just as bad ten years ago; we were all alike, -no church, no preacher, no Sunday-school, no dayschool. One evening a minister and a young woman stopped at my house for the night. I thought them very inquisitive people. They asked if we had any preaching? No. Any schools? No; we have had several teachers, but no one will stay more than a quarter with us.' The young woman said she would come and take a school among us if we would employ her. After some further conversation, I told her I would see what could be done, and write her the result. Next morning they left for the minister's home at M-, some fifty miles distant.

"In a short time I had a school made up, and board engaged for the new teacher, and wrote her to that effect. She came, and commenced her school at the time appointed. But soon there was a complaint that the new teacher read the Bible, and prayed in her school. And her troubles did not stop here. The man at whose house she boarded insisted that she should leave, because she prayed, sung hymns, and would keep talking about religion all the time. Miss H. then set out to look for another home for herself; she applied to most of her employers, but met with the same reply from all. 'We cannot receive you, unless you leave off praying and singing.'

"When she applied to me I objected on the same grounds. Finally, I told her if she would come on my own terms I would take her into my family. She inquired what those terms were. Why,' said I, 'you shall have such a room to yourself; there you are to stay from the time you return from school until you start to go back, only when you come to your