this dreadful traffic was not only sanctioned, but a solemn compact was entered into, by which all prohibition of it was prohibited for twenty years. Yet, in the year 1820, after the lapse of only thirty-three years, this very trade was declared to be piracy,--the highest offence known to the law,--and the felon’s death was denounced against all principals and abettors. We are often reminded by gentlemen of the south, that, at the time of the adoption of that constitution, slavery existed in almost every state in the Union; and that some northern merchants, by a devilish alchemy, transmuted gold from its tears and blood. But can they read no lesson as to the progress of the age from the fact that all those states have since abjured slavery of their own free will; and that, at the present day, it would be more tolerable for any northern merchant, rather than to be reasonably suspected of the guilt of this traffic, to be cast into the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, seven times heated? In Europe, the tide of liberty, though meeting with obstructions from firm-seated dynasties and time-strengthened prerogative, still rises, and sweeps onward with unebbing flow. In France, revolutions follow each other in quicker and quicker succession. These revolutions are only gigantic struggles of the popular will to escape from oppression; and, at each struggle, the giant snaps a chain. Great Britain, which in former times sent more vessels to the coast of Africa to kidnap and to transport its natives, than all the other nations of the earth together, now maintains a fleet upon the same coast to suppress the trade she so lately encouraged. Three times, during the present century, has that government escaped civil commotion by making large concessions to popular rights. Since the year 1814, written constitutions have been extorted by the people from more than three fourths of all the sovereigns of Europe. What a tempest now beats upon Austria, from all points of the compass, because, during the last season, she attempted only to half enslave the Hungarians,--because she attempted to do what, during the last century, she might have done without a remonstrance! The rights of individuals, not less than the rights of communities, have emerged from oblivion into recognition, and have become law. Penal codes have been ameliorated, and barbarous customs abolished. There are now but two places on the globe where a woman can be publicly whipped,--in Hungary and in the Southern States! And the universal scorn and hissing with which the rulers of the former country have been visited for their women-whipping, and their execution of those whose sole crime was their love of freedom, only foretoken that fiercer scorn and louder hissing with which, from all sides of the civilized world, the latter will soon be visited. Let the high-toned and chivalrous sons of the south,--those “who feel a stain upon their honor like a wound,”--think of all this, as one in the long catalogue