trious. The West Indies are ruined. Immense tracts of the most productive soil in the world are left uncultivated for the want of labour, and other nations are making fortunes over the heads of British colonists. The emancipated negro will do no work at all. His needs are small, and his exertions are small too. The climate enables him to dispense with refinements of shelter or apparel; almost spontaneously the soil provides him with sustenance, and vagrancy and indolence leave him at least as much like a beast as ever.

"To complete the force of this case, while fertile estates are lying untilled for want of labour, and European manufacturers are anxiously looking for the cotton which such labour would supply, an inexhaustible store of the agency required is left unemployed and useless in other lands. But our embarrassment arises from the fact, that if once blacks were known to be wanted, and to be saleable on the coast for some sort of price, they would forthwith be kidnapped for consignment by their own chief! By transporting Africans from their own country to the West Indies, we could benefit all parties together the colonist, the labourer, and the European consumer of tropical produce; but we are afraid to shew our desire for such supplies, lest man-stealing should be commenced anew. If we could but surmount this difficulty, we should be not only restoring the prosperity of our own colonies with advantages even to the blacks themselves, but we should probably be going far to suppress the slave trade as it survives. That free labour can beat slave labour is undoubtedly true; but, unfortunately, the free labour is not forthcoming, and slave labour wins in default of opposition."

It is easy to see what the true meaning is of this cautious language. This is the way the London Times generally prepares to swing round to some new direction. It is trying, as sailors often do, to catch the breeze before it fully makes itself felt. It anticipates the adoption, ere long, of a new policy in England, who needs more African labour as much as France does, and is no more proof against selfish considerations.

From this glance at New York and London opinions, let us look at those now held in Paris. France is not only thinking or talking about the matter, but acting. Lord Clarendon, in the House of Lords, denounced what she is doing as, in fact, the slave trade. The Constitutionnel, in three editorial columns, gave a semi-official reply.

(6 The government had authorised French merchants to buy, on the coast of Africa, ten thousand slaves, but it had a functionary of the State in charge of the affair, and the negroes were set free, and after the term of the engagement as hired servants was over, should all, if they wished, be sent back to Africa. Our government," it continues, "has recognised the immigration as alike useful and moral. Our enterprise is the very opposite of the slave trade. The code of British abolitionists is not law for France. It is not by our fault that slavery and barbarism pervade Africa; we must take the social state of the

native population as it is. In pursuing our own interests, we act in a way to meliorate the lot of those who contract engagements with us; we christianize and we civilize."

Every one of these sentences is pregnant with meaning. We commend to the examination of our readers these carefully deliberated words of France to England, in all their various important bearings. They are designed to settle several points, and, of course, they are settled, by imperial authority. Louis Napoleon constitutes himself a judge of morals above any dictation of England, and is practically carrying out his philanthropic plans for the benefit of Africa. Not one of the ten thousand is to be forced to emigrate, and, every one of them has the word of Napoleon for it, that he will be sent back after a term of years to his old home! Meantime this contract between the savage African and the French Emperor, wherein the African acts so voluntarily and freely, is made through the chief whose slave that African is, and who has the absolute power of life and death over him! And if, in the progress of these benevolent négotiations of the French court with the courts of Ashanti or Dahomey, it should turn out that, under the stimulus of the French silver which buys these slaves to set them free, the native wars that fed the old-fashioned slave trade should break out anew, and the whole interior bleed again, why (says the philosophic as well as philanthropic Louis, with a shrug of his shoulders), what is that to us, we must take the social state of the native population as it is!

Such are the indications of changing opinions outside of us. We regret to notice, to some slight extent, a corresponding movement at home. In this State we are persuaded there are few who would consent to such proceedings. In the SouthWest, it is said, there have been already some actual importations. The New Orleans Delta says the trade is already opened, and that on some plantations negroes "recently imported from Africa are at their daily work." There has been some discussion of the question in the Legislatures of Mississippi and Louisiana, but we believe no action yet taken. The New Orleans Delta states that Henry Hughes and his party, in the Mississippi House of Representatives, "urge the labour immigration movement; not opening the slave trade, but legalizing the operations now already begun to be carried on. The same paper also gives rules and directions for the conduct of the business expeditiously, secretly, safely, and profitably. The profits of the business are stated to be enormous.

In the name of the Southern people, especially of the religious class, at the South, and still more especially of Southern Presbyterians, we raise our voice of protest against the reopening amongst us of the African slave trade, whether openly

or in disguise. And having brought to the notice of our readers the total change of attitude assumed and being assumed by Abolitionists, we call on all true Southern men to abjure all present and future, as we have all past alliance, with their views and practices. We call on the press of the South to speak out and repudiate the doctrine of man-stealing. We call upon our fellow-citizens, and most particularly our fellow Christians of the South-West, not to tarnish their honour and ours by following the base lead of France, or of England; and not to set Christianity and the Bible against the South. The New Orleans Picayune, we are glad to observe, is protesting on the part of "five-sixths of that city against this revival of the slave trade by indirection, and this bringing into Louisiana gangs of pagan labourers fresh from the bloody and barbarous wars of the African coast." It objects not so much upon any humanitarian ground on behalf of the imported negro, since it will tend to his advantage; but "upon every ground of expediency and principle, and upon considerations of the interests and honour of the State." It objects, as it ought to object, distinctly on the ground of those "means of bringing about this transfer of the African to our shores which are abhorrent to every feeling of what is right and merciful; means which make the slave-trade a horror to many who conscientiously uphold the institution of slavery as it exists among ourselves." It states that the French Government does not disguise the fact that it deals in slaves. It well says "there is no such thing to be had on the African coast as a negro willing to contract and able to contract understandingly for a free labourer. The whole country is a drive for the chiefs who monopolise the traffic, and whom the new French market has incited to new wars for the purposes of getting captives." This journal, to its honour, also says

