ences, under which the fifteen slaveholding States, assembled in their respective legislatures, should pronounce the deathsentence on the system of "involuntary servitude." But such a miraculous effusion, to be really effectual, must be shared among blacks and whites without distinction. It must remove not only selfishness, inhumanity, and avarice on the one hand, but the vices, the ignorance, and the incompetency attached to servitude, on the other. Without such a change, it is to be feared that the negroes themselves would be among the principal sufferers by immediate emancipation, and that gross injustice would be involved in turning adrift millions of men, women, and children, unprepared for freedom by a sufficient process of training and education. Great events, we are aware, may unexpectedly occur in these remarkable times, similar to those which have suddenly peopled the wilds of California and Australia, and which are converting Ireland into a desert. The probability however is, that slavery, like other social evils, will be gradually extinguished, and that it will depart by a process the reverse of that by which it has attained its present magnitude. "Interest," according to Dr. South, "is the grand wheel and spring that moves the whole universe." In the meanwhile, the increase of the white population in America may render free labour comparatively inexpensive, and thus, by a combination of causes, slavery may cease to be required. It must not, however, be forgotten that considerations of justice and piety have already, in many individual cases, led to acts of emancipation. Many conscientious persons have given liberty to their slaves, and have voluntarily reduced themselves to comparative poverty. The result has not always proved satisfactory, and the objects of this well-intended bounty have not unfrequently become miserable vagabonds, unhappy in themselves and the causes of unhappiness in others. The establishment of the colony of Liberia has, however, afforded a place of refuge, to which the free and emancipated negroes of America may resort, with the hope of obtaining a home of their own and that respectability which can attach only to an independent nation. The strange American prejudice against African descent may be found to have effected a providential design, when it shall have forced the negro back upon the land of his forefathers. Injustice carried him to America, and injustice may have its share in his final migration from the American shores. But if he should carry back with him the English language, AngloSaxon institutions, and the Christian religion, if a central point shall be established in Africa, from whence truth and piety shall go forth throughout that unhappy continent, it will be admitted that a captivity of two centuries has not been undergone in vain, and that even the cupidity and avarice of man can be made subservient to the merciful purposes of an All-wise Creator. SOCIAL LIFE IN PARIS. (FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) Paris, April 10, 1853. SOCIAL life in Paris! we think we hear our readers sayespecially those who think they know Paris-Social life in Paris! why what can there be entertaining or instructive in that-quid novi-to say on such a subject, in a place swarming with our own countrymen, and only eight or ten hours removed from our own metropolis? As well write and tell us country folks what social life is in London as in Paris! Do not the men wear coats and waistcoats, and other appendages, of the same cut as our own, and do not the women adorn or deform themselves exactly according to the same exigencies of art or fashion? It is not social life we now go to Paris to investigate; men and women live there much as they do in England. We go to Paris, if for a first visit, to see the Pantheon instead of St. Paul's! Notre Dame instead of Westminster Abbey! If we have been there before, to take a turn down the Rue de la Pisa, because we are tired of strolling in Bond-street, to exchange the Parks for the Champs Elysées ; or perhaps now-a-days to see the Emperor; that is something new if you like. But social life in Paris! we would rather, if you please, hear about life in a wig-wam. This is all very true, reader. Your enlarged view of human nature doubtless teaches you aright that, go not only to Paris, but where you will, man, that poor inhabitant of this globe, is every where of the earth, earthy; between Frenchmen and Englishmen, between Romanist and Protestant, nay, unhappily, between Jew and Turk, Christian and Infidel, there is but too great affinity every where in their short-comings. All here, and alas! where not? men and women alike, consume the greater portion of life in eating, drinking, sleeping, and dressing; content to live, et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. But, let me ask you, in travelling over the most beaten of roads, such even as that between Boulogne and Paris, have you never felt puzzled to account for it; how, with so great a resemblance, there is yet so wide a distinction, between the country you have just left, and the one you are passing through? Trees and houses, hill and dale, field and plain, glide past you, all familiar names and objects enough; and yet producing somehow or other a totally different general effect, and imparting an entirely strange and foreign impression. If you desire to explain and account for to yourself, what it is which, amidst so great a particular resemblance, produces a general effect so contrary, you may perhaps do so by some such familiar illustration as the following, which may serve as a clue to many others. In France there are somewhere about ninety millions of acres of land under cultivation, whilst in the British Isles not quite half that quantity affords scope for the labours of husbandry. Yet the former country presents to our view only some ten million acres laid out in grass or pasture land, whilst in the latter there