would do him any harm. It clearly never struck | recent election for Clarke county, the popular canthem as possible that it could do him any good, or aid his chance of success. 66 didate admitted the upright character and high qualifications of his opponent, an old friend of his own, and simply dwelt on his riches as a sufficient ground for distrust. "A rich man," he said, "cannot sympathize with the poor." Even the anecdotes I heard, which may have been mere inventions, convinced me how intense was this feeling. One, who had for some time held a seat in the legislature, finding himself in a new canvass deserted by many of his former supporters, observed that he had always voted strictly according to his instructions. The chief motive, I apprehend, of preferring a poorer candidate, is the desire of reducing the members of their legislature to mere delegates. A rich man would be apt to have an opinion of his own, to be unwilling to make a sacrifice of his free agency; he would not always identify himself with the majority of his electors, condescend to become, like the wires of the electric telegraph, a mere piece of machinery for conveying to the capital of his State, or to Washington, the behests of the multitude. That" Do you think," answered a former partisan," that there is, besides, a vulgar jealousy of superior wealth, especially in the less educated districts and newer states, I satisfied myself in the course of my tour; but in regard to envy, we must also bear in mind, on the other hand, that they who elevate to distinction one of their own class in society, have sometimes to achieve a greater victory over that passion than when they confer the same favor on one who occupies already, by virtue of great riches, a higher position.-Vol. i., pp. 97-99. America, like some of the old Greek republics, will need a law to compel her best men to take a part in her affairs. dress at Mobile was twenty dollars, or four times they would vote for you after your daughter came to the ball in them fixings?" His daughter, in fact, having been at Mobile, had had a dress made there with flounces according to the newest Parisian fashion, and she had thus sided, as it were, with the aristocracy of the city, setting itself up above the democracy of the pine-woods. In the new settlements there the small proprietors, or farmers, are keenly jealous of thriving lawyers, merchants, and capitalists. One of the candidates for a county in Alabama confessed to me that he had thought it good policy to go everywhere on foot when soliciting votes, though he could have commanded a horse, and the distances were great. That the The great evil of universal suffrage is the irresist-young lady whose "fixings" I have alluded to had ible temptation it affords to a needy set of adventur- been ambitiously in the fashion, I make no doubt; ers to make politics a trade, and to devote all their for my wife found that the cost of making up a time to agitation, electioneering, and flattering the passions of the multitude. The natural aristocracy of a republic consists of the most eminent men in the liberal professions-lawyers, divines, and physicians of note, merchants in extensive business, literary and scientific men of celebrity; and men of all these classes are apt to set too high a value on their time to be willing to engage in the strife of elections perpetually going on, and in which they expose themselves to much calumny and accusations, which, however unfounded, are professionally injurious to them. The richer citizens, who might be more independent of such attacks, love their ease or their books, and from indolence often abandon the field to the more ignorant; but I met with many optimists who declared that whenever the country is threatened with any great danger or disgrace, there is a right-minded majority whose energies can be roused effectively into action. Nevertheless, the sacrifices required on such occasions to work upon the popular mind are so great that the field is in danger of being left open on all ordinary occasions to the demagogue.-Vol. i., p. 101. The second volume gives the comic side of this serious evil-its actual workings on the verge of civilized society: I heard many anecdotes, when associating with small proprietors in Alabama, which convinced me that envy has a much ranker growth among the aristocratic democracy of a new settled slave-state, than in any part of New England which I visited. I can scarcely conceive the octracism of wealth or superior attainments being carried further. Let a gentleman who has made a fortune at the bar, in Mobile or elsewhere, settle in some retired part of the newly cleared country, his fences are pulled down, and his cattle left to stray in the woods, and various depredations committed, not by thieves, for none of his property is carried away, but by neighbors who, knowing nothing of him personally, have a vulgar jealousy of his riches, and take for granted that his pride must be great in proportion. In a From Boston we are tempted, indeed compelled by our limited space, to make as it were a wide leap to the farthest south; we are curious to place in their striking opposition the two