ter and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting des potism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to the worst of passions; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his morals and manners undepraved by such circumstances.'-Notes, p. 241."-Hall, p. 459.

Whether those halcyon days, which I think would attend a similar state of things in England, are in existence here, must be left for future observation. There are five Dutch Reformed churches; six Presbyterian; three Associated Reformed ditto, one Associated Presbyterian; one Reformed ditto; five Methodist; two ditto for blacks; one German Reformed; one Evangelical Lutheran; one Moravian; four Trinitarian Baptist; one Universalist; two Catholic; three Quaker; eight Episcopalian; one Jews' Synagogue; and to this I would add a small meeting which is but little known, at which the priest is dispensed with, every member following what they call the apostolic plan of instructing each other, and building one The following picture of a slave song is quot another up in their most holy faith.' The Pres-ed by Mr. Hall from the "Letters on Virginia." byterian and Episcopalian, or Church of England sects, take the precedence in numbers and in respectability. Their ministers receive from two to eight thousand dollars per annum. All the churches are well filled: they are the fashionable places for display; and the sermons and talents of the minister offer never-ending subjects of interest when social converse has been exhausted upon the bad conduct and inferior nature of niggars (negroes); the price of flour at Liverpool; the capture of the Guerrière; and | the battle of New Orleans. The perfect equality of all sects seems to have deadened party feeling: controversy is but little known."Fearon, p. 45, 46.

"I took the boat this morning, and crossed the ferry over to Portsmouth, the small town which I told you is opposite to this place. It was court-day, and a large crowd of people was gathered about the door of the court-house. I had hardly got upon the steps to look in, when my ears were assailed by the voice of singing; and turning round to discover from what quarter it came, I saw a group of about thirty negroes, of different sizes and ages, following a roughlooking white man, who sat carelessly lolling in his sulky. They had just turned round the corner, and were coming up the main street to pass by the spot where I stood, on their way out of town. As they came nearer, I saw some of them loaded with chains to prevent their escape; while others had hold of each other's hands, strongly grasped, as if to support themselves in their affliction. I particularly noticed a poor mother, with an infant suckling at her breast as she walked along, while two small children had hold of her apron on either side, almost running to keep up with the rest. They came along singing a little wild hymn, of sweet and mournful melody, flying, by a divine instinct of the heart, to the consolation of religion, the last refuge of the unhappy, to support them in their

The absence of controversy, Mr. Fearon seems to imagine, has produced indifference; and he heaves a sigh to the memory of departed oppression. "Can it be possible (he asks) that the non-existence of religious oppression has lessened religious knowledge, and made men superstitiously dependent upon outward form, instead of internal purity?" To which question (a singular one from an enlightened man like Mr. Fearon), we answer, that the absence of religious oppression has not lessened religious knowledge, but theological animosity; and made men more dependent upon pious ac-distress. The sulky now stopped before the tions, and less upon useless and unintelligible wrangling.*

tavern, at a little distance beyond the court house, and the driver got out. My dear sir,' The great curse of America is the institution said I to a person who stood near me, 'can you of slavery-of itself far more than the foulest tell me what these poor people have been doing? blot upon their national character, and an evil What is their crime? and what is to be their which counterbalances all the excisemen, licens- punishment?' 'O,' said he, 'it's nothing at all ers, and tax-gatherers of England. No virtu- but a parcel of negroes sold to Carolina; and ous man ought to trust his own character, or that man is their driver, who has bought them' the character of his children, to the demoral-But what have they done, that they should be izing effects produced by commanding slaves. Justice, gentleness, pity and humility soon give way before them. Conscience suspends its functions. The love of command-the impatience of restraint, get the better of every other feeling; and cruelty has no other limit than fear.

