pier than that of the wretched beings who cultivate the sugar plantations of Trinidad and Demerara, cannot be supposed to be more favourable to health and fecundity, than that of free labourers. In 1810, the slavetrade had been but recently abolished, and there were, in consequence, many more male than female slavesa circumstance, of course, very unfavourable to procreation. Slaves are perpetually passing into the class of free men; but no freeman ever descends into servitude-so that the census will not exhibit the whole effect of the procreation which really takes place. We find, by the census of 1810, that the number of slaves in the Union was then 1,191,000-in 1820, they had increased to 1,538,000 -that is to say, in ten years they had increased 29 per cent-within 3 per cent of that rate of increase, which would double the number in

twenty-five years. We may, we think, fairly calculate, that if the female slaves had been as numerous as the males, and if no manumissions had taken place, the census of the slave population would have exhibited an increase of ten per cent in ten years."

The folly and ignorance of this is indeed portentous. That increase which Mr Sadler has shewn to be impossible, under all the suppositions of Dr Franklin, who created a golden age, in which people had nothing else to do but propagate, and to propagate from earliest puberty on to green old age, in neither sex becoming impotent or effetethis ninny believes to have been realized by negro slaves, in an American house of bondage, in spite of numbers of them perpetually passing into the class of freemen, and in spite of the comparative scarcity of females in proportion to males, a circumstance which he very profoundly remarks, is" of course very unfavourable to procreation!"

But every single statement or assertion, in this, "our reason," is false. Do not mind the lines in Italics. Mr Sadler tears to pieces the whole concern.

In the first place, the female slaves were, at a nubile age, as numerous as the males, which we kindly mention, just that the Reviewer may see

that he can't open his mouth, but out comes a mistake.

For, even if the computation be made to commence at fourteen, instead of about sixteen, and to end at twenty-six, the whole difference between the males and females at that age, in a population of above a million and a half, is only 652. Our arithmetician does not see this, but Mr Sadler does; and so, at his pointing out, does all the world, but the Wooden Spoon.

Secondly, The Reviewer says, "And if no manumissions had taken place." What have manumissions to do with the matter? Nothing. Do manumitted slaves not propagate? They do-and none the worse or less frequently, one would think, for manumission. Add, then, the free coloured population, and the slave population, in 1810, and in 1820, and the deuce is in it, if you do not get at all the manumissions. Now, the total number in 1810, is 1,377,810; and, in 1820, it is 1,771,658, actually giving a less increase than that in the slaves only, instead of amounting, as it ought to do, on the principle of the Reviewer, to 32 per cent! "I can retort the Reviewer's compliment, with the utmost sincerity," adds Mr Sadler; "he is, indeed, a bad arithmetician."

Thirdly, "Slaves," says the Reviewer, "are perpetually passing into manumission." Be it so. "I hope and believe," says Mr Sadler, "this to be the case in America and to a considerable degree. But the Reviewer does not mean to say, that, in gaining their freedom, they lose their country or their colour. There they are; and included among another class of persons in North America, the free-coloured population,—to which I have in vain directed the Re

viewer's attention in the volumes under criticism. I will make another attempt. As the number of them is not more than a sixth or a seventh of that of the slaves, it is very obvious, that the constant passing of numbers, however moderately estimated, from the large to the small community, must have had a great effect upon the increase of the latter. Now, the free coloured population have women enough among them to satisfy even the Reviewer's ideas on

the subject. The number of these free coloured inhabitants, of both sexes and of all ages, in 1810, was 186,446; in 1820, it amounted to 233,530; having, therefore, increased, during that period, something above 25 per cent. But to take the very lowest supposition regarding manumissions, at how much smaller an increase than that must he arrive, when we calculate that which has taken place from procreation only! Thus, then, the population of America contains within itself a distinct class, exhibiting those results which completely overturn all the fables which have been uttered regarding American increase by procreation, and by procreation alone.""

Fourthly, Now for the squabash. The Reviewer has most audaciously said, that, between 1810 and 1820, "the numbers of the slaves in the United States were not increased by emigration." The assertion is false; and if the Reviewer did not know it to be so, he is the most ignorant man now extant. Is there a man, asks Mr Sadler, who is not aware, that long after the act of Congress of the 2d of March, 1807, and up to a very recent date, if not even to the present hour, the slave-trade has been carried on in America to a prodigious extent? Why, the proceedings of the legislature, and of the courts of justice there, give witness to the fact. In Congress, several acts have been passed between 1810 and 1820, of which the object was the suppression of the slave-trade. On the 15th of May, 1820, Congress passed an act constituting the offence piracy, and in spite of the aversion of the legislature of that country to capital punishments, adjudging those found guilty to suffer death! Nor has even that law, with such a penalty annexed to its violation, been found effectual; for, in 1821, in a report of the House of Representatives, we find, that "it is still a melancholy fact, that the disgraceful practice is now carried on to a surprising extent!" In April, 1822, a committee of the Senate declare, "The African slave-trade now prevails to a great extent." Mr Sadler does not say that this nefarious trade, so extensively carried on by the Americans during the period in question, was directed to the supply of the home-market exclusively-he is

