Our imperfect abstract gives but a meagre notion of the fulness and completeness of this admirable work. It will accomplish its object, if it send the reader to the book itself. The appearance of the volume is timely. Events and circumstances have prepared the minds of our countrymen to understand and to appreciate the argument. The book cannot fail to diffuse sounder views of the great topics which it discusses, and will exert, we trust, a beneficial influence on the legislation of the country. _The Slave-Power; its Character, Career, and Probable Designs: being an Attempt to explain the Real Issue involved in the American Contest_. By J. E. CAIRNES, M. A, London: Parker, Son, & Bourn. 8vo. This book, which is dedicated to John Stuart Mill, and is in excellent keeping with that writer's article on "The Civil War in America," deserves a respectful and even cordial welcome from the people of this country. It has grown out of a course of university-lectures on North-American Slavery, more especially considered in its economical aspects. But the author has been led to enlarge his view, and has brought before the public one of the most significant works that have yet appeared on this momentous subject. So far as the treatise is a speculative one, it has an interest for all inquirers. So far as it is intended to influence or modify the current estimate of the great conflict in this country, it bears more directly on the people of England; but, unless we have determined neither to seek nor to miss the sympathy of intelligent Englishmen, we ought to hail so manly and powerful an attempt to correct the errors which prevail in the mother-country. We do not undertake at this time to subscribe to everything we find in this book, nor are we now about to criticize its contents. Our wish is to introduce it to our readers as a comforting proof that there is a leaven yet working among our English kinsmen which it would be extremely unjust in us not to recognize. We quote an English critic, who says:--"The work is exceedingly able, as well as exceedingly opportune. It will do much to arrest the extraordinary tide of sympathy with the South which the clever misrepresentations of Southern advocates have managed to set running in this country, and to imprint the picture of a modern slave-community on the imagination of thoughtful men." Professor Cairnes sets himself at the start against the endeavor to refer this great crisis to superficial and secondary causes. He pierces the question to the core, and finds there what has too often been studiously kept out of sight, the cancer of Slavery. Acknowledging what has been so diligently harped upon, that the motive of the war is not the overthrow of the slave-power, he still insists that Slavery is the cause of the war. This he attempts to establish historically and economically; nor does he leave the subject without a searching look into Southern society and a prospective glance at the issues of the contest.