LETTER XXI.

A Chapter on American Slavery.

The word Englishman is but another name for an American, and the word American is but another name for an Englishman—­England is the father, America the son.  They have a common origin and identity of language; they hold the same religious and political opinions; they study the same histories, and have the same literature.  Steam and mechanical ingenuity have brought the two countries within nine days sailing of each other.  The Englishman on landing at New-York finds his new neighbours speaking the same language which he last heard on leaving Liverpool, and he sees the American in the same dress that he had been accustomed to look upon at home, and soon forgets that he is three thousand miles from his native land, and in another country.  The American on landing at Liverpool, and taking a walk through the great commercial city, finding no difficulty in understanding the people, supposes himself still in New-York; and if there seems any doubt in his own mind, growing out of the fact that the people have a more healthy look, seem more polite, and that the buildings have a more substantial appearance than those he had formerly looked upon, he has only to imagine, as did Rip Van Winkle, that he has been asleep these hundred years.

If the Englishman who has seen a Thompson silenced in Boston, or a Macready mobbed in New-York, upon the ground that they were foreigners, should sit in Exeter Hall and hear an American orator until he was hoarse, and wonder why the American is better treated in England than the Englishman in America, he has only to attribute it to John Bull’s superior knowledge of good manners, and his being a more law-abiding man than brother Jonathan.  England and America has each its reforms and its reformers, and they have more or less sympathy with each other.  It has been said that one generation commences a reform in England, and that another generation finishes it.  I would that so much could be said with regard to the great object of reform in America—­the system of slavery!

No evil was ever more deeply rooted in a country than is slavery in the United States.  Spread over the largest and most fertile States in the Union, with decidedly the best climate, and interwoven, as it is, with the religious, political, commercial, and social institutions of the country, it is scarcely possible to estimate its influence.  This is the evil which claims the attention of American Reformers, over and above every other evil in the land, and thanks to a kind providence, the American slave is not without his advocates.  The greatest enemy to the Anti-Slavery Society, and the most inveterate opposer of the men whose names stand at the head of the list as officers and agents of that association, will, we think, assign to William Lloyd Garrison, the first place in the ranks of the American Abolitionists.  The first