It is the destiny of the middle of the nineteenth century—­well may we be forgiven, if we pronounce it with some pride—­unhesitatingly to defend the African slave-trade, and to smile at what sickly philanthropists used to consider the unutterable woe, the unmeasured crime, and the diabolical hard-heartedness of that traffic.  We have changed all this; and, to say the truth, it was high time to discover that the negro-trade forms a charming chapter in the history of Europe, and that the protracted efforts to put it down were unchristian and unstatesmanlike.  Pitt, Roscoe, Wilberforce, Burke, Washington, Franklin, Madison, Adams, Lowndes,—­puny names! short-sighted men!  By the African slave-trade, creatures that are hardly deserving the name of men, on account of organic, intellectual, and moral incapacity, are forcibly carried into the regions of Christian religion and civilization, there to become civilized in spite of their unfitness for civilization.  The mariners, usually occupied in risking life or health merely for the sake of base traffic and filthy lucre, are suddenly transformed into ministering agents of civilization and religion.  It gives a priestly character to the captain of a slave-ship,—­to him that is willing to break the laws of his country, even daring the gallows, for the benefit of the sable brother, and of his law-abiding conservative society.  How different from those dark times when the poet could say, _—­Homo ignoto homini lupus est!_ The missionary only endeavors to carry the Church to Africa; the slave-trader carries Africa to the Church, to civilization, and to the auction-table.

There are but two more returns to truth and justice necessary,—­the Inquisition and the Witch-Trials.  These restored, we may safely congratulate ourselves on having regained the ground on which our race stood before the Reformation, that untoward event, whence all the mischief dates that has befallen man in the shape of human rights, liberty, and other deplorable things, as lately a grave writer—­not a Catholic, nor a Jew either—­gravely assured us.  Gentle readers, let us not be impatient.  Progress has been of late so rapid, that many of you, it is to be hoped, will yet have an opportunity of hailing the return of those two noble institutions, pro majore gloria Dei, for which they always existed, as long as chill and misty skepticism did not extinguish their glowing poetry.  Ah! happy times! poetic age! when there existed not only “words that burn,” but also laws that burned!

In the mean time, it may not be inappropriate to commence the consideration of a topic somewhat farther removed from us, but which, according to our humble opinion, ought not to remain wholly beyond the limits of a candid, liberal, and unprejudiced examination,—­we mean the important question, Whether the choicest of all substances, the most delicate of all muscular texture, that substance of which kings, philosophers, policemen, and supporters of crinoline are fashioned