too well-informed on the whole question to say so; neither does he attempt to extricate the proportion of it that was so engaged. But he refers the Edinburgh Reviewer to the American Reviewer, who says, "in 1824, the laws were still found to be imperfect, as they neither afforded a sufficient check to the trade of American citizens on the coast of Africa, nor provided any means of redeeming and restoring to their country the unfortunate victims who might, in viola tion of the laws, be introduced into the States." Indeed, distinct information has been frequently given, and from undoubted authority, of the different stations where, and the various channels through which, it has been conducted, and imports of slaves effected into the Southern States.

That the actual number of slaves introduced between the years 1810 and 1820-during which period the infatuated Reviewer says there were none at all-was vast, is most certain. In the report of the American Society for colonizing Free People of Colour, for the year 1821, it is stated, that in the course of twentyfive years, during one half of which period the Reviewer asserts that the import had entirely ceased, 1,500,000 slaves have been imported from Africa! The report of a Committee of the House of Representatives states the "

average annually withdrawn from Western Africa to be a mean somewhere between fifty and eighty thousand!" Now, what is the sole object of the American Colonization Society? The re-emigration of the blacks. And why should Congress have assisted that Society, in that attempt, and also put forth a similar estimate in proof of its absolute necessity, if America had not fully shared in these immense African importations?

Fifthly, Now for the squabash of squabashes. The Reviewer, to prove his position that the American slave population doubled itself in twentyfive years, or nearly so, by procreation alone, asserted, as we have now seen, in the face of all evidence, that there was no importation of slaves between 1810 and 1820. But, grant for a moment that this monstrous falsehood is a truth, and let Mr Sadler be let loose upon him as he lies behind that position. Why, if the

Finally, Now for the squabash of all squabashes, intensified beyond itself into something for which squabash is an inadequate appellation. In the slave-holding states, it appears, that there are astonishing irregularities in their increase-and we might almost say, decrease. They cannot be said to be owing to variations, surely, in procreation-more especially by the Reviewer, and the school in which he is booby of the lowest form-who all contend with so much pertinacity for an arbitrary and fixed ratio of human increase, under all circumstances, as a law of nature. Now, in the states in which it is well known that the law of abolition has been in a great measure operative, little increase, and in one of them a positive decrease, has taken place; but in the new slaveholding states, where it is as notorious as the sun at noonday, that that trade has been actively pursued, there have these varying and vast augmentations occurred. Mr Sadler gives us a table from which it appears, that in the district of Colombia,-in which we are assured the slaves are exceedingly well treated, marry universally, and in which slave-labour and service is constantly preferred, and where on that as well as on many other accounts, we may rest assured that the slaves are increased by other means than pro

creation only-a fact, indeed, to which Dr Torrey bears witnessstill the increase there in this favoured Colombia-is little more than half of what it ought to be on the Reviewer's hypothesis-it being but 18 per cent instead of 32-while in Missouri again, it has been 239— and in Illinois 445. The table contains all the slave-holding states of the great American republic-with the rate of increase of the slave population in each, during the periods 1790-1800, and 1810-1820. To these Mr Sadler adds-separatelyAlabama-which in 1820 contained 41,879 slaves, claimed by the Reviewer as the product of “ American procreation alone," though in 1816, the total number was only 10,494, giving an increase, therefore, of about 300 per cent in-four years! "Procreation alone,” indeed! Why they must at least have imported one propagator-the daughter, with all her mother's powers and charms, of the Reviewer's lady, with the small family, as we say in Scotland, meaning a large family of small children-the Reviewer's lady who sat, like the myriad-breasted Cybele, with 1.762,500 children round her knees!

The Reviewer, we think, had better never return to England, but, becoming a citizen of the United States, remain in America all the rest of his days. Nay, perhaps, since he so greatly admires the slave population there, who are not only "so much happier than the wretched beings who cultivate the sugar plantations of Trinidad and Demerara," but increase their numbers by "procreation alone," in a style which sets all imitation on the part of free labourers at defiance, bidding

"Europe and her pallid sons go weep," who knows but he may become himself a Slave Proprietor, and crack his finger and his thumb at the Antislavery Reporter, the African Institution, and at all that his friend Thomas Babington Macauley has written and spoken against all sorts of slavery, and in favour of all sorts of liberty all over the world?

