History is sometimes called a gallery, where are exhibited scenes, events, and characters of the Past. It may also be called the world's great charnel-house, where are gathered coffins, dead men's bones, and all the uncleanness of years that have fled. Thus is it both an example and a warning to mankind. Walking among its pictures, radiant with the inspiration of virtue and of freedom, we thrill with new impulse to beneficent exertion. Groping amidst unsightly shapes without an epitaph, we may at least derive fresh aversion to all their living representatives. In this mighty gallery, amidst angelic light, are the benefactors of mankind,--poets who have sung the praise of virtue, historians who have recorded its achievements, and the good of all time, who, by word or deed, have striven for the welfare of others. Here are those scenes where the godlike in man is made manifest in trial and danger. Here also are those grand pictures exhibiting the establishment of free institutions: the signing of Magna Charta, with its priceless privileges, by a reluctant monarch; and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, announcing the inalienable rights of man, by the fathers of our Republic. On the other hand, in ignominious confusion, far down in this dark, dreary charnel-house, is tumbled all that now remains of the tyrants, the persecutors, the selfish men, under whom mankind have groaned. Here also, in festering, loathsome decay, are monstrous _institutions_ or _customs_, which the earth, weary of their infamy and wrong, has refused to sustain,--the Helotism of Sparta, the Serfdom of Christian Europe, the Ordeal by Battle, and Algerine Slavery. From this charnel-house let me draw forth one of these. It may not be without profit to dwell on the _origin_, _history_, and _character_ of a custom, which, after being for a long time a by-word and a hissing among the nations, is at last driven from the world. The easy, instinctive, positive reprobation which it will receive from all must necessarily direct our judgment of other institutions, yet tolerated in defiance of justice and humanity. I propose to consider the subject of _White Slavery in Algiers_, or, perhaps it may be more appropriately called, _White Slavery in the Barbary States_. As Algiers was its chief seat, it seems to have acquired a current name from that place. Nevertheless I shall proceed to speak of White Slavery, or the Slavery of Christians, throughout the Barbary States. This subject may fail in interest, but not in novelty. I am not aware of any previous attempt to combine its scattered materials. TERRITORY OF THE BARBARY STATES.