transactions is, and must be in almost every case impossible--after all this, which the late proceedings have so strongly brought to light--there remains but one safe course, _viz._ to abstain from all mercantile intercourse with countries in which slavery or the slave trade exists. The absurdity which appears on the face of such a statement as this just made, involving as it does the cutting off communication with half the world at least, and leaving the communication with the other half very much on the footing of an inconsistency, renders the accuracy of the rule, as a conclusion from the preceding reasoning, very suspicious. I appeal, however, to every candid and honest mind whether it be or it be not the conclusion which, but for its _absurdity_, (if so it is to be called) would be imperative, and such as could not be avoided without manifest want of honesty. If such is the real fact--if the conclusion is just and legitimate, and yet it leads to something absurd and wrong; then the principles upon which it proceeds must themselves be the _wrong-doers_. The state of the law, which leaves no other alternative than that of an impracticable absurdity on the one side, and on the other an exposure, imminent and threatening, to an indictment, followed up by the most terrible consequences, even if a conviction does not take place--must be wrong. It deserves a stronger epithet, lest it should be thought that by wrong is only meant _unwise_--it is positively of the very nature of a national crime--it is a deep moral stain upon the people who suffer this state of things to continue in all its hideous deformity, whilst the victims to such a state of the law could only be looked upon as barbarously sacrificed: the people tolerating its continuance, when once made aware of what was being done, could be considered only as a race of heartless, cruel tyrants. In the pursuit of a praiseworthy object it is very possible, and indeed it is not uncommon, for a nation no less than for an individual to betray itself into a very false position, which is made so much the more mischievous, because, in the case of the nation no less than the individual, people are found ready to take advantage of that position. But so soon as the evil reveals itself in this practical shape, the nation, quite as much as the individual, is called upon to remove the very possibility of a repetition of the act of oppression arising from that false position.