In The West Indian Archipelago As In Brazil (Two Portions Of America Which Contain Near 3,200,000 Slaves) The

Fear of [?] among the blacks, and the perils that surround the whites, have been hitherto the most powerful causes of

The security of the mother countries and of the maintenance of the Portuguese dynasty. Can this security, from its nature, be of long duration? Does it justify the inertness of governments who neglect to remedy the evil while it is yet time? I doubt this. When, under the influence of extraordinary circumstances, alarm is mitigated, when countries in which the accumulation of slaves has produced in society the fatal mixture of heterogeneous elements may be led, perhaps unwillingly, into an exterior struggle, civil dissensions will break forth in all their violence and European families, innocent of an order of things which they have had no share in creating, will be exposed to the most imminent dangers.

We can never sufficiently praise the legislative wisdom of the new republics of Spanish America which, since their birth, have been seriously intent on the total extinction of slavery. That vast portion of the earth has, in this respect, an immense advantage over the southern part of the United States, where the whites, during the struggle with England, established liberty for their own profit, and where the slave population, to the number of 1,600,000, augments still more rapidly than the whites.* (* In 1769, forty-six years before the declaration of the Congress at Vienna, and thirty-eight years before the abolition of the slave-trade, decreed in London and at Washington, the Chamber of Representatives of Massachusetts had declared itself against "the unnatural and unwarrantable custom of enslaving mankind." See Walsh's Appeal to the United States, 1819 page 312.

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