But what would be the consequences of England's granting a loan to Texas? How would it be employed? First,-In the permanent establishment of a new slave market; for the abolition of which, in her own colonies, she has recently paid 20,000,0007. sterling. Secondly,-It would be applied to carrying American influence and interest to the gates of Mexico, a country where England has vast monetary and commercial interests at stake. Thirdly,-It would be giving a premium for, and would consolidate an unjust and daring aggression in the south, on the part of the United States, which might speedily be imitated in the north.*

Hence, then, without venturing an opinion as to the probability of the Texans paying the interest of a foreign debt, it is to be hoped that their efforts to obtain a loan in England may ever prove unsuccessful.+

The slaves (as I have before stated publicly‡) have been imported from the United States by dealers, labour-masters, (men who hire slaves in the States and let them out again in Texas,) and insolvent planters, who carry their slaves to Texas in order to evade their creditors. From fifteen hundred to two thousand slaves are annually imported into the country by such persons; and it will scarcely

* Vide Extracts from Lord Durham's Report on Canada, page 278.

+ Vide Supplement : Opinions of the French Press.

+

See Letter to Lord Palmerston in Appendix.

be believed that they are imported from the United States across the Gulf of Mexico, i. e. from the Mississippi to Texas, a distance of four hundred miles, in the steam-packets which run between those two places, in the face of every treaty and law now in force for the suppression of slavery! I happened to be at the city of Galveston, Texas, in February, 1840, when the steam-packet Columbia" arrived

in Galveston harbour from New Orleans, with no less than thirty or forty slaves on her deck; and again in May of the same year, while I was at Galveston a second time, the "Columbia" boat arrived with twenty slaves. Thus the traffic is carried on.

The slaves, however, are well treated while on board the steam-packets, but they are not so ashore. The instant these poor creatures land, they are carried away to the interior of the country, to work on some plantation, where they have to labour from sun-rise to sun-set, under the eye of their cruel task-masters, whose heartless conduct I have too often witnessed. On one occasion, I was perfectly horrified at the savage barbarity of a planter towards a poor negro woman. The planter here alluded to was a young man about twenty-three years of age, the son of a widow named Thompson, who occupies a plantation on the Brazos river, about three miles above the city of Richmond. On the 20th of March, 1840, I had some business to transact in the immediate neighbourhood of Mrs. T.'s plantation. As I rode along the boundary fence I heard the

most piteous cries of a female, in the direction of a cotton patch within the fence. I hastened as near the spot as I could get on horseback, where I beheld the most revolting scene imaginable. A poor negro woman, who complained of being ill, was seized by the planter, James Thompson, who, after striking her several times with his clenched fist, called her husband from the gang then at work in the field, made him take hold of his wife, place her head between his (her husband's) legs, raise her clothes, and give her a cow-hiding, which the husband did, and then led his poor tortured wife back to the gang, who stood watching the execution of the inhuman monster's sentence.*

The next outrage that came under my own immediate notice, was the trial of a man named Vince, at the spring term of the second Judicial District Court, held at the city of Richmond, Texas, in the first week in April last. An action was brought against Vince by a planter, to recover the value of a negro whom Vince had shot. The defendant openly acknowledged that he shot the negro, which was not deemed murder, the action being brought merely to recover the value of the man. The jury, after hearing counsel on both sides, gave a verdict for the plaintiff, and the murderer of the negro was allowed to leave this court of justice without a reprimand. But any man, in fact, may go out and

* See Anti-slavery Reporter, 4th November, 1840.

shoot any number of slaves in Texas, provided he is able to pay for them; and, indeed, if he cannot pay for them, he has only to make an affidavit to that effect, and all remedy at law is at an end.*

Soon after this, a whole family was offered for sale, at public auction, by the sheriff of Fort Bend County, under execution. The family consisted of a man, his wife, and two children; the eldest, a boy about four years old; the youngest, an infant at the breast. The sheriff, after describing (to a host of spectators) the capabilities of each member of the family, who stood before him weeping at their degradation, and seeming to be fully impressed with the injustice and cruelty of their fate, he opened the sale, which was soon brought to a conclusion, as the slaves happened to be the property of an alien, who was absent, and the terms of sale twelve months' credit. However, the result of the sale was, the man was bought by a planter who resides. about thirty miles below; and his wife, with the infant at her breast, by a man who lives sixty miles above; while the boy was bought by a third party, who carried him away some thirty or forty miles west of the place of sale. Thus the holiest of ties -the strongest bonds of civilization-were torn asunder, and the purest affections of the human heart grossly outraged! The man or woman whose skin is as white as the snow from heaven, could not press each other more affectionately to their bosoms,

or weep more bitterly, than this poor man and woman did when parting from each other and their children, in all probability, for ever.

The man, on arriving at the plantation of his purchaser, was sent to live with a woman who had three children by another man. Here depravity was enforced, and yet the very men who enforce it, will, with an air of singular composure, tell me "that the niggers are the most depraved race in the world that they are a curse and a disgrace to the human race;" while they employ many ingenious arguments to prove, that the "native American, of the African origin, is closely allied, or is, in fact, a branch of the monkey family; and were it not for a singular perverseness of nature, which has given the black native American a mouth and ear formed to speak many languages, as they do correctly, in lieu of what the naturalists vulgarly call a tail, instead of a projection," the most philosophical mind might admit the correctness of the analogy drawn by the Anglo-American slaveholder, which, by the by, is not at all flattering to "the whites," inasmuch as the blacks, whom they define as belonging to the baboon species, are, in their physical formation, nearly a fac-simile of themselves. But, to show how they reason on this head, I will here give a quotation from the anonymous Texan author before quoted :

"How does it happen, asks every stranger that visits our country, that so moral and chaste a people have so many mulattos among them? You may