"There must doubtless,' says Mr. Jefferson, be an unhappy influence on the manners of the people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between mas

Mr. Fearon mentions a religious lottery for building a Presbyterian church. What will Mr. Littleton say to this? he is hardly prepared, we suspect, for this union of Calvin and the Little Go. Every advantage will be made of it by the wit and eloquence of his fiscal opponent;

nor will it pass unheeded by Mr. Bish. 15

sold into banishment?' 'Done,' said he, 'nothing at all, that I know of; their masters wanted money, I suppose, and these drivers give good prices. Here the driver having supplied himself with brandy, and his horse with water, (the poor negroes, of course, wanted nothing,) stepped into his chair again, cracked his whip, and drove on, while the miserable exiles followed in funeral procession behind him.'” Hall, 358--360

The law by which slaves are governed in the Carolinas, is a provincial law as old as 1740, but made perpetual in 1783. By this law it is enacted, that every negro shall be presumed a slave, unless the contrary appear. The 9th clause allows two justices of the peace, and

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three freeholders, power to put them to any manner of death; the evidence against them may be without oath.-No slave is to traffic on his own account.-Any person murdering a slave is to pay 100%-or 147. if he cuts out the tongue of a slave.-Any white man meeting seven slaves together on an high road, may give them twenty lashes each.--No man must teach a slave to write, under penalty of 100%. currency. We have Mr. Hall's authority for the existence and enforcement of this law at the present day. Mr. Fearon has recorded some facts still more instructive.

scourger and murderer of slaves, to compare himself with the least and lowest of the Eu ropean nations?-much more with this great and humane country, where the greatest lord dare not lay a finger upon the meanest peasant? What is freedom, where all are not free? where the greatest of God's blessings is limited, with impious caprice, to the colour of the body? And these are the men who taunt the English with their corrupt Parliament, with their buying and selling votes. Let the world judge which is the most liable to censure--we who, in the midst of our rottenness, have torn off the "Observing a great many coloured people, par- manacles of slaves all over the world;-or ticularly females, in these boats, I concluded that they who, with their idle purity and useless they were emigrants, who had proceeded thus perfection, have remained mute and careless, far on their route towards a settlement. The fact while groans echoed and whips clanked round proved to be, that fourteen of the flats were the very walls of their spotless Congress. We freighted with human beings for sale. They wish well to America-we rejoice in her pros had been collected in the several states by slave perity-and are delighted to resist the absurd dealers, and shipped from Kentucky for a mar- impertinence with which the character of her ket. They were dressed up to the best advan-people is often treated in this country: but the tage, on the same principle that jockeys do horses upon sale. The following is a specimen of advertisements on this subject.

'TWENTY DOLLARS REWARD

"Will be paid for apprehending and lodging in jail, or delivering to the subscriber, the following slaves, belonging to JOSEPH IRVIN, of Iberville.-TOM, a very lig mulatto, blue eyes, 5 feet 10 inches high, appears to be about 35 years of age; an artful fellow-can read and write, and preaches occasionally.-CHARLOTTE, a black wench, round and full faced, tall, straight and likely-about 25 years of age, and wife of the above-named Tom.-These slaves decamped from their owner's plantation on the night of the 14th September inst." " Fearon, p. 270.

existence of slavery in America is an atrocious crime, with which no measures can be kept-for which her situation affords no sort of apology --which makes liberty itself distrusted, and the boast of it disgusting.

