Fact, as usual, lay between the two assertions, but the inner working of the slave-abolition measures was known only to few, and those few hardly cared to speak out. England, ripe for free labour, had resolved to throw off the African; she kicked away, to use a popular phrase, the ladder by which she had risen, and she made slavery, for which she had shed her best blood in the days of Queen Anne, the sum of all villanies in the reign of King George. This was natural. The steps by which nations attain to the summit of civilization appear, as they are beheld from above, gradations of mere barbarism: to revert to them would be as possible as to enjoy the nursery tales which enlivened our childhood. Other European peoples were not in the condition of England to dispense with slave labour, but the termination of a long continental war was made the inducement to sign abolition treaties. All were so much waste- paper, not being based upon public opinion. As long as Cuba and the slave-importers of the Western world required (A.D. 1830-57) an annual supply of 100,000 men, their demands were supplied. Neither the word piracy, nor the prospect of hanging from the yard-arm—a remedy more virulent than the disease—could deter adventurers from engaging in a trade where a ‘pretty girl’ was to be ‘bought for a few rolls of tobacco, fathoms of flannel, and pieces of calico,’ and whose profits were estimated at 200 per cent. As long as sugar, tobacco, and dollars increase, so long will the desire for more support the means by which the supply may be increased. Of old one cargo run home out of three paid: presently one in four was found sufficient. The losses, however, added greatly to the misery of the slave; ships were built with 18 inches between decks, one pint of water ahead was served out per diem, and five wretches were stowed away instead of two. With curious contradiction and ‘wrong-headedness,’ these evils, caused by an abolitionary squadron, were quoted against the slaver, as if the diabolical malignity of the latter could be gratified only by destroying his own property.