than the slaves but they can number many highly esteemed and valuable citizens. It speaks much in their favor, considering the prejudi ces of the planters, that, in nearly every colony, they were admitted before emancipation to all the civil rights and privileges of the highest classes. They are found in the stations of mechanics, merchants, and magistrates also as members of the Assemblies and in all the professions. Some of them are men of wealth; though they are generally employed in the lower occupations of life, where they obtain a mere competency. There are, however, fewer poor people, who depend on charity, among them, than among the whites, by three to one. They are able to carry on a profitable trade, in the various departments of industry, and successfully to compete, either in price or skill, with white people who are engaged in the same business. Some of the most respectable mechanics in Bridgetown and Kingston are negroes, who own large establishments and employ only workmen of their own color. In addition to these facts, I may remark, that in the schools where children of all complexions met on equal terms, no difference of capacity can be perceived. I was constantly in the habit of asking the teachers whether the negro children manifested as much aptitude for learning as the others, and they invariably replied that they saw no difference. Nor do I recollect to have conversed with an intelligent man in the West Indies, who maintained that the negroes are naturally inferior to the whites; though I do not doubt that such might be found.' Letters, pp. 200—206.

In the great question of emancipation in this country, much will depend on the demonstration of the comparative superiority of free labor to slave labor. This has indeed been given in the two States of Ohio and Kentucky, lying side by side. But in the case of the West Indies, the same thing will be evinced on the very soil once tilled by the same men as free, who were the former cultivators as slaves. We have not a doubt as to the final result. The introduction of new inventions for the tillage of the soil, and the preparations of it for use, cannot go on in any great degree, where the only laborers are slaves. Consequently, the proprietors must be deprived of all the advantages which they might derive from such a source of additional profit. But let the cultivators be instructed, and taught to understand the use of machinery, and labor will be lightened; double the amount may often be realized at the same expense. The discussion of these topics, and the diffusion of information, must exert some influence; and the time is hastening, we hope not far distant, when more than one chief man at the South will be eager to learn the best means of ridding the whole community of that evil system, which now hangs its leaden weight around their means of improvement. It is impossible, and they will soon learn it, to suppress thought, or speech, or discussion, on

the subject, at the North; an influence will insensibly pervade the whole of the free States, and the more so, in proportion to the violence aiming to check it, which will bring out the expression of opinion, and it will be felt. We hope that it may ever be confined to all lawful methods, and we would be among the last to be guilty of taking any other course; but it is a well-established maxim, that any cause which cannot bear the light must eventually sink before the power of truth. Nor can any thing betray so clearly the weakness of one's defense, as the effort to suppress an examination into its defects. It is impossible, that any such effort should finally be successful, for the world is moving on, and the whole tendency of its revolutions is to break down the barriers by which the freedom of man has been hedged in, and to elevate his condition in intellectual and moral supremacy. It is evident, that emancipation, in order to be effectual, must be with the consent of the masters, and that as much need exists of preparation on their part as on that of the slaves. Care ought therefore to be taken not wilfully to irritate their feelings, but, on the contrary, every thing should be done to open their eyes both to the injustice and the impolicy of continuing a system which deprives man, born in the image of God, of the high privilege for which he was designed, of preparing for an eternal world of bliss. The time is coming, when the page of history, as it is read by generations now unborn, will seem almost too strange to be credited, and not the least among those marvels will be the fact, that the serious attempt should have been made to justify by the word of God, as though it were a real blessing, the system of American slavery. The voice of a mighty people has been uttered, proclaiming the jubilee for their enslaved ones, and the echoes of that decree shall be heard returning from beyond the ocean, from our own land, and the loud acclaims of other nations shall swell high in the triumph of Britain's exultation, that the bands of African slavery are forever broken. May no prejudice ever debar us from the preparation of heart thus to mingle our gratitude with that of myriads; may no unholy feeling ever prompt us to retard that hastening hour-but may the tendency of our pages always be to convince every mind, and urge to ~ just views and righteous action!

ART. VIII.-DR. HUMPHREY'S FOREIGN TOUR.

Great Britain, France, and Belgium: a Short Tour in 1835. BY HEMAN HUMPHREY, D. D., President of Amherst College. In two volumes. Amherst: J. S. & C. Adams. 1838.

WRITERS of travels may be distributed into two classes. The one is the journalist, who gives off the impressions which are made on his own mind in their original shape and order. He makes himself the focus of interest; the medium of observation and feeling to the reader. You wait on his motions; tread in his steps; see through his eyes; hear with his ears; think and feel only in sympathy with him. He is the mirror from which, reflected, you see the various objects which come under his notice. His prominent, ostensible aim, is gratification. If he instruct, inform, it is only subordinate; or, at least, it is but the covert aim. Hence the only limits which bound this species of writing, are those on the outside of which lie fatigue and disgust. He may be pathetic or didactic, descriptive or argumentative. He may be sober or merry, playful or earnest. He may indulge in fancy or in sentiment, play the poet or the philosopher, the politician or the moralist, and "all by turns," if "neither long." His method is the strict order of events. His book is but the transcribed record of his own thoughts and feelings, referred always to the place and time of their occurrence. He, consequently, can be no "traveler at home." He must have been personally on the spot; must have had opportunities for seeing, observing, noting, and have improved them. He may, indeed, revise his note-book. may, in his library, correct, within certain limits, his first impressions, or throw around them newly gathered historic inBut his book must be, in the main, a transcript of actual impressions, or it loses its character.

terest.