As for emigration, every man, of course, must determine for himself. A carpenter under thirty years of age, who finds himself at Cincinnati with an axe over his shoulder, and ten pounds in his pocket, will get rich in America, if the change of climate does not kill him. So will a farmer who emigrates early with some capital. But any person with tolerable prosperity here had better remain where he is. There are considerable evils, no doubt, in England: but it would be madness not to admit that it is, upon the whole, a very happy country,—and we are much mistaken if the next twenty years "The three African churches,' as they are will not bring with it a great deal of internal called, are for all those native Americans who improvement. The country has long been are black, or have any shade of colour darker groaning under the evils of the greatest foreign than white. These persons, though many of them war we were ever engaged in; and we are just are possessed of the rights of citizenship, are not beginning to look again into our home affairs. admitted into the churches which are visited by Political economy has made an astonishing prowhites. There exists a penal law, deeply writ- gress since they were last investigated; and ten in the mind of the whole white population, every session of Parliament brushes off some which subjects their coloured fellow-citizens to of the cobwebs and dust of our ancestors. unconditional contumely and never-ceasing in- The Apprentice Laws have been swept away; sult. No respectability, however unquestionable, the absurd nonsense of the Usury Laws will -no property, however large,-no character, probably soon follow; Public Education and however unblemished, will gain a man, whose Saving Banks have been the invention of these body is (in American estimation) cursed with last ten years; and the strong fortress of bigotry even a twentieth portion of the blood of his has been rudely assailed. Then, with all its African ancestry, admission into society!!! defects, we have a Parliament of inestimable They are considered as mere Pariahs-as out-value. If there be a place in any country where casts and vagrants upon the face of the earth! I make no reflection upon these things, but leave the facts for your consideration."—Ibid., p. 168, 169.

That such feelings and such practices should exist among men who know the value of liberty, and profess to understand its principles, is the consummation of wickedness. Every American who loves his country, should dedicate his whole life, and every faculty of his soul, to efface this foul stain from its character. If nations rank according to their wisdom and their virtue, what right has the American, a

500 well-educated men can meet together and talk with impunity of public affairs, and if what they say is published, that country must improve. It is not pleasant to emigrate into a country of changes and revolution, the size and integrity of whose empire no man can predict.

In a scarcity which occurred little more than twenty Justice of the Common Pleas, and Serjeant Remington,) years ago, every judge, (except the lord chancellor, then when they charged the grand jury, attributed the scarcity to the combinations of the farmers; and complained of it tolerated in the mouth of a schoolboy. as a very serious evil. Such doctrines would not now be

combination of powers, and no force of capital.

The Americans are a very sensible, reflecting | fact, is so expensive as one which human bepeople, and have conducted their affairs ex-ings are just beginning to inhabit;—where there tremely well; but it is scarcely possible to con- are no roads, no bridges, no skill, no help, no ceive that such an empire should very long remain undivided, or that the dwellers on the Columbia should have common interest with the navigators of the Hudson and the Delaware. England is, to be sure, a very expensive country; but a million of millions has been expended in making it habitable and comfortable; and this is a constant source of revenue, or, what is the same thing, a constant diminution of expense to every man living in it. The price an Englishman pays for a turnpike road is not equal to the tenth part of what the delay would cost him without a turnpike. The New River Company brings water to every inhabitant of London at an infinitely less price than he could dip for it out of the Thames. No country, in

How, too, can any man take upon himself to say that he is so indifferent to his country that he will not begin to love it intensely, when he is 5000 or 6000 miles from it? And what a dreadful disease Nostalgia must be on the banks of the Missouri! Severe and painful poverty will drive us all anywhere: but a wise man should be quite sure that he has so irresistible a plea, before he ventures on the Great or the Little Wabash. He should be quite sure that he does not go there from ill temper-or to be pitied-or to be regretted-or from ignorance of what is to happen to him-or because he is a poet-but because he has not enough to eat here, and is sure of abundance where he is going.

GAME LAWS.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1819.]

THE evil of the Game Laws, in their present state, has long been felt, and of late years has certainly rather increased than diminished. We believe that they cannot long remain in their present state; and we are anxious to express our opinion of those changes which they ought to experience.

We thoroughly acquiesce in the importance of encouraging those field sports which are so congenial to the habits of Englishmen, and which, in the present state of society, afford the only effectual counterbalance to the allurements of great towns. We cannot conceive a more pernicious condition for a great nation, than that its aristocracy should be shut up from one year's end to another in a metropolis, while the mass of its rural inhabitants are left to the management of factors and agents. A great man returning from London to spend his summer in the country, diffuses his intelligence, improves manners, communicates pleasure, restrains the extreme violence of subordinate politicians, and makes the middling and lower classes better acquainted with, and more attached to their natural leaders. At the same time, a residence in the country gives to the makers of laws an opportunity of studying those interests which they may afterwards be called upon to protect and arrange. Nor is it unimportant to the character of the higher orders themselves, that they should pass a considerable part of the year in the midst of these their larger families; that they should occasionally be thrown among simple, laborious, frugal people, and be stimulated to resist the prodigality of courts, by viewing with their own eyes the merits and the wretchedness of the poor.