We must now bid the Reviewer farewell. We wished to have shewn how Mr Sadler has proved that his ignorance of the British Peerage is

equal to his ignorance of the American slaveage; but we cannot encroach on another sheet, having limited the Double Number of Maga to 288 pages-enough surely to satisfy the maw of the most greedy subscriber.

A very few words-at partingwith the Public. Pamphlets seldom or never sell very widely-and therefore Mr Sadler's assailant has hitherto had a great advantage over him, in the circulation of his wit, wisdom, and erudition. But now Mr Sadler is on something more, perhaps, than an equality with him there; and we call upon the Public to judge between the combatants. We also call upon the Periodical Press to do Mr Sadler justice if not for his own sake, for that of the best interests of mankind. The settlement of such a question cannot be barren of consequences to Society; on all hands it is admitted to bear most powerfully on the welfare and well-being of the State. There may be others, but we have not seen any thing like justice done to Mr Sadler by any of the London newspapers, except the Atlas and the Standard. In the Atlas appeared an enlightened view of his doctrines very soon after the publication of the work; and we do not doubt that the same able writer will continue to defend and vindicate the cause of Truth. The great talents of the Editors of the Standard are well known, and such a daily paper has it in its power to expose, widely, the ignorance and presumption of the spiteful persecutors of a man who is one of the brightest ornaments of this age. We shall go hand in hand, and heart with heart, with such allies, in the support of principles, of which the maintenance is essential to the liberties of the land-the civilisation of the species.

The Reviewer has accused Mr Sadler of carrying on his controversy with Mr Malthus, "with all the license of the seventeenth century”and adds, "We are quite as little afraid of a contest, in which quarter shall be neither given nor taken, as he. But we would advise him seriously to consider, before he publishes the promised continuation of his work, whether he be not one of that class of writers who stand peculiarly in need of the candour which he in sults, and who would have most to fear from that unsparing severity which he practises and recommends."

Nothing can be more ludicrous than the sight of these words now; and as the Reviewer-in spite of the buffeting and bastinadoing he has received at the hands of Mr Sadler, whom, without any provocation-for how could that gentleman have insulted him?-he attacked with all the license of the nineteenth century— will probably be instigated, by the bruises under which he must still be smarting, to return to the charge,— it is our intention to be present at the conflict, to see fair play, and to record the issue. In a former number of the Edinburgh Review, “Malthus is backed against Sadler-more fearful odds than any offered at Tattersall's." We know not if that celebrated courser is going to start for the stakes; but should he, and also Auchingoul, and half-a-dozen untried horses besides-we back Sadler ten to one against the field; odds which we believe never were offered at Tattersall's, but which were offered, but not taken, in the days of Eclipse. We also offer a thousand to onemeaning thereby a thousand gold sovereigns glowing from the mint, to one brass shilling, pale from the pot-against Reviewer.

"WHAT surprised me most," says the elder Segur, " on my return from Russia to Paris in 1790, after an absence of four years, was the sudden metamorphosis which many of our ci-devant philosophers had undergone, and the vehemence with which they declaimed against a revolution which they had been mainly instrumental in producing. They could only endure their own doctrines, it would appear, in theory. One day some one reproached the Abbé Sabatier with his ill humour at the States General, which he had been the first to demand, and of which he was in reality the father- True,' he replied, but they have changed my States General at nurse.'

These words convey a brief abstract of what has occurred in all sudden changes of the form or equilibrium of government, with a view to extend the power or ascendency of the lower orders. Universally it will be found, that "the States General have been changed at nurse." The principles adopted by the populace, when they become the electors, have gone so far beyond what was contemplated or intended by the first promoters of the measure, that they could no longer recognise their own offspring, and found, with an

guish, that a spurious, base-born progeny had been substituted in its

room.

Yielding to the popular clamour, and in the hope of regulating the movement of the revolution, Necker granted a liberal parliamentary reform to France. He doubled the number of popular representatives, by a royal ordinance, six months before the meeting of the States General in 1789. It is impossible to study, with sufficient minuteness, the consequences of this great concession, because it was adopted from precisely the same views as the reform now so much the object of discussion. The proceedings of the Constituent Assembly, are the picture of the unavoidable consequences of such sudden additions to popular power-the pacification of France, the prototype of what may be anticipated from the great supposed tranquillizing measure of the British empire.

The first measure of the reformed Parliament of France, was to compel the House of Peers to sit and vote with them in one assembly, which at once rendered the commons omnipotent, because they out-numbered the peers two to one.

The next step was, to confiscate

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