We must altogether dissent from this doctrine. It does not appear to us quite self-evident, that every law which every government may choose to make is necessarily a wise law. We have sometimes been inclined to suspect that, even in this enlightened country, legislators have interfered in matters which should have been left to take their own course. An English Parliament formerly thought fit to limit the wages of labour. This proceeding does not perfectly satisfy us, that wages had previously been higher than they should have been. Elizabeth, unquestionably the greatest sovereign that ever governed England, passed those laws for the support of the poor, which, though in seeming and intention most humane, have produced more evil than all the cruelties of Nero and Maximin. We have just seen that, at the close of the seventeenth century, a most respectable and enlightened Scotch gentleman thought slavery the only cure for the maladies of his country. Christophe was not destitute of talent:-. Toussaint was a man of great genius and unblemished integrity, a brave soldier, and in many respects a wise statesman. But both these men had been slaves. Both were ignorant of history and political economy. That idleness {392}and disorders should follow a general civil war, was perfectly natural. That rulers, accustomed to a system of compulsory labour, should think such a system the only cure for those evils, is equally natural. But what inference can be drawn from such circumstances? The negligence with which Major Moody has arranged his Appendix, is most extraordinary. He has, with strange inconsistency, given us no copy of the decree of Toussaint in the original, and no translation of the decree of Christophe. The decree of Boyer, the most important of the three, he has not thought fit to publish at all; though he repeatedly mentions it in terms which seem to imply that he has seen it. Our readers are probably aware, that the decree of Toussaint, or rather the Major’s translation of it, was retouched by some of the statesmen of Jamaica, docked of the first and last paragraphs, which would at once have betrayed its date, and sent over by the Assembly to England, as a new law of President Boyer. This forgery, the silliest and most impudent that has been attempted within our remembrance, was at once exposed. The real decree, if there be such a decree, is not yet before the public.