Not many years elapsed before this Darling of the West was replaced, by another Chief Justice who asserted the power of constituted authorities with an energy that roused more fear than gratitude in the breasts of local magistrates. That grim, ghastly, hideous progress, which Jeffreys made in the plenitude of civil and military power through the Western Counties, was not without its comic interludes; and of its less repulsive scenes none was more laughable than that which occurred in Bristol Courthouse when the terrible Chief Justice upbraided the Bristol magistrates for taking part in a slave-trade of the most odious sort. The mode in which the authorities of the western port carried on their iniquitous traffic deserves commemoration, for no student can understand the history of any period until he has acquainted himself with its prevailing morality. At a time when by the wealth of her merchants and the political influence of her inhabitants Bristol was the second city of England, her mayor and aldermen used daily to sit in judgment on young men and growing boys, who were brought before them and charged with trivial offences. Some of the prisoners had actually broken the law: but in a large proportion of the cases the accusations were totally fictitious--the arrests having been made in accordance with the directions of the magistrates, on charges which the magistrates themselves knew to be utterly without foundation. Every morning the Bristol tolsey or court-house saw a crowd of those wretched captives--clerks out of employment, unruly apprentices, street boys without parents, and occasionally children of honest birth, ay, of patrician lineage, whose prompt removal from their native land was desired by brutal fathers or vindictive guardians; and every morning a mockery of judicial investigation was perpetrated in the name of justice. Standing in a crowd the prisoners were informed of the offences charged against them; huddled together in the dock, like cattle in a pen, they caught stray sentences from the lips of the perjured rascals who had seized them in the public ways; and whilst they thus in a frenzy of surprise and fear listened to the statements of counsel for the prosecution, and to the fabrications of lying witnesses, agents of the court whispered to them that if they wished to save their lives they must instantly confess their guilt, and implore the justices to transport them to the plantations. Ignorant, alarmed, and powerless, the miserable victims invariably acted on this perfidious counsel; and forthwith the magistrates ordered their shipment to the West Indies, where they were sold as slaves--the money paid for them by West India planters in due course finding its way into the pockets of the Bristol justices. It is asserted that the wealthier aldermen, through caution, or those few grains of conscience which are often found in the breasts of consummate rogues, forbore to share in the gains of this abominable