man; and communities are but one remove less dependent than the individual. The Author of the Christian system has availed himself of this bond of mutual dependence in the construction of the Christian church; and the metaphor of the apostle in comparing it to a body is beautifully appropriate, not only in regard to its particular sections and localities, but to its widest and most comprehensive boundaries. As well might an amputated limb boast of its independence of the body, as any one section of the spiritual body long retain its vitality dissevered and excluded from the rest. I am far from thinking lightly,' said the Rev. R. Hall, of the spiritual power with which Christ has armed his church. It is a high and mysterious one, which has no parallel on earth. Nothing in the order of means is equally adapted to awaken 'compunction in the guilty, with spiritual censures impartially administered. The sentence of excommunication, in particular, harmonizing with the dictates of conscience, and re-echoed by her voice, is truly terrible; it is the voice of God, speaking through its legitimate organ, which he who despises or neglects, ranks with heathen men and publicans,' joins the synagogue of Satan, and takes his lot with an unbelieving world, doomed to 'perdition. Excommunication is a sword which strong in its 'apparent weakness, and the sharper and more efficacious for being divested of all sensible and exterior envelopments, lights 'immediately on the spirit, and inflicts a wound which no balm 'can cure, no ointment can mollify, but which must continue to 'ulcerate and burn, till it is healed by the blood of atonement, applied by penitence and prayer.'

But this will not altogether meet the case. Very few ministers or professors of religion, who advocate slavery, or are actual participants in its abominations, ever visit this country; we have, therefore, no personal access to men of this class. The ministers who visit us are almost entirely from the northern and free States; and are these entirely free from blame? Are their hands unstained by the pollution? We are firmly of opinion that so long as unchristian prejudices against the colored population are cherished in the north, it is in vain to expect the extinction of slavery in the south. This prejudice is nothing else and nothing better than incipient slavery; it is both the parent and the nurse of the system. The very arguments which would justify the one, only carried a little further, will justify the other. The expression of that prejudice furnishes a passport to the confidence of the south, silences the reproofs of conscience, and wipes off the odium which attaches to the system. The ministers who cherish this prejudice feel no scruple in associating with the thorough advocates of slavery, of holding fellowship with their churches, or of uniting in their benevolent and religious institutions. The countenance, therefore, which we give to ministers of this class is

an indirect countenance to the system itself. Believing what we do respecting that system; believing it to be the very essence of sin, the grossest outrage on the rights of man, the fruitful parent of the most loathsome impurities, and the most daring invasion of the prerogatives of the Most High, we must not be content to withdraw from those who openly countenance these abominations, we must equally withdraw from those whose guilty silence emboldens its abettors; whose associations with slavery churches encourage them in transgression, by blunting the edge of remonstrance, and weakening the voice of conscience. To this class of ministers and others we have frequent access; they traverse our country; they mingle with our churches; they assist at our public meetings; and it is, therefore, upon the consciences of these we must urge our remonstrances. We must prove to them and to the world, that we take the high ground of religious principle, and are resolved to follow out the legitimate bearings of such principle, whithersoever and to whatsoever it may lead. Unseduced by bribes and undeterred by frowns, we must refuse-indignantly refuse to associate with men who either practise injustice and robbery themselves, or who wink at such atrocities when practised by others.

Art. VIII. 1. Debate in the House of Commons on Sir James GraApril, 1840.

ham's Motion.

2. Parliamentary Papers. Affairs of the East India Company. 1830.

3. Parliamentary Papers. China. 1840.

4. Asiatic Journal (passim).

5. Facts and Evidence relating to the Opium Trade with China. By WILLIAM STORRS FRY. London: Richardson.

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N the debate on Sir James Graham's Motion on Chinese affairs, Sir Robert Peel said, He would give no opinion with 'regard to the Opium Trade, nor as to the policy of the war. Those were two questions perfectly distinct from that which 'formed the substance of the present motion.' In this declaration the opposition leader displayed his usual tact, looking forward to the possibility of being called upon as minister to prosecute the war and to perpetuate the traffic. The suppression of questions of such importance, involving the whole merits of the controversy between Great Britain and China, renders the debate (like the play of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted) most jejune and unsatisfactory performance. But these topics,

though carefully kept out of the motion, could not be altogether excluded from the discussion. The latter was managed on both sides with sole reference to the interests of party, yet many of the statements made, and much of the argument employed, serve to illustrate the question in its more general bearings, and in this point of view the debate has features of interest and utility.

It is impossible for any intelligent and reflecting reader, even supposing him to have no previous acquaintance with the subject, to read the speeches on either side without perceiving that the present difficulties are to be traced to one source-the Opium Trade;' that this traffic is immoral in its intrinsic character, being destructive of human happiness and of human life; that it is criminal, being carried on by unlawful means; and that by common consent it is condemned as degrading to the national reputation and injurious to the national interests. The consideration of this subject, a subject involving the whole gist of the controversy, was excluded by the terms of Sir James Graham's motion, for obvious reasons. The two great parties which divide the British parliament are equally guilty of the Chinese warboth are implicated in the omissions and the commissions, in the blunders and the crimes which have brought this country into its present disgraceful position. The following extracts from the speeches of Mr. Hawes and Sir John Cam Hobhouse establish this fact beyond controversy.