extremes of American scenery, society, and civilization; the height of European culture with the most thoroughly American wildness, and, we must not say, lawlessness, but that state where every small community of men is a law unto itself. We pass over at once the author's visits to New York, Philadelphia, ference-the leviathan of the Book of Job!" * A friend of the highest authority on scientific matters says, "The sea-serpent now in London is a fish, known to Ichthyology for about a century, described by Black and name. what appears to us an extremely probable and consistent theory, very rigidly reasoned out, from the various appearances dignified with that awful Sir Charles Lyell's conclusion, a conclusion which, even if we could follow it out at greater length, would be unintelligible without his engravings, is that, wherever there has been a true sea-monster, and some of the relations appear of undoubted veracity, it has been a variety of the "basking shark." We would call especial attention to an extract from Campbell's Life, as showing the value of unsifted contemporaneous testimony. We have besides many pages of lively description of scenery, which of course Sir Charles beholds rather with the keen and close observation of a naturalist than with the vague and brilliant sight of the painter. We have a great many very amusing facts in natural history. We have much about Irish quarters in the great towns; Irish votes, and, we regret to say, indelible Irish hatred of England. We have a debate in Congress, with one specimen of eloquence which we cannot pass over : When I got to Macon, my attention was forcibly called to the newness of things by my friend's pointing out to me the ground where there had been and I was told how many Indians had been slaugha bloody fight with the Choctaws and Chickasaws, tered there, and how the present clerk of the Circuit Court was the last survivor of those who had won the battle. The memory of General Jackson is quite idolized here. It was enough for him to give public notice as he passed, that he should have great pleasure in meeting his friends at a given point on several hundred settlers, armed with rifles. and prea given day, and there was sure to be a muster of pared for a fight with 5000 or 7000 Indians.-Vol. ii., p. 65. This cause of General Jackson's popularity is quite new to us. Macon is now a considerable town. I often rejoiced, in this excursion, that we had brought no servants with us from England, so strong is the prejudice here against what they term a white body-servant. Besides, it would be unreasonable to expect any one, who is not riding his own hobby, to rough it in the backwoods. In many houses I hesitated to ask for water or towels for fear It would be impossible to burlesque or caricature of giving offence, although the yeomen with whom the ambitious style of certain members of Congress, I lodged for the night allowed me to pay a moderespecially some who have risen from humble stations, ate charge for my accommodation. Nor could I and whose schooling has been in the back-woods. venture to beg any one to rub a thick coat of mud A grave report, drawn up in the present session by off my boots or trousers, lest I should be thought the member for Illinois, as chairman of a post-office to reflect on the members of the family, who had committee, may serve as an example. After speak- no idea of indulging in such refinements themselves. ing of the American republic as "the infant Her-I could have dispensed cheerfully with milk, butter, cules," and the extension of their imperial dominion over the "northern continent and oriental seas," he exclaims: "The destiny of our nation has now become revealed, and great events, quickening in the womb of time, reflect their clearly defined shadows into our very eye-balls. Oh, why does a cold generation frigidly repel ambrosial gifts like these, or sacrilegiously hesitate to embrace their glowing and resplendent fate? Must this backward pull of the government never cease, and the nation tug forever beneath a dead weight, which trips its heels at every stride?"-Vol. i., p. 263. and other such luxuries; but I felt much the want of a private bed-room. Very soon, however, I came to regard it as no small privilege to be allowed to have even a bed to myself. On one occasion, when my host had humored my whims so far in regard to privacy, I felt almost ashamed to see, in consequence, a similar sized bed in the same room, occupied by my companion and two others. When I related these inconveniences afterwards to an episcopal clergyman, he told me that the bishop and some of his clergy, when they travel through these woods in summer, and the lawyers, when on the circuit or canvassing for votes at elections, have, in addition to these privations, to endure the bites of countless musquitos, fleas and bugs, so that I had great reason to congratulate myself that it was now so cold. Moreover, there are parties of emigrants in some of these woods, where women delicately Be it remembered that the author is conveyed infants at the breast, may now be seen on their brought up, accustomed to be waited on, and with along all this wide and desultory route from city way to Texas, camping out, although the ground to city, with occasional divergences for geologi- within their tent is often soaked with heavy rain. cal purposes, by steam-vessel and rail-road. He" If you were here in the hot season," said another, travels with perfect ease, at no great cost, from northern Boston to Savannah, and Darien in Georgia, to Macon and Milledgeville in Alabama. We cannot show the change better than by the following extracts : We have Mr. Webster pleading before the Supreme Court before judges, only one of whom, such has been the ascendency of the democratic party, had been nominated by the whigs.-But we hasten southwards. Yarrell under the name of Gymnetrus Hawkenii, and rarely captured by reason of its being a deep sea-fish, and therefore not taking a bait, or getting in the way of nets; the last species to figure as the surface-swimming python, for its gills are so constructed that it dies very soon after they are exposed to the air." Some poor Germans, we hear, exhibit next door a most beautiful model of Cologne as the architect intended it to be-alas! will it now ever be? They bitterly complain that more people went in one day to see "de nasty stinking fisch, than to their model in a month." "the exuberant growth of the creepers and briars And yet even here science finds more than liberal hospitality; it has its ardent votaries— The different stages of civilization to which families have attained, who live here on terms of the strictest equality, is often amusing to a stranger, but must be intolerable to some of those settlers who have been driven by their losses from the more advanced districts of Virginia and South Carolina, having to begin the world again. Sometimes, 66 in the morning, my host would be of the humblest | ored race, which would make rapid or inconsiderclass of crackers," or some low, illiterate Ger- ate emancipation a curse rather than a blessing. man or Irish emigrants, the wife sitting with a No more, on the other hand, does he disguise or pipe in her mouth, doing no work and reading no books. In the evening, I came to a neighbor mitigate the inherent evils of the system; the barwhose library was well stored with works of French barous laws which in Georgia prohibit the eduand English authors, and whose first question to cation of the negroes; the barbarous jealousy me was, Pray tell me, who do you really think which prevents their employment when free as is the author of the Vestiges of Creation?" If it is workmen and mechanics; the more barbarous, it difficult in Europe, in the country far from towns, should seem indelible antipathy, which will not to select society on a principle of congeniality of allow social intercourse, still less the connection taste and feeling, the reader may conceive what of marriage, with one in whom there can possibly must be the control of geographical circumstances here, exaggerated by ultra-democratic notions of be suspected one drop of black blood. Sir Charles equality and the pride of race. Nevertheless, these Lyell is disposed to take a favorable view of the regions will probably bear no unfavorable compari- capacity of the black, still more of the colored son with such part of our colonies, in Canada, the race, for moral and intellectual cultivation. We Cape, or Australia, as have been settled for an do not doubt this conclusion up to a certain point equally short term of years, and I am bound to say ―(beyond this, evidence is wanting ;) and below that I passed my time agreeably and profitably in this point it is criminal and unchristian to attempt Alabama, for every one, as I have usually found in newly peopled districts, was hospitable and obliging to keep down this race of God's creatures, of our to a stranger. Instead of the ignorant wonder, brethren in Christ. In Virginia the question first very commonly expressed in out-of-the-way dis- presents itself in a practical form; at Richmond, tricts of England, France, or Italy, at travellers in that province, the rector and the proprietors of who devote money and time to a search for fossil a handsome new church have set apart a side bones and shells, each planter seemed to vie with gallery for people of color. "This resolution had another in his anxiety to give me information in re- been taken in order that they and their servants gard to the precise spots where organic remains had been discovered. Many were curious to learn my might unite in the worship of the same God, as opinion as to the kind of animal to which the huge they hoped to enter hereafter together into his vertebræ, against which their ploughs sometimes everlasting kingdom if they obeyed his laws." strike, may have belonged. The magnitude, in- (p. 275.) In this church there were few negroes; deed, and solidity of these relics of the colossal zeu- but the galleries of the Methodist and Baptist glodon are such as might well excite the astonish-churches are crowded with them. The mixed ment of the most indifferent. Dr. Buckley informed me that on the estate of Judge Creagh, which I visited, he had assisted in digging out one skeleton, where the vertebral column, almost unbroken extended to the length