finally attended it have been made to overshadow the thing itself, in the popular estimation, but despite all these, and all other drawbacks, it is certain that the introduction of these negroes has resulted in a vastly preponderating good to our race, while the four millions of Christianized and enlightened negroes in our midst, when compared with any similar number of their race in Africa, are in a condition so immeasurably happy and desirable, that we can find no terms that will sufficiently express it. The frightful tales invented of their cruel treatment on the passage from Africa may be dismissed with the single remark that it was the highest interest of the traders to take the utmost care of them, and if that be not sufficient, with the simple but pregnant fact that the average mortality, when the trade was legal, was only eleven per cent., while the illegal trade, the efforts to put it down, the false philanthropy, and mistaken interference, have raised the mortality to something like forty per cent.! There were but two mistakes, wrongs, inhumanities, outrages on nature, whatever we may term them, involved in the “slave trade,” so far as we were concerned: 1st, the importation mainly of males, and the consequent violation of the laws of reproduction—of that fundamental and universal command of the Almighty to multiply their kind and to replenish the earth; and, 2d, their importation into northern latitudes, unsuited to the physical and industrial nature of the negro. But, as has been said, nature, sooner or later, recovers from every outrage upon her laws, and while we, in our ignorance and folly, have been disputing over our petty theories in respect to this subject, her reparatory processes have silently and steadily gone on and corrected our mistakes, and, therefore, both of the real _wrongs_ connected with the “slave trade” are now substantially _righted_.