Laws for the preservation of game are not only of importance, as they increase the amusements of the country, but they may be so constructed as to be perfectly just. The game which my land feeds is certainly mine; or, in other words, the game which all the land feeds certainly belongs to all the owners of the land; and the only practical way of dividing it is, to give to each proprietor what he can take on his own ground. Those who contribute nothing to the support of the animal, can have no possible right to a share in the distribution. To say of animals, that they are feræ Naturâ, means only, that the precise place of their birth and nurture is not known. How they shall be divided, is a matter of arrangement among those whose collected property certainly has produced and fed them; but the case is completely made out against those who have no land at all, and who cannot, therefore, have been in the slightest degree instrumental to their production. If a large

pond were divided by certain marks into four parts, and allotted to that number of proprietors, the fish contained in that pond would be, in the same sense, feræ Naturû. Nobody could tell in which particular division each carp had been born and bred. The owners would arrange their respective rights and pretensions in the best way they could; but the clearest of all possible propositions would be, that the four proprietors, among them, made a complete title to all the fish; and that nobody but them had the smallest title to the smallest share. This we say in answer to those who contend that there is no foundation for any system of game laws; that animals born wild are the property of the public; and that their appropriation is nothing but tyranny and usurpation.

In addition to these arguments, it is perhaps scarcely necessary to add, that nothing which is worth having, which is accessible, and sup plied only in limited quantities, could exist at all, if it was not considered as the property of some individual. If every body might take game wherever they found it, there would soon be an end of every species of game. The advantage would not be extended to fresh classes, but be annihilated for all classes. Besides all this, the privilege of killing game could not be granted without the privilege of trespassing on landed property;-an intolerable evil, which would entirely destroy the comfort and privacy of a country life.

But though a system of game laws is of great use in promoting country amusements, and may, in itself, be placed on a footing of justice, its effects, we are sorry to say, are by no means favourable to the morals of the poor.

It is impossible to make an uneducated man understand in what manner a bird hatched nobody knows where,-to-day living in my field, to-morrow in yours,-should be as strictly property as the goose whose whole history can be traced, in the most authentic and satisfactory manner, from the egg to the spit. The arguments upon which this depends are so contrary to the notions of the poor,- -so repugnant to their passions, and, perhaps, so much above their comprehension, that they are totally unavailing. The same man who would respect an orchard, a garden or an hen-roost, scarcely thinks he is committing any fault at all in invading the game-covers of his richer neighbour; and as soon as he becomes wearied of honest industry, his first resource is in plundering the rich magazine of hares, pheasants and partridges-the top and bottom dishes, which on every side of his village are running and flying before his eyes. As these things cannot be done with safety in the day, they must be done in the night;-and in this manner a lawless marauder is often formed, who proceeds from

one infringement of law and property to another, till he becomes a thoroughly bad and corrupted member of society.

These few preliminary observations lead naturally to the two principal considerations which are to be kept in view, in reforming the game laws;-to preserve, as far as is consistent with justice, the amusements of the rich and to diminish, as much as possible, the temptations of the poor. And these ends, it seems to us, will be best answered,

1. By abolishing qualifications. 2. By giving to every man a property in the game upon his land. 3. By allowing game to be bought by any body, and sold by its lawful possessors."