of seventy feet, and Dr. Emmons afterwards showed me the greater part of this skeleton in the Museum of Albany, New York. On the same plantation, part of another back-bone, fifty feet long, was dug up, and a third was met with at no great distance. Before I left Alabama, I had obtained evidence of so many localities of similar fossils, chiefly between Macon and Clarkesville, a distance of ten miles, that I concluded they must have belonged to at least forty distinct individuals. -Vol. ii., p. 74. races, it is allowed, are more intelligent and more agreeable as domestic servants; whether from physical causes, or intercourse with the whites, is still a matter of controversy : the negro race as naturally warm-hearted, patient, Several Virginian planters have spoken to me of and cheerful, grateful for benefits, and forgiving of injuries. They are also of a religious temperament bordering on superstition. Even those who think they ought forever to remain in servitude give them a character which leads one to the belief that steps ought long ago to have been taken towards their gradual emancipation. Had some legislative provision been made with this view before the annexOur philosopher is here in the south, in the ation of Texas, a period being fixed after which all midst of the slave states. Throughout the Union, the children born in this state should be free, that new territory would have afforded a useful outlet and here more especially, his object is to inform for the black population of Virginia, and whites himself upon this vital question-the state of would have supplied the vacancies which are now slavery, the condition and prospects of the slaves, filled up by the breeding of negroes. In the abthe hope, the possibility of an early and a peace- sence of such enactments, Texas prolongs the duraful adjustment of this awful feud of races. There tion of negro slavery in Virginia, aggravating one is throughout a quiet dispassionateness, which gives great weight to his opinions. He has manifestly in his heart the true English, Christian abhorrence of slavery; yet neither, on the one hand, does he close his eyes to the fact that the actual slavery of the present time-in many parts of the country at least-has its compensations in the ease, comfort, plenty of food, good lodging, secure provision for old age, as compared with the condition of the laboring classes in most parts of the old world; nor is he blind to the difficulties and perils, perils appallingly serious to the col of its worst consequences, the internal slave-trade, and keeping up the price of negroes at home. They are now selling for 500, 750, and 1000 dollars each, according to their qualifications. There are always dealers at Richmond, whose business it is to collect slaves for the southern market, and, until a gang is ready to start for the south, they are kept here well fed, and as cheerful as possible. In a court of the jail, where they are lodged, I see them every day amusing themselves by playing at quoits. How much this traffic is abhorred, even by those who encourage it, is shown by the low social position held by the dealer, even when he has made a large fortune. When they conduct gangs of fifty slaves at a time across the mountains to the Ohio | taint of sin depends mainly on the particular manriver, they usually manacle some of the men, but ner of performing the rite, and the principal charm on reaching the Ohio they have no longer any fear to the black women in the ceremony of total immerof their attempting an escape, and they then un- sion consists in decking themselves out in white shackle them. That the condition of slaves in Vir-robes like brides and having their shoes trimmed ginia is steadily improving, all here seem agreed. Vol. i., p. 277. There is a great repugnance to the separation of families; and some persons have been known to make great sacrifices in order to do their duty by their dependants, whom they might profitably have thrown on the world, in other words, sent to market. with silver. They well know that the waters of the Alatamaha are chilly, and that they and the officiating minister run no small risk of catching cold, but to this penance they most cheerfully submit.-Vol. i., p. 363. Sir Charles Lyell attended at Savannah first a black Baptist church with a black preacher, and then a black Methodist church with a white preacher. The black preacher delivered an extempore sermon, for the most part in good English, with only few phrases in "talkee talkee," to come more home to his audience :— At Hopeton, further south in Georgia, Sir Charles Lyell had an opportunity of examining the actual working of the system-as he admits, on a well-regulated estate. There seems to be much mutual attachment between the master and He got very successfully through one flight about the slave. Of 500 blacks on the property, some the gloom of the valley of the shadow of death, and, are old, superannuated, live at their ease in sepa- speaking of the probationary state of a pious man rate houses, in the society of neighbors and kins-left for a while to his own guidance, and when in folk. There is no restraint, rather every encourdanger of