Malpractice may be covered by a shroud, and the remains of African experiments overgrown with brambles; but such stupendous monuments of folly or of spite, or ulterior design, are not easily overlooked by men not interested in keeping them from public view. The negro you have started on a rapid down-hill march to the grave, and will so find his movement written in every succeeding census that will hereafter be taken in the United States. But let us turn from your follies to your sum of excuses. You have done all, if your own words may be taken as expressive of your intentions, for the sake of that _beau ideal_ of the world called civil or political liberty. But have you ever stopped in your career long enough to ask yourselves what such liberty is? The German radical sees it only in equality, the toper in his drams, the brigand in his plunder, and even Mr. Wendell Phillips, whom you have followed as the sheep with the bell, has displayed but little, if any, more wisdom in his definitions. It is, he tells us, “The reservation of all natural rights with civil liberty to defend them.” Could inconsistency be more complete? If all natural rights be retained, from whence come the civil ones? Of what materials are they made? If my natural rights be undisturbed, by what authority am I crowded from the fields of my neighbor? Did nature give him more dominion over them than she gave to me? Or, if the proposition be not as empty as the air on which it floated, by what authority did the United States government wage that war against the Southern States, for the support of which Mr. Phillips was even then, while making the utterance, haranguing the people? Did not the government assume that the Southern people had surrendered certain _natural rights_, which they could not, at pleasure, resume? Sir William Blackstone, whose views have stood the abrasion of time with as much durability as any other of his fellow contributors, discusses the subject with as much clearness and precision as is, we apprehend, in any other place to be found. He divides the subject into three heads, and to each gives particular bounds—into absolute liberty, natural liberty, and that division which is called civil or political liberty. The first—absolute liberty—he tells us is “The power of one to do whatever he sees fit.” The second—natural liberty—is “The power of one to do whatever he sees fit to do, subject only to the laws of nature,” and the third and last—civil liberty—is “Natural liberty so far restrained, and no farther than is essential for the public good.” The first of these, it will no doubt readily be seen, can have no existence below him to whom all things move by command. For none other can do whatever he sees fit to do, consequently such liberty has no existence in the world of men.