Nothing can be more grossly absurd than the present state of the game laws, as far as they concern the qualification for shooting. In Eng. land, no man can possibly have a legal right to kill game, who has not 100%. a year in land rent. With us in Scotland, the rule is not quite so inflexible, though in principle not very different. But we shall speak to the case which concerns by far the greatest number: and certainly it is scarcely possible to imagine a more absurd and capricious limitation. For what possible reason is a man, who has only 90%. per annum in land, not to kill the game which his own land nourishes? If the legislature really conceives, as we have heard surmised by certain learned squires, that a person of such a degree of fortune should be confined to profitable pursuits, and debarred from that pernicious idleness into which he would be betrayed by field sports, it would then be expedient to make a qualification for bowls or skittles-to prevent small landowners from going to races or following a pack of hounds-and to prohibit to men of a certain income, every other species of amusement as well as this. The only instance, however, in which this paternal care is exercised, is that in which the amusement of the smaller landowner is supposed to interfere with those of his richer neighbour. He may do what he pleases, and elect any other species of ruinous idleness but that in which the upper classes of society are his rivals.

Nay, the law is so excessively ridiculous in the case of small landed proprietors, that on a property of less than 100l. per annum, no human being has the right of shooting. It is not confined but annihilated. The lord of the manor may be warned off by the proprietor; and the proprietor may be informed against by any body who sees him sporting. The case is still stronger in the instance of large farms. In Northumberland, and on the borders of Scotland, there are large capitalists who farm to the amount of two or three thousand per annum, who have the permission of their distant nonresident landlords to do what they please with the game, and yet who dare not fire off a gun upon their own land. Can any thing be more utterly absurd and preposterous, than that the landlord and the wealthy tenant together cannot make up a title to the hare which is fattened upon the choicest produce of their land? That the landlord, who can let to farm the fertility of the land for growing wheat, cannot let to farm

All this has since been established.

its power of growing partridges? That he may reap by deputy, but cannot on that manor shoot by deputy? Is it possible that any respectable magistrate could fine a farmer for killing a hare upon his own grounds with his landlord's consent, without feeling that he was violating every | feeling of common sense and justice?

Since the enactment of the game laws, there has sprung up an entirely new species of property, which of course is completely overlooked by their provisions. An Englishman may possess a million of money in funds or merchandize-may be the Baring or the Hope of Europe

provide to government the sudden means of equipping fleets and armies, and yet be without the power of smiting a single partridge, though invited by the owner of the game to participate in his amusement. It is idle to say that the difficulty may be got over by purchasing land: the question is, upon what principle of justice can the existence of the difficulty be defended? If the right of keeping men-servants was confined to persons who had more than 100% a year in the funds, the difficulty might be got over by every man who would change his landed property to that extent. But what could justify so capricious a partiality to one species of property? There might be some apology for such laws at the time they were made; but there can be none for their not being now accommodated to the changes which time has introduced. If you choose to exclude poverty from this species of amusement, and to open it to wealth, why is it not opened to every species of wealth? What amusement can there be morally lawful to an holder of turnip land, and criminal in a possessor of exchequer bills? What delights ought to be tolerated to long annuities, from which wheat and beans should be excluded? What matters whether it is scrip or short-horned cattle? If the locus quo is conceded-if the trespass is waived-and if the qualification for any amusement is wealth, let it be any probable wealth

Dives agris, dives positis in fœnore nummis.

It will be very easy for any country gentleman who wishes to monopolize to himself the pleasures of shooting, to let to his tenant every other right attached to the land, except the right of killing game; and it will be equally easy, in the formation of a new game act, to give to the landlord a summary process against his tenant, if such tenant fraudulently exercises the privi leges he has agreed to surrender.

The case which seems most to alarm country gentlemen, is that of a person possessing a few acres in the heart of a manor, who might, by planting food of which they are fond, allure the game into his own little domain, and thus reap an iarvest prepared at the expense of the neighbour who surrounded him. But, under the present game laws, if the smaller possession belongs to a qualified person, the danger of intrusion is equally great as it would be under the proposed alteration; and the danger from the poacher would be the same in both cases. But if it is of such great consequence to keep clear from all interference, may not such a piece of land be rented or bought? Or, may not the food which tempts the game be sown in the same abundance in the surrounding as in the enclosed