The other class are of a very different stamp. They are the cold generalizers of facts; the careful adjusters of results. They deal only with the abstract. There is no living bond of connection between you and the objects which they describe. In studying them, you lay the observer out of view. You have no chance to sympathize with him. He is, indeed, to all intents and purposes, as if he were not. These writers have for their object instruction. Interest is merely subordinate. Their method must be the strictly philosophical method, which the subject naturally indicates. They take no note of time or

place. As their books are but balance-sheets of results, designed to set forth facts in a clear and compendious view, they must first carefully analyze and classify; then draw their lines both of general and particular division; and finally refer each separate topic to its proper page and column. Hence, after making their personal observations, they may plant themselves in their libraries, spread out around them their stores of collected mementoes-whether in the shape of antiquities, specimens in natural history, or of views, costumes, and products of artgather about them all the manifold sources of information, and with the hints and guides furnished by their own observations, proceed to their work of arranging and expressing on paper.

The theoretical distinction between these classes is obvious. They may, indeed, possess some common features. The two species of writing may run into each other. Different writers may exhibit more or less of the peculiar characteristics which distinguish them. Yet to disregard the distinction, to write now in one character and then in the other, is to confound and perplex. The reader will have no clue readily guiding him from one part to another of the book; and will lose all the aid and pleasure of association, as well in originally apprehending as in subsequently recollecting. If the work be not a mere jumble of attached essays, of unconnected fragments; if there be in it that connection which a book presupposes, then the law of connection must be one of the two we have specified.

The work before us originally appeared in the form of letters, addressed to the editors of the New York Observer, and published in that paper, at successive intervals, from January, 1836, to March, 1838. Preparatory to the present publication, it underwent a hasty revision by the author, in which the weekly letters of the newspaper were transformed into the chapters of a book-not so perfectly, however, as to leave all traces of their original form.

It is the result, or, shall we better say, the consequence of a tour in Great Britain, France, and Belgium, in the summer of 1835. The author left New York on the 24th of March, arrived at Liverpool on the 18th of April, and sailed from that port, on his return home, on the 8th of September, having spent nearly five months on foreign shores. Of this, all but about three weeks, seem to have been passed in Great Britain.

Dr. Humphrey possesses some of the most important desiderata in a traveler who does not intend to keep to himself his ideas and pleasures. You see every where on his pages the marks of guileless simplicity and candor. The most striking

exhibitions of his perfect artlessness are in the frequent expressions of surprise at finding himself in such strange scenes; of doubts whether it be not all delusion-a dream. "Is that St. Paul's cathedral ?" he exclaims in London; "and am I actually here, on Black Friar's Bridge, to gaze at it?" Vol. i. p. 115. "And is it a dream, a vision of the night?" is his exclamation again on waking in Paris, "or am I really in that great city?" Vol. ii. p. 300. The same unaffected simplicity shows itself, also, in his mode of observing. He wants to look and look again-from this side and that side—to satisfy himself, that it is not all a fairy trance.

Conjoined with this, is the most thorough accuracy. What he sees he sees. He does not content himself with half a sight. He waits in the posture of attention till the full impression is made. He suffers also the true impression to be freely made, without interposing previous opinion, prejudice, self-conceit, or other disturbing emotions. Not that he is positively and absolutely perfect in this respect. We think he has sometimes shown the effect of previous expectations, in too much heightening or too much depressing his views of objects. For a single instance, in his description of the wild pass of the Trosachs, in the Scottish highlands, (vol. i. pp. 120—123,) it seems to us, that he has either mistaken imagination for memory, or has seen with the eyes of poetry, or of romance, and not with those of truth. According to our estimate of natural sublimity and beauty, many a scene in his own native state corresponds much more nearly with the extravagant terms of his highwrought description. We cannot but believe, that he was at the time under the potent sway of Sir Walter Scott's magic pen, which has raised every trifling object in this region into importance, and made every rock, tree and hill, a monument.

The same admirable traits, not less indicative of moral than intellectual excellence, show themselves when he transcribes on paper his impressions. There is nothing strained, nothing overdrawn, nothing given as observed which is merely imagined. So that you are led to put the most implicit confidence in his statements and his descriptions. In this respect, so unlike some that have followed him, you suffer him to take your hand and lead you at his will, over the scenes of his travels, listening to every word he utters as oracular.

Dr. H. excels in painting natural scenery, and in observing and noting moral features. He shows little taste for the arts. Architectural beauties, the wondrous creations of the pencil and the chisel, so profusely scattered in the old world, engage little