The manners and customs most opposed to European ideas found favour in the eyes of Frederika Bremer, when she thought she detected in American usages the elements of progress and liberty. It is, indeed, with too light a touch that she glides by the more regrettable defects of the American character, so fascinated, so dazzled is she by the brilliant mirage of independence--independence of thought and action, often verging upon or passing into licence--which the United States presented to her. She reminds one of that Western patriot who, from the banks of the Mississippi, watching the explosion of a steamship, exclaimed, "Heavens! the Americans are a great people!" This exclamation she does not repeat in so many words, but the idea which it embodies is present in every page of her book. But, in truth, she travelled under conditions which made it almost impossible for her to form an impartial judgment of men and things. She was everywhere received with so much enthusiastic hospitality, even by Quakers, Shakers, Plungers, and other of those strange sects described with so much unction by the late Mr. Hepworth Dixon, that her usual keen powers of observation were necessarily obscured. She saw everything through rose-coloured glasses. On the question of slavery, for example, she, the ardent champion of the emancipation of humanity, who started with the firm resolution to launch her heaviest thunderbolts at the slave-owners, was led to give forth an uncertain sound. For the astute Southerners got hold of her, feted her, complimented her, read her works; how could she retain her impartiality when brought under such powerful influences? Can any author inveigh against the men who read his books? So it has not inaptly been said that she denounces the slave-holders only when she is in Yankee territory, and criticises the Yankees only when she is in the Southern States. Allowing herself to believe that the condition of the negroes was not so deplorable as she had supposed, she even began to extenuate the institution of slavery by arguments too transparently feeble to call for detailed confutation. It is true, she says, that slavery is an evil to-day, but to-morrow it will be a boon to humanity, and a boon to the negro world. Why? Because the American negro, enlightened by the teachings of Christianity through his contact with the white man, will, at some future time, return to Africa, the home of his ancestors, a missionary of civilization, charged with the glorious task of redeeming and regenerating it. This was a new reading of the old falsehood, doing evil that good may come. What could the negro think of a Christianity that justified his subjugation by oppression? Or how could a race, kept in the bonds and fetters of an accursed degradation, be fitted to play the part of apostles and missionaries? Happily it is unnecessary to discuss the subject, since slavery no longer exists in America. * * * * *