But now that circumstances have caused loyal American citizens to think upon slavery, and to mark with a quickened moral perception its enormous usurpations, there could be no publication more timely than this volume by M. Cochin.  To be sure, all illustration of the results of this legalized injustice, derived from a past experience, must be tame to those who stand face to face with the gigantic conspiracy in which it has concentrated its venom, and from which it must stagger to its doom.  The familiar proverb which declares that the gods make mad those whom they would destroy has a significance not always considered.  For when a man loses his intellectual equilibrium, a baseness of character which never broke through the crust of conventionality may be suddenly revealed; and when a wicked system goes mad, such depths of perfidy are disclosed as few imagined to exist.  During the last two years, while our Southern sky has been aglow with the red light of the slave-masters’ insurrection, few of us could probe and pry about among details of lesser villanies than those pertinent to the day.  And so it is fortunate that M. Cochin now comes to address a people instinctively grasping at the principle which may give them peace, and to offer them his calm and thorough investigation of the material basis whereon that principle may surely rest.

“L’Abolition de l’Esclavage,” of which the first volume is translated under the title at the head of this notice, was published in 1861.  It is a diligent study of official and other testimony bearing upon slavery and emancipation.  M. Cochin had access to the unpublished records of every ministry in Europe, and gives his evidence with scientific precision.  He has faithfully detailed the effects of liberating the slaves in the colonies of France and England, as well as in those of Denmark, Sweden, and Holland.  By an admirable clearness of arrangement, and a certain netiete of statement, the reader retains an impression of the experience in slavery and its abolition which each colony represents.  That no disturbance should follow emancipation, we apprehend that no one, who believes in the moral government of the world, can seriously expect.  Ceasing to persist in sin frees neither man nor nation from the penalty it entails.  But the distressing consequences of any social upheaval make a far greater impression upon the common mind than the familiar evils of the condition from which the community emerges.  The amount of suffering which must temporarily follow an act of justice long delayed is always over-estimated.  Many half-measures for the public safety, many blunders easy to be avoided, produce the derangement of affairs which the enemies of human freedom are never tired of proclaiming.  It is the merit of M. Cochin to separate that penalty of wrong which it is impossible to extinguish from the disastrous results of causes peculiar to the politics of a given nation, or to the private character of its officers.  He certainly