shows that production and commerce have not been annihilated by the abolition of slavery, while the moral condition of both races has been manifestly improved.  Recognizing the immutable laws which are potent in the life of nations, M. Cochin touches upon the remote antecedents of slavery as well as the immediate antecedents of emancipation.  His results are divided into groups, material, economical, and moral; thus the reader may easily systematize the information of the book.  There are practical lessons in relation to the great deed to which our nation has been called that may well be laid to heart.  The insurrection of San Domingo preceded emancipation, and was due to the absurd law of the Constituent Assembly which gave the same privileges to freemen of every color and every degree of education and capacity.  While we recognize the negro as a man, let us remember that the time for recognizing him as a citizen is not yet.  We must also mark the importance of paying with promptness the indemnity to the master, in order that the greater part of it may pass in the form of wages into the hands of the servant.  Forewarned of mistakes in the methods of emancipation, which other nations deplore, we encounter the question with many important aids to its solution.

M. Cochin, though not a Protestant like Count de Gasparin, writes in a similar spirit of fervent Christian belief.  In the second volume of his work, which we trust will soon appear in America, the relation of Christianity to slavery is powerfully discussed.  The Catholic Church is shown to oppose this crime against humanity, and the Pope, as if to indorse the conclusion, has conferred an order of knighthood upon the author since the publication of his book.  It is worth while to note that the most logical and effective assailants of slavery that these last years have produced have been devout Catholics,—­Augustin Cochin in France, and Orestes A. Brownson in America.  And while we think that it will require a goodly amount of special pleading to clear either the Catholic Church or most Protestant sects from former complicity with this iniquity, we heartily rejoice that those liberal men who intelligently encourage and direct the noblest instinct of the time are the exclusive possession of no form of religious belief.  From every ritual of worship, from every variety of speculative creed, earnest minds have reached the same practical ground of labor for the freedom of man.  Such minds realize that Christianity can approximate its exact application only as the machinery of human society is rightly comprehended.  The Gospel, acting through the church, the meeting-house, the lecture-room, and the press, is demanding the redemption of master and slave from the mutual curse of their relation.  Every affliction and struggle of this civil war may be sanctified, not only to the moral improvement, but also to the material prosperity of our land.