He (Mr. Hawes) meant to lay it down as a principle, that the discussions on the contraband Opium Trade were the foundation of all these troubles. In 1833, when the Indian Act was passed, and the instructions sent out, all the evils of this trade were well known, and the dangers attending it had been distinctly pointed out; no information had been wanting to prove the nature of the trade, or to show its tendency to produce collision with the Chinese authorities, and to put a stop to trade with that country altogether. All these circumstances were as distinctly known then as they were at present. Mr. Grant, in opening the India Act, expressly stated that it was a contraband trade-that it was a dangerous trade, and one that could not continue. Now he (Mr. Hawes) wanted to know, if all this information was well known, how it was that measures were not taken by the government of that day to put down the trade in opium. To that trade he (Mr. Hawes) attributed all the evils which the trade between this country and China had been suffering, and to that he attributed all the jealousies of the Chinese.'

Sir John Cam Hobhouse bore testimony to the same facts in a manner which must have been sufficiently galling to the member for Pembroke.

This was not a question of yesterday. A committee sat in 1810 to discuss the renewal of the East India Company's charter, and at the

In

same time examined the case of the Opium Trade. Did that committee make a report? Yes, it did. Did that report say any thing against the smuggling of opium? No, it did not. There was another committee which inquired into the same subject in 1832. Did that committee make any report as to the smuggling trade in opium? It did. Various witnesses were examined; the atrocities, as they had most properly been called, of the trade were inquired into; a report was drawn up, and the evidence given, more particularly that of Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Majoribanks, and the whole bearings of the trade were thoroughly sifted. Yet some gentlemen spoke of this matter as if it now came before the house for the first time. What was the opinion of the committee of 1832? Why, that as the Opium Trade of Bengal produced £981,283 it was not desirable, in the existing state of the revenue of India, to put an end to it; the more so as the duty fell chiefly on the foreign consumer. The right honorable baronet was very loud now in his indignation against this traffic. 1833, when Mr. Grant, now Lord Glenelg, in his place in the house, entered into a long and eloquent detail of the iniquitous process by which this trade was carried on, the right honorable baronet, who then sat by the side of Mr. Grant as a colleague, was perfectly mute-he said not one single word on the subject. The right honorable baronet, on that occasion, expressed no disapproval of the trade. No, the right honorable baronet reserved all his indignation at the traffic for this particular occasion. On that occasion, in fact, there was no member of the house who said any thing about it, except, indeed, one solitary individual, Mr. Buckingham, who got up and exposed the whole traffic, and made a direct charge against the East India Company, taking the occasion to mention that the trade in opium was so productive as to bring in a profit of 1000 per cent., and that it was held of such importance by the company, that their superintendent of the growth of opium at Patna received a larger salary than the chief justice of the Court of King's Bench; adding, that while the company claimed to themselves the privilege of being the guardians of the law in India, and the conservators of the morals of the people of that country, and while they punished with the utmost severity any infraction of their own laws, they openly cultivated this drug for the purpose of smuggling it into China. That charge was made by Mr. Buckingham in the face of the House of Commons; and did the right honorable gentleman opposite, who was sitting near Mr. Grant, say any thing against it? Mr. Buckingham told them that the East India Company had the monopoly of the cultivation of the poppy, and he charged the iniquities of the traffic on the company. Did any one rise to second Mr. Buckingham, or say a word in his favor? No one said a word; neither his right honorable friend the member for Pembroke, nor the honorable member for Newark, who, he believed, was then a member, nor the noble lord the member for Liverpool.'

Mr. Hawes asks a question which cannot be answered without condemning not the present administration alone, but former administrations and former parliaments. The government of

Great Britain has for forty years past connived at the Opium Trade, and in 1833 that disgraceful traffic received the formal sanction of the imperial parliament after all its circumstances of atrocity and danger had been fully developed before the committee of 1832. The evidence adduced before that committee, and printed in the parliamentary papers, is a permanent record of national dishonor,

The most important and characteristic peculiarity of the Opium Trade, though incidentally developed by Sir John Cam Hobhouse in the remarks above quoted, was carefully kept out of sight by the other speakers on both sides of the house. They not only were silent on this point, but by arguing on a contrary supposition, virtually implied the non-existence of so remarkable a feature. We allude to the national character of the traffic. The slave trade, during its legal continuance, might have been called a national trade from the amount of capital and the number of vessels and of seamen employed in it; but the Opium Trade is national in a stricter sense, or more properly speaking, it is a government trade. The opium in its production and original sale is strictly monopolized by the British Indian government, which, in our eastern empire, is an alter idem of the British government itself. For the acts and policy of the former the latter is completely and entirely responsible, not only because from the British government the rulers of India derive every particle of their delegated power, but because on the last settlement of Indian affairs, parliament reserved, in the most full and comprehensive terms, its imperial and constantly existing right of supervision and interference; and because also the President of the Board of Control, one of the mainsprings of Indian administration, and whose powers and responsibilities are almost unlimited, is a member of the Cabinet. Indian measures are, therefore, the measures of the government of the day, and the latter are as responsible for them as for any part of their more strictly foreign, colonial, or domestic policy.

The East India Company assumed the monopoly of opium in 1773. They carried on the trade openly at Canton for some years by their own servants, but the attention of the Chinese government being drawn to the pernicious effects of the drug, its introduction was totally prohibited by an imperial edict in the year 1796. On the urgent recommendation of the officers who superintended their important interests at Canton, the company prohibited their vessels and commanders from carrying opium to China. It was found expedient to employ unchartered villany in a traffic, which by being declared contraband, was rendered both disreputable and dangerous. The company continued to monopolize the growth and preparation of the drug, sold it at stated public sales, and licensed vessels to carry the baleful freight