clergy to certain queries sent out a few years ago by Lord Bathurst, will see some curious instances of the ignorance, the idleness, and the levity of that body. Why should the new Establishment be less corrupt than the old? The dangers to which it is exposed are the same; we do not see that its securities are much greater. It has Bishops, no doubt; and when we observe that Bishops are more active than their inferiors on this side of the Atlantic, we shall begin to hope that they may be useful on the other. These reforms have begun at the wrong end. “God,” says old Hooker, no enemy to Episcopal Establishments, “first assigned Adam maintenance for life, and then appointed him a law to observe.” Our rulers would have done well to imitate the example,--to give some security to the hearth and to the back of the slave, before they sent him Bishops, Archdeacons, and Chancellors and Chapters. The work of Mr. Stephen has, we think, disposed forever of some of the principal arguments which are urged by the Colonists. If those who conscientiously support slavery be open to conviction, if its dishonest advocates be susceptible of {314}shame, they can surely never again resort to that mode of defence, which they have so often employed when hard pressed by some particular case of oppression. On such occasions their cry has been, “There are individual instances. You must not deduce general conclusions from them. What would you say, if we were to form our estimate of English society from the Police Reports, or the Newgate Calendar? Look at the rules, and not at the exceptions.” Here, then, we have those boasted rules. And what are they? We find that the actions which other societies punish as crimes, are in the West Indies sanctioned by law;--that practices, of which England affords no example but in the records of the jail and the gibbet, are there suffered to exist unpunished;--that atrocities may there be perpetrated in the drawing-room or in the market-place, on the persons of untried and unconvicted individuals, which here would scarcely find an asylum in the vaults of the Blood-Bowl House.