"If the design really be to bring in free emigrants from Africa, such proceedings are contrary to all the laws of the State which have aimed to hinder the increase of free blacks. But if the contract is to be made a device, by which the slave trade is to be covertly practised under the authority of the State of Louisiana, then the scheme is not worthy of the manliness and honesty which ought to pervade the legislation of a sovereign State."

In conclusion we have only to say that it is idle to deny the cruelty of the slave trade, and the equal cruelty of the apprentice trade as it operates in Africa itself. There are too many witnesses to this cruelty for any man to contradict. Mr Bowen, the Baptist Missionary from Georgia, resident seven years in Africa, and now on a visit home, says

"Forty years ago the Egba kingdom contained more than 100

towns, some of which were six or eight miles in circuit. In 1850 but one of these towns remained. All the rest had been swept away as a crop for the slave trade. The new system affords a safer passage across the Atlantic, but the apprentices' are collected by the same system of destructive wars which have already depopulated some of the finest districts of Africa. No sooner was it known that apprentices would be bought, than the chiefs in different places began to make war upon their weaker neighbours. My last advices from Africa told of famishing sieges and bloody battles to supply the French ships with emigrants."

Is it possible that any portion of our Southern people will stoop, like the French Emperor, to make themselves allies of those barbarian chiefs in Africa, who were ready to make war on their weaker neighbours as soon as they could get money by it? Shall we for cotton, and those chiefs for gold and silver, become partners in this business? Suppose it does benefit many of these negroes and their descendants-have we any right to employ those chiefs to kill other negroes in getting these, and to get these by capturing whole villages? And shall we aim to do this bloody work under a false pretence? The bare suggestion is insulting. We may be sure our countrymen of the South-West, if they have only time to understand the case, will decide it rightly. Mississippi and Louisiana will not covet a prosperity which shall be the fruit of crimes like this. They will not forget that States have a being as well as individuals, and therefore a responsibility for all their acts. They will not forget that there is such a thing as national honour and justice. They will not bring upon themselves, and indirectly upon their sisters of the South, the reproach of hisfredume tory and the frown of God.

ART. V.-The Office of Deacon.

INEFFICIENCY is oftentimes affirmed to be a characteristic of the ministry in the present day.

There are not wanting men who, with the bitterness of an asp's poison under their lips, await every opportunity to emit some slanderous effusion into the character of those who, in the providence of God, are called to be preachers of His word and pastors of His flock. With no appreciation of the onerous nature of ministerial duties, and with hearts full of enmity against every form and demand of religion, they are ever ready, like a bird of prey which fastens itself upon forms of living in

nocence as well as upon corrupted masses, to seize indiscriminately upon that in the ministry which is good as well as evil, and to pounce upon the whole as worthy only of destruction. "The boar out of the wood doth waste [ministerial character], the wild beast of the field doth devour it." To say that we have no sympathy with such infidel ravings would be saying little. We despise, in men professing more than ordinary intelligence, that ignorance, much more that lack of moral appreciation, which leads them to denounce an institution that has confessedly accomplished so much towards civilisation and general morality.

Withdrawing ourselves from the unbelieving world, we meet even in Christian society, a large number of persons who seem to view the ministry with suspicion. Exorbitant in their demands upon both ministerial piety and pastoral labour, naturally fault-finding in their dispositions, possessing an eagle-eye for the detection of defects that lie beyond themselves, they are ever ready to catch at any delinquency in the ministry whether imaginary or real, and to brand the whole body with its blame. In their estimation, the ministry should be treated to a stricter oversight than are men of other professions: there should be on the part of the Church, a more rigid enforcement of ministerial duties, that these duties may be the more efficiently discharged. It seems to afford a peculiar and exquisite enjoyment to many of these individuals to hold ministers up, if not to the scorn, certainly to the mistrust of both the religious and the irreligious public. We have sometimes met with these traducers of God's messengers, who urge forward with a zest betraying too readily for their purpose the malignity of their character, every little foible in the ministry, every inconsistent circumstance in ministerial history, every unworthy suspicion of clerical honour, which a godless public, or an infidel press, or a slanderous apostate may have launched upon the waters of rumour. Sometimes these uncharitable repetitions will be accompanied by semi-sanctified deplorings that religion should so greatly suffer at the hands of its guardians, and will be whispered, in confidence forsooth! into a hundred ears, unconscious, we will suppose, that while they profess to deplore the stain which ministerial inconsistencies inflict upon religion, they are themselves guilty of the most injuriouslytelling of all Christian inconsistencies, that of wielding an uncharitable tongue. We refrain from clothing in words the contempt with which we regard such unmitigated treachery towards a cause to which every Christian man has sworn an inalienable allegiance.

Leaving the circle of general Christian society, we fall upon another class who are ever ready, by both lip and pen, to de