failing saved by the grace of God, he comagement, to marriage. The out-door laborers pared it to an eagle teaching her newly-fledged offspring to fly by carrying it up high into the air, have separate houses, "as neat as the greater then dropping it, and, if she sees it falling to the part of the cottages in Scotland"-no flattering earth, darting with the speed of lightning to save it compliment, observes our author, himself a Scot; before it reaches the ground. Whether any eagles their hours of labor are from six in the morning, really teach their young to fly in this manner, I with an interval of an hour, till two or three. In leave the ornithologist to decide; but when desummer they divide their work, and take a cool scribed in animated and picturesque language, yet siesta in the middle of the day. In the evening lated to keep the attention of his hearers awake. by no means inflated, the imagery was well calcuthey make merry, chat, pray, and sing psalms. He also inculcated some good practical maxims of There is a hospital. To counterbalance all this morality, and told them they were to look to a futhere is the overseer and his whip, not a heavy ture state of rewards and punishments, in which one, and rarely used-but still there is a whip; God would deal impartially with "the poor and though the number of stripes is generally limited, the rich, the black man and the white.”—Vol. ii., its terrors seem to have great effect : P. 3. In neither of these churches did that odor, which The most severe punishment required in the last forty years for a body of 500 negroes, at Hopeton, is said to keep the two races apart, at all offend was for the theft of one negro from another. In the sense. At another black Methodist church at that period there has been no criminal act of the Louisville, in Kentucky, built by subscription by highest grade, for which a delinquent could be com- the blacks themselves, and well lighted with gas, mitted to the penitentiary in Georgia, and there have he heard another dark divine, (we regret to say been only six cases of assault and battery. As a race, the negroes are mild and forgiving, and by no means so prone to indulge in drinking as the white man or the Indian. There were more serious quarrels and more broken heads among the Irish in a few years, when they came to dig the Brunswick canal, than had been known among the negroes in all the surrounding plantations for half a century. The murder of a husband by a black woman, whom he had beat violently, is the greatest crime remembered in this part of Georgia for a great length of time.-Vol. i., p. 258. that Sir Charles compares him with a white Puseyite Episcopalian, not much to the advantage of the latter.) This preacher was a full black, spoke good English, and quoted Scripture well. He laid down, it is true, metaphysical points of doctrine with a confidence which seemed to increase in proportion as the subjects transcended human understanding; but in this we discern the sect rather than the color. Our black Chrysostem received signs of assent-not the riotous clapping of hands which applauded him of Constantinople, nor the The Baptist and Methodist missionaries were sighs and groans, so well known in other places, for some time the most active in evangelizing the like those which are heard above the torrent's negroes. Since Dr. Elliott has been Bishop brawl on the hill sides in Wales. It was said of of Georgia, the Episcopalians have labored with a celebrated metropolitan preacher of the last genmuch zeal and success. The negroes have no eration, that he had taken lessons of Mr. Kemble; faith in the efficacy of baptism, except with a our sable brother (as he would be called at Exeter complete washing away of sin; the bishop has Hall) was a manifest imitator of an eminent Amerwisely adopted the rubric which allows immer-ican actor who had been playing in those parts. sion: It may be true that the poor negroes cherish a superstitious belief that the washing out of every We must not omit one point more :-from his explanation of "Whose image and superscription is this?" it was clear that he supposed that Cæsar had set his signature to a dollar note. Our author following passage seems to us to give a most imafterwards attended in Philadelphia a free black pressive view of the difficulties of the question :Episcopal church, in which the more solemn and quiet Anglican service was performed by a black clergyman with great propriety. While on this point we will add that, according to the account of Dr. Walsh, published many years ago, and confirmed, if we remember right, by later travellers, the black Roman Catholic priests in Brazil conduct the ceremonial of their faith with much greater impressiveness and dignity than those of European descent. One of the most reasonable advocates of immedi ate emancipation whom I met with in the north, said to me, "You are like many of our politicians, who can look on one side only of a great question. Grant the possibility of these three millions of colored people, or even twelve millions of them fifty years hence, being capable of amalgamating with the whites, such a result might be to you perhaps, ing experiment; but would not the progress of the as a philanthropist or physiologist, a very interestwhites be retarded, and our race deteriorated, nearly in the same proportion as the negroes would gain? The whites constitute nearly six sevenths of our whole population. As a philanthropist, you are bound to look to the greatest good of the two races collectively, or the advantage of the whole population of the Union."