are upwards of twenty millions of acres under the same form of agriculture. The above is but one instance chosen at hazard, out of many, to explain the difference of aspect in the two countries; but in what does this tell us that that difference essentially consists? Why, in cultivation; and it is from the difference of cultivation bestowed on the man as well as on the soil on which he is born, that spring the varieties of social life exhibited in the two capitals. A different cultivation, a different system, a different course, produce the striking difference of aspect in the material surface of the two countries: a different bringing up, education, instruction, habits and turn of thought, "C'est ce qui fait le charme particulier des campagnes Brittanniques. Hors de quelques provinces, notre territoire présente rarement le spectacle riant qu' offre partout l'Angleterre avec les vertes pe louses peuplées d'animaux en liberté."- cause the national distinctions between society in the one country and the other to be as remarkable as that exhibited by their soils. Let us, in order to make this more apparent, endeavour to seize a few of the more salient traits of French social life in the metropolis, and illustrate them by some familiar facts. And first, what strikes one perhaps as the most prominent characteristic of every period of Parisian existence, is its publicity. Sterne says, "I took a single captive, and shut him up in his dungeon." Let us take a single Frenchman, or rather child, and see what we can make of him. When a Parisian infant is brought into the world, since home in the metropolitan view of life means no more than a place to be born in, the earliest scenes and impressions which open themselves upon its juvenile apprehension, will assuredly be those of some public place of resort. The Tuilleries, the Champs Elysées, the Bois de Boulogne, or even the crowded Boulevards, are the public nursery grounds of Paris. Private houses appear not to be provided with any such necessary appendage to married life. Observe, it is not that the little creature is sent there some fine sunny morning by chance merely to take the air, as an English baby is dandled an hour in the Parks; the French child, on the contrary, lives and grows from infancy to boyhood, from boyhood to youth, in the atmosphere of such places. Let the weather be only something less than rainy, let but the merest glimmer of sunshine give the signal-grata vice veris et Favoni—of the change of seasons, and on visiting any of the sheltered nooks out of doors, well known to Parisian mothers and gossips, you will find them converted into human nurseries, swarming with armies of bonnes and babes, the latter undergoing, en plein air, ablutions, shiftings, manipulations of every sort mentionable and unmentionable; nay, nothing is more usual than to see some sunny morning on the very Boulevards, well-dressed mothers nursing, in the most maternal sense of the word, their offspring in front of the Café de Paris, outside of which at noon the infant commences life by sucking in the nutriment which in after years he will probably seek with equal publicity inside the same well-known locality. It would be too long to follow our nursling through all the grades of his existence, but as a social being, if we take his school-boy life, passed with the exception of one vacation in the year, (no Christmas, no Easter holidays, or Whitsuntide for him,) almost invariably at some large public school, or lycée, in the heart of a capital, with its public exercise and cours, public walks through the town, public speeches, and public distribution of prizes, the world in short always before him-if we take his professorial or university studies at the école de médicine or the école de droit, all equally public and independent of home and of home contact and home associations-his subsequent life of garçon passed almost wholly in public places, cafés, restaurants, theatres-we shall find that as he has arrived at the age at which men generally marry, without home and fireside education and training, or home influences, so he, in his turn, will be unfit and incapable to impart, will never think of imparting, any such feelings to the generation which is to succeed him, and so on to the end of the chapter. In Paris life and training, then, from earliest infancy, publicity is the predominant feeling and influence; home feelings here have little place in the recollection, little predominance over the understanding; here there is no home in our sense of the word, no word capable even of expressing it in the language; a man here has a chez soi, a pied à terre, in which he sleeps, and makes his toilette, and violà tout. We appear to have been speaking with reference only to the male portion of the creation; but observations of a similar description will be equally applicable to the general mode of life of French women. Not again to revert to the beginnings of life, let us look at the habits of the grown-up individual. And here there is a French phrase, courir les rues, which the subject too readily calls up to one's recollection. Parisian ladies have a privilege, and in some respects it reflects credit both on themselves and their nation, of being able to go alone and on foot, at almost all hours, in almost all parts of their beautiful city, without other impediment, if such they deem it, than that of being looked at, and of having their toilette if tasteful (as when is it not so?) fully appreciated and admired. There is but one drawback to this privilege in a social point of view, and that is the abuse that is made of it. A French woman is never off the streets. To give an illustration of this from one of their social customs, which amongst others has greatly contributed to form and maintain the practice. It is usual for a French lady in the capital, to have once a week, her day of morning reception, when she herself keeps house the whole day to re |