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alarm, to be disposed of on the Exchange at 30 and 40 per cent. loss, but without success.

But there was another reason to induce the government to put on the appearance of severity in the case of the Deux Nantais. It seems that public opinion (thanks to the British press and to the persevering remonstrances of Mr. Canning!) was beginning to declare itself in Paris against the infamous traffic. The merchants and bankers of that city had already petitioned the legislature against it; they had held up Nantz as the great emporium for sanctioning a crime which they declared to be compounded of robbery and murder; against which the law, they observe, as it now stands, recognizes but one single offender, namely, the captain of the ship, although his guilt is shared by the owners, insurers, the advancers of capital, the supercargo, and the seamen. France has also its abolition societies, though yet in their infancy, who are scandalized at the barefaced proceedings of the dealers of Nantz.

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Thirty ships (says one of them), belonging to a civilized country, have sailed in the nineteenth century from a single port of one of the most enlightened nations in the world- -a nation which honours letters, which admires the sciences and the arts, which publicly recognizes and professes the religion of Christ; and these ships have sailed, not to communicate to Africa the blessings of civilized life,—not to go, guided by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, that Spirit of mercy and of peace, and carry to the inhabitants of Africa the good tidings of salvation,-but to bear thither terror and desolation, to foment war and carnage, to pollute its shores with the most flagitious crimes, and to condemn thousands of innocent victims to the horrors of the middle passage, unparalleled in the history of the miseries of mankind.'

The slave-dealers of Nantz have also been told, by one of their own deputies, what their real character is.

If the pirate is a criminal, an armed robber, often an assassin; so the man who orders, or shares in such a traffic, (for there is no difference between the slave-captain who executes, and the merchant who, from his counting-house, in cold blood, gives out to his accomplice this execrable mission,) the man thus sharing and thus ordering is also a criminal, an armed robber, often an assassin: he is, moreover, as cowardly as he is ferocious: he has not even the courage of a pirate. He does not deserve to be less hated, because he must be more despised.'

The spirit of commercial avarice, however, though checked, is not easily subdued; and we are therefore not in the least surprized that the trade under the French flag should, at the moment we are writing, be as vigorously pursued as ever. If the govern ment manifests, to say the least of it, a frigid indifference on the subject, we may be quite sure that the commanders of the few ships of war, ostensibly sent to the coast of Africa for the suppression

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of the trade, will imitate the supineness of the ruling power. While these traffickers are swarming on every part of the coast, few, if any of them, are captured. The master of one of them, which was boarded by one of our cruizers, said he had been visited by a French ship of war before he took on board his cargo, the commander of which only told him to take care he did not fall in with him on his coming out some ten days afterwards; as, if he did, he should be obliged to capture him: a friendly hint which, of course, was not lost upon the slave-dealer. Another slavecaptain says to his owner,

'M. La Traite (who commands the Hebe) gave me plainly to understand that he was not ignorant of my voyage, and told me at parting, "Be prudent, and look well about you."

There appears to be some ground, therefore, for the complaint of the Baron de Damas, 'that the officers of the navy are disposed to do their duty very reluctantly.' But why are they so disposed? The reason is obvious enough-they meet with a degree of discouragement from the government and the civil authorities, which the spirits and the hardihood of a seaman can scarcely be expected to surmount. Yet one French officer at least has honestly done his duty. Captain Lachelier detained and sent to Senegal for adjudication several French slaving vessels, and among others three that were afterwards boarded by the Maidstone; but mark the issue-they were all liberated by the Court there, and, when very shortly afterwards met by our Commodore, Bullen, they had already audaciously returned to complete their adventure. The law, therefore, as it now stands, is either inadequate to the object, or there is a secret understanding that it is not meant to be acted upon. In truth, it is a mockery of common sense to proclaim a traffic to be unlawful, and to punish the offender with confiscation of the vessel only, while neither infamy nor corporal punishment attaches to the individual, and while he knows that the profits of one successful voyage will more than compensate him for the losses he may sustain in two, by the capture of his ships. France objects to a mutual right of search, and to the capture of her ships actually engaged in the slavetrade, because, forsooth, such a concession would militate against the honour of her flag-strange notions of honour, that can suffer the French flag not only to protect a trade which France has declared to be infamous and illegal, but to give security and protection to the wretches of other countries engaged in the trade who may chuse to display it! France, however, may rest assured that even her flag would not be dishonoured in assisting the British flag in the work of extending humanity to the African race. In point of fact, the privileged pirates under the French flag

openly

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openly declare that they have no fear of being disturbed by the king's ships. Mr. Canning may therefore well say, that the slave-trade is now carrying on under the flag of France with scandalous publicity.' So little,' says Commodore Bullen, do they appear to fear detection, that the officers of La Sabine voluntarily conducted ours over their vessel, pointing out the different apartments for the males and females, and explaining every circumstance connected with it.'

Some notion of the system of atrocities under which this traffic is carried on may be collected from the dispatches of Commodore Bullen; but we must observe, that the number of slave-vessels seen and visited by our squadron, on a line of coast of more than a thousand miles, affords no criterion of the real extent of the trade. Neither can we form an idea of the sum of human misery from the cruelties which are witnessed in those few that are captured; as is justly observed in the Nineteenth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, there is not more of cruelty, it may fairly be assumed, in the one vessel which is captured, than in the hundred which escape.' In their Twentieth Report they

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'It is stated, under date of 10th December, from Sierra Leone, that, notwithstanding the activity of English cruizers, the coast still swarmed with slave-dealers. The Redwing boarded, during a single cruize, French vessels having on board upwards of three thousand slaves; besides which, she saw many French vessels which avoided her. A brig, la Jeune Caroline, had four hundred and fifty slaves on board, every one of whom was closely battened below when she was boarded. A large French ship, having five hundred slaves on board, and carrying twelve guns and sixty men, bound for Martinique, was boarded a few days prior to the Redwing's return to Sierra Leone. She had all her guns clear for action, but offered no resistance to a visit from the boats of the Redwing.

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Three Spanish vessels were captured by the Redwing's boats between the 7th and 11th October, but only one had arrived at Sierra Leone by the 10th December. The schooner Teresa was upset on the morning of the 19th October, in a tornado, when one hundred and eighty-six slaves, three men and one boy belonging to the Redwing, and the Spanish mate, were lost; the remainder, two officers and nine seamen belonging to the Redwing, and six slaves, were picked up on pieces of the wreck the next morning: fortunately, fifty slaves had been removed to another vessel the day before, and have since arrived at Sierra Leone. It is observed, that the captures of the last six months equal any other in a similar space of time which can be named, fourteen vessels having been captured, making a total of 1,690 tons, and carrying about 4,000 human beings. It is stated that the Maidstone boarded, amongst many other French vessels, a corvette fully armed and manned, which originally had 1,000 slaves on board.

On the whole, it appears that the slave-trade has increased during the

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massacre would be the result among the varied population of our sugar islands; that a total destruction of all property would be inevitable; and, in a word, that these valuable possessions of the British empire would be utterly lost and annihilated. Nor would his view of the matter be altered in favour of the ultra-abolitionists, by the additional observation that, in point of fact, other nations, in utter contempt and violation of solemn treaties, are systematically taking advantage of the effects of English legislation upon the English colonies-that, in short, foreigners are zealously engaged in increasing the slave population of their own colonies, with the obvious design of enabling these to raise in greater abundance the articles of produce for the consumption of the European world, which were once almost exclusively in the hands of our British planters.

To the assertion that the conduct of the party in question is dangerous,' we cannot for a moment hesitate to give our assent; whether their object be insidious' (by which we suppose is meant, treacherous, or mischievously artful) is best known to themselves. We cannot but think, however, that a candid and impartial foreigner, who should witness the multitude and magnitude of petitions presented to parliament for the emancipation of our colonial negroes, might very well be puzzled in his attempt to hit upon the real cause of these expressions of popular feeling-he might be in doubt whether they were the effect of a free constitution, producing in the minds of the people an intense love of liberty, and a burning detestation of the very name of slaveryor merely of human compassion for the supposed sufferings of eight hundred thousand fellow-creatures. In the first case he would conclude, that it was perfectly natural for such a people as the English to be anxious to wipe off the stain with which the existence of slavery, in one portion of the empire, taints the national honour and character; and learn without surprize that petitions were pouring in from every city, town and village of the British Isles, some praying for an immediate, others for a gradual, but all of them for a total abolition of negro slavery, even although it were distinctly assumed-(which we are very sorry to say it has not been)-in every such document, that such an event could only be brought about by a great national and INDIVIDUAL sacrifice. And, unquestionably, by such noble and generous conduct, adopted under such sane and rational views of the whole case, the people of England would extort his applause, nay, they might well excite his envy.

If, on the other hand, this foreigner should be inclined to ascribe the extraordinary eagerness in question solely to the dictates of humanity, and a feeling of compassion for the un

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happy state of the West Indian negroes-he might perhaps be apt to pause when, on looking around him here at home, he saw so many objects of wretchedness and want, such a mass of ignorance, and crime, and cruelty exhibited before his eyes, and detailed with disgusting minuteness in all the daily newspapers, for the relief or reformation of which no particular anxiety appeared to be felt by the 'party' alluded to, or by any other equally active and organized association.

A third view, however, may be supposed, which, if explained to our stranger, might better reconcile to his judgment, than either of the other two, this general impulse and impatience for breaking the fetters of the negro. He might be told, and perhaps truly, that great pains had indeed been taken, on the one hand, by the kind of people described in the South Carolina resolution, and, on the other, by quite a different class of persons, to excite and keep alive these kindly feelings in the people of England in favour of the slave population; but that the main object of the former party' was, to raise themselves into a spurious kind of reputation and importance, and the sole object of the other, a mere mercantile speculation, grounded on the idea that the ruin of our western colonies would promote their own personal interests in the east. This foreigner might be told that, to effect these objects, the most unfair and unjustifiable means had been resorted to; such as that of calling public meetings in the metropolis and most of the great towns, at which inflammatory speeches are made, loaded with tales of oppression and cruelty, many of them absolutely false, others most grossly exaggerated;-He might be told that pamphlets of the same stamp had been got up and distributed gratis over the whole country, illustrated with pictures of negroes in the act of being whipped, or fettered in chains, for the clearer understanding of those whose learning extends not beyond hieroglyphics or picture-language; and that petitions, ready manufactured in London, had been in thousands sent down to the provinces, to be subscribed by all quakers, methodists, and other dissenters of every denomination-including all that numerous sect who have a fancy for using the cross as their signature, and other really well-meaning and humane persons, who, on too many occasions, are the easy dupes of the artful and designing.

Whether charges of the nature we have mentioned be true or false, we shall not take upon ourselves to affirm; it is certain that such have been made, and equally so that they have met with nothing like a satisfactory disproof, or even a solemn contradiction. Of one thing, however, we are very sure, namely, that very

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