—Vol. i., p. 101. From Alabama we arrive at New Orleans, a provincial Paris in the midst of this land of AngloSaxondom, with its Roman Catholic religion, its carnival, its theatres open on Sundays, its hotels with Louis XIV. furniture, its brilliant shops, its life and gayety, but with its black slaves, its voluptuous quadroon beauties. This must contrast strangely with the sober, busy, thriving cities of the north, the pale and fever-worn "crackers" in the new provinces, the restless pioneers of society pressing on towards Texas. From New Orleans Sir Charles makes his excursion to the delta of the Mississippi But there is much to be set against these hopeful signs of negro improvement, and the better state of feeling between the two races By an unfortunate schism, called "the northern and southern split," the black Methodist churches are severed from the great and powerful communities with whom it might have been to their pride as well as to their advantage to have been in close union. Still, likewise, in many parts there is a stern and jealous resistance to their education; a resistance which was dying away, but which has been provoked into life by the imprudent and fanatic crusade of the Abolitionists. Sir C. Lyell gives the barbarous law of Georgia, which we should read with more righteous indignation but for the compunctious remembrance of certain Irish penal statutes, abrogated only in later days. Yet even in Georgia, Sunday schools arise in Christian defiance of the law. There is still almost everywhere the indelible antipathy of the races;-perhaps the most important of his geological the inextinguishable attainder of blood, on which chapters. The delta he estimates at 14.000 square M. de Beaumont founded his romance, and Miss miles; the level alluvial plain to the north, which Martineau her tale, which we wish that we could stretches above the junction of the Ohio, is 16,000 believe, like many of her tales, to be romance. square miles-being reached by so gradual a slope Still the thumb-nail without its white crescent, that the junction of the Ohio is but 200 feet above still the heel betrays the lingering drops of black the level of the Bay of Mexico. He calculates by blood; those drops which annul marriage, even if various processes, and from certain data furnished fruitful in children; which drive back the most to him by skilful engineers and philosophic observamiable, virtuous, intelligent, accomplished per-ers of the country, that the delta must have taken sons into the proscribed caste. Still slaves are car- 67,000 years; the plain above, assuming a certain ried openly about for sale; may be stolen like other depth of alluvial matter, 37,000 years more, to acobjects of trade; may be shot by passionate over-cumulate. These vast periods of time, like those seers, without the overseer suffering in social esti- of space in astronomy, alternately depress us with mation (p. 92;) are advertised when runaways the most humiliating sense of our insignificance; exactly like stray horses or dogs here; still they and next awaken something like proud gratitude to are either, when free, prohibited by law from acting our Divine Maker for the gift of those faculties as mechanics, (they are very clever and ingenious which enable us thus, as it were, to gauge this in some arts,) or by the jealousy of the whites, who overwhelming-this almost boundless-time and will not admit them of their guild. Still writers of space. As regards the Deity, while astronomy the calm humanity of Sir Charles Lyell are obliged vindicates the majesty of space, so does geology to waver and hesitate; at one time eagerly to look that of time. What a comment on the scriptural forward, at another, for the sake of the blacks them-phrase, that to Him a thousand years are but as a selves, to tremble at their immediate-even their day! And all this time and space, so measured, is speedy emancipation. The number of negroes in but a brief fragment of his eternity and infinity! the Union is now three millions; and according to their present rate of increase may, by the close of the century, amount to twelve millions. But for disturbing causes," he would cherish sanguine hopes of their ultimate fusion and amalgamation. But by his own account, are those disturbing causes likely to become less powerful as the two races show a broader front towards each other? The 66 Our traveller's return is up the vast Mississippi, after an excursion to Grenville in Missouri, upon the Ohio, and so across the Alleghany Mountains, back to the land of the older cities, to Philadelphia and N. York. We must leave our readers to complete this immense circuit, feeling confident that, having once set forth with Sir Charles Lyell, they will not abandon him from weariness, |