AFRICAN SLAVERY is, at present, the subject of all-absorbing interest to the American mind; for, our people, almost intoxicated with their own freedom, seem unsatisfied with those manifold blessings acquired by the labors of their sires; and while they are conscious of not excelling them in wisdom, virtue, or valor, they are becoming ideal, and seem willing to sacrifice the practical, safe rules of republican action, for mere idealisms, born in the dizzy sphere of their own over-wrought imaginations. They tremble at the name of Washington, whose purity and moral power shed lustre upon the name of man, and they worship him as a god; but while the REAL WASHINGTON commands the homage of mankind, and stands the intermediate between the race of men and the Infinite, we find the imaginations of men ignoring reason, and embarked upon a voyage aerial, amid the clouds. There they revel high above the mountain tops of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, where the atmosphere is pure, where the light is clear, and where the lightnings play; but, alas for human weakness and frailty! they are there only in imagination, though the splendid illusion is to them a reality, and the pleasing dream of ideal beauty, which, by the magic power of transmutation, annihilates or obliterates the reason and memory, destroys those distinctions of great and little, right and wrong, weakness and power, which nature has arbitrarily made, and the experience of mankind recognized as fundamental; upon which all law is based, and all order and civilization sustained and advanced, for the security and elevation of nations and of men. THE IDEAL AND THE REAL This ideal element so predominates, in consequence of over or false _culture_; by the reading of a spurious literature, which dwells in the regions of fiction and romance, to the proportionate neglect of the stirring incidents of our time, which actually go to make up true history--which seem marvellous enough of themselves, without the necessity of invention, or the aid of artificial novelties, except for mere embellishment.