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ample of the depravation and ferocity which sudden wealth and uncontrolled power can produce in nations, as they have often produced them in individuals.

The present degradation of the United States is a tremendous warning. It must sadden and alarm all who believe in the excellence of purely democratic institutions.

SLAVERY

IN

THE UNITED STATES.*

THE sale of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is the most marvellous literary phenomenon that the world has witnessed.

It came out as a sort of feuilleton in the "National Era," a Washington paper. The death of Uncle Tom was the first portion published, indeed the first that was written. It appeared in the summer of 1851, and excited so much attention, that Mrs. Stowe added a beginning and middle to her end, by composing and printing from week to week the story as we now have it, until it was concluded in March, 1852. It

* 1. Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life among the Lowly. By HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. London: 1853.

2. A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. By HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. London: 1853.

3. Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. By Mrs. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. London: 1854.

4. Speech of the Honourable Charles Sumner on his Motion to Repeal the Fugitive Slave Bill in the Senate of the United States. Aug. 26. 1852. Washington: 1852.

B

was soon after reprinted at Boston in two volumes, - a form in which we have not seen it in England, although by the end of Nov. 1852, 150,000 copies had been sold in America. The first London edition was published in May, 1852, and was not large, for the European popularity of a picture of negro life was doubted. But in the following September, the London publishers furnished to one house 10,000 copies per day for about four weeks, and had to employ 1000 persons in preparing copies to supply the general demand.

We cannot follow it beyond 1852, but at that time more than a million of copies had been sold in England; probably ten times as many as have been sold of any other work, except the Bible and Prayerbook.

All that we know respecting the sale in France is, that "Uncle Tom" still covers the shop windows of the Boulevards, and that one publisher alone, Eustace Barba, has sent out five editions in different forms. Before the end of 1852 it had been translated into Italian, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Flemish, German, Polish, and Magyar. There are two Dutch translations, and twelve German ones—and the Italian translation enjoys the honour of the Pope's prohibition. It has been dramatised in twenty forms, and acted in every capital in Europe, and in the free States of America.

Its moral influence, though it has not been as wonderful as its literary popularity, has been remarkable. In the form of a novel it is really a political pamphlet. It is an attack on the Fugitive Slave Law of America, and though it has not effected the repeal of that law, it has rendered its complete execution impossible.

Those among our readers to whom the subject is

not familiar may perhaps be interested by a short account of the origin, and the nature of that law.

Slavery is a status so repugnant to the principles of Christianity, that, though never formally abolished, it gradually died out, as, with the diffusion of knowledge and the improvement of intelligence, the spirit of our religion was better understood, and its precepts were better obeyed. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was practically extinct in the civilised portions of Europe. Its revival is one of the crimes of religious intolerance. At that time orthodoxy was supposed to be essential to salvation. The Church of Rome condemned to eternal damnation, as indeed she does now, all whose faith on any point, however practically unimportant, however purely speculative, however unintelligible, differed from the creed which she thought fit to proclaim. The Reformers followed her example. Each sect believed those, whose opinions varied from its own, worthy of the severest punishment which can be inflicted in this world, and destined to perpetual suffering in the other. The strongest term of reproach and antipathy in the English language, the word in which abhorrence and contempt are concentrated, is miscreant. That is to say, a person whose religious belief differs from that of the speaker.

When such was the sentence which each sect passed on its fellow Christians, -on men who agreed with them as to the precepts of Revelation, and differed from them only as to the essence of the Being from whom it was derived, or as to the nature of His relations to mankind, of course they were not more merciful to infidels. The Roman Catholic, who condemned a Protestant to be burnt alive here, and to be tormented for never ending millions of years hereafter, had indeed nothing worse in store for the follower

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of Mahomet or of Menu. The difference seems to have been that they hated most the heretics and despised most the heathens. The former they treated as rebels, the latter as enemies. They believed the deities of Paganism to be real existences, to be devils in a state of permanent war with our Creator and Saviour, and their worshippers, therefore, to be the allies and auxiliaries of the enemies of God and of his people. They felt for them no more sympathy than we do for wolves or for tigers; in fact, they felt less, for, though we delight in killing a tiger, we have no pleasure in torturing one.

When it occurred, therefore, to the Spaniards, that the tropical regions of the new hemisphere, which were then mortal to the white labourer, might perhaps be profitably cultivated by seizing negroes in Africa, and transporting them to America, the cruelty or the injustice of thus treating the negro was not an element in the deliberation. He was a heathen, a worshipper of devils, a vessel of wrath, created for the purpose of enduring eternal misery, and to give him a foretaste in this world of what was to be his fate in the next, was only carrying out the decrees of Providence. The experiment was tried and succeeded. The English and the Dutch followed in this respect, as in her other colonial follies and enormities, the example of Spain. They were at that time the wisest and the most religious nations of the world. One of them had just conquered her independence and her freedom, the other was preparing for the long contest which ended in the British Constitution; but they had no more scruples about enslaving heathens than they had about enslaving horses.

These opinions, however, though they enabled the British settler to kidnap or purchase, and work to death, without compunction, the natives of Africa,

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