its noble struggle against Austria, although the Austrian Government in Hungary was in some sense a foreign yoke. But when, the Hungarians having shown themselves likely to prevail in this struggle, the Russian despot interposed, and, joining his force to that of Austria, delivered back the Hungarians, bound hand and foot, to their exasperated oppressors, it would have been an honorable and virtuous act on the part of England to have declared that this should not be; and that, if Russia gave assistance to the wrong side, England would aid the right. It might not have been consistent with the regard which every nation is bound to pay to its own safety for England to have taken up this position single-handed. But England and France together could have done it: and, if they had, the Russian armed intervention would never have taken place, or would have been disastrous to Russia alone; while all that those powers gained by not doing it was that they had to fight Russia five years afterwards, under more difficult circumstances, and without Hungary for an ally. The first nation, which, being powerful enough to make its voice effectual, has the spirit and courage to say that not a gun shall be fired in Europe by the soldiers of one power against the revolted subjects of another, will be the idol of the friends of freedom throughout Europe. That declaration alone will insure the almost immediate emancipation of every people which desires liberty sufficiently to be capable of maintaining it; and the nation which gives the word will soon find itself at the head of an alliance of free peoples, so strong as to defy the efforts of any number of confederated despots to bring it down. The prize is too glorious not to

be snatched sooner or later by some free country; and the time may not be distant, when England, if she does not take this heroic part because of its heroism, will be compelled to take it from consideration for her own safety.

THE SLAVE POWER.*

THIS volume has a twofold claim to attention, on the author's account, and on its own. Mr. Cairnes, one of the ablest of the distinguished men who have given lustre to the much-calumniated Irish colleges, as well as to the chair of Political Economy, which Ireland owes to the enlightened public spirit of Archbishop Whately, is known to the thinking part of the public as the contributor to English periodicals of the clearest and most conclusive discussions which have yet appeared on some of the most disputed and difficult economical questions of the time. He has now, in a work of larger dimensions, given the result of the study, which, both as a first-rate political economist, and in the higher character of a moral and political philosopher, he has devoted to the American contest. A work more needed, or one better adapted to the need, could scarcely have been produced at the present time. It contains more than enough to give a new turn to English feeling on the subject, if those who guide and sway public opinion were ever

*The Slave Power; its Character, Career, and Probable Designs: being an Attempt to explain the real Issues involved in the American Contest. By J. E. Cairnes, M.A., Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Economy in Queen's College, Galway; and late Whately Professor of Political Economy in the University of Dublin. London: 1862.

Westminster Review, October, 1862.

likely to reconsider a question on which they have so deeply committed themselves. To all who are still open to conviction, it is an invaluable exposition both of the principles and the facts of the case. The last is as much required as the first; for the strange partiality of the nation which most abhors negro slavery to those who are urging an internecine war solely for its propagation could not have existed for a moment, had there. not been, not merely a complete misunderstanding of principles, but an utter ignorance of facts.

We believe that we shall, on the present occasion, do a better service to truth and right by helping to extend the knowledge of the contents of Mr. Cairnes's treatise than by any comments of our own. Mr. Cairnes opens

up the question in so lucid and natural an order, and so exhausts it in all its more important aspects, that a mere condensation of his book would be the most powerful argumentative discourse on the subject which could well be given in the narrow compass of an article. Not that, as is the case with lax and diffuse writers, his argument gains by condensation: on the contrary, it loses greatly. In Mr. Cairnes's book there is nothing verbose, nothing superfluous; the effect is nowhere weakened by expansion, nor the impression of the whole frittered away by undue expatiating on parts: the work is artistic as well as scientific, observing due proportion ; dwelling long enough, and not too long, on each portion of the subject, and passing to a new point exactly when the mind is prepared for it, by having completely appropriated those preceding. An attempt to convey the substance of such a composition in an abridged form may give some idea of the skeleton, but none of

the nerve and muscle: the greatest merit which it could have would be that of stimulating the reader to have recourse to Mr. Cairnes's own pages.

After sweeping away the idle notion, which never could have been entertained by any one conversant with even the surface of American history, that the quarrel is about tariffs, or any thing whatever except slavery, Mr. Cairnes proceeds to the main thesis of his book; viz., that the Slave Power, whose character and aims are the cause of the American contest, is "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 germs 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." This is what a man of distinguished ability, who has deeply considered the subject, thinks of the new power, which England, by the moral influence of its opinion and sympathies, is helping to raise up. "The vastness," he continues, "of the interests at stake in the American contest, regarded under this aspect, appears to me to be very inadequately conceived in this country; and the purpose of the present work is to bring forward this view of the case more prominently than has yet been done."

Accordingly, in the first place, Mr. Cairnes expounds the economic necessities under which the Slave Power is placed by its fundamental institution. Slavery, as an industrial system, is not capable of being everywhere profitable. It requires peculiar conditions. Originally