residence of free blacks within their territory. I shall not attempt here to discuss the propriety and equity of such laws. Granting that they are arbitrary and unjust, such laws do exist, and they oppose an insuperable obstacle to the accomplishment of the desires of those who wish to liberate their slaves, unless they transport them beyond the bounds of those states. Those who have sufficient regard for the welfare of their slaves to emancipate them, would not wish to transfer them to a perhaps worse condition, by sending them to the northern states, and perhaps some of them might not find it easy to provide the means of such transportation. The Colonization Society stands ready to receive them on their manumission, and bear the expense of their passage to the Liberian colonies, where they can enjoy all the advantages of freedom, and become constituent parts of rising republics. It has been the means of effecting the emancipation of more than three thousand slaves, while it would perhaps be no easy matter for that society which so bitterly and unsparingly denounces it, to show that, with all its agitation and clamor, and with all the boasted light it has been shedding abroad during seven years past, it has emancipated one. And let the adver. saries of the Colonization Society say what they will, its very existence, and its whole course of operations, is a strong and decided testimony against slavery. The language which it speaks to every unbiased mind is, that as it was cruel and unjust to transport the blacks against their will from Africa, and enslave them, it is but an act of justice to liberate and restore them. It appeals to the consciences of slave. holders by actions which speak louder than words. It does not indeed assume the tone of dictation, menace, and reproach. It seeks not the extinction of slavery by calling hard names. It seeks to excite public indignation against no class of citizens. It interferes with the rights of none. It pursues a far more effectual way of accomplishing its object. None among the well informed and candid can doubt that ever since its formation it has been doing what it under. took to do, exerting an influence by the testimony which it has been bearing against slavery, to mitigate its rigors, and prepare the way for its ultimate extinction. Indeed, since the commencement of its operations, slavery has assumed a milder form; at least in some of the southern states great numbers have manifested a willingness to liberate their slaves, and commit them to its care. Nay, from the first, many more have been ready to embrace its offers than it has had the means of furnishing with a conveyance, and sometimes this number has amounted to no less than two thousand. Through its influence, combined with other causes, a few years since the final termination of the system of slavery began to be very extensively agitated, especially in the states of Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky, and there was a fair prospect that state conventions would soon be called to consider the subject, when the most ill-judged measures of some fiery zealots in the northern states, and the torrent of flaming invective which they poured forth, by arousing the angry passions of southern men, exciting their fears and their prejudices, put the matter at rest.

So much has been written and said against the colonization plan, thatno doubt many who are not in reality unfriendly to it have had

their confidence in it shaken, and stand in doubt with respect to its efficiency. Some of the objections which have been made to it carry with them their own refutation; such, for instance, as that it is a system of coercion, when in its constitution it provides for the emi. gration of none but those who give their consent; and that it upholds the system of slavery, and aids the slave-holders in retaining their slaves in bondage, when it has been all along holding out to the masters inducements to liberate their slaves, and presenting before the slaves themselves the spectacle of their emancipated brethren, growing up into free and flourishing states. I am not aware that those who make these objections have ever pretended to prove that there have been any instances of men forced away to Africa, or that it has exerted an influence to perpetuate slavery in any other way than that it conveys the freed blacks to another country, instead of leaving them on the soil perhaps to excite sedition among the unemancipated, and endanger the lives of their masters. In other words, their great objection against it is, that it appears to be in the way of their favorite theory, of immediate, unconditional emancipation on the spot. The charge has indeed been very extensively made against the Colonization Society, that it opposes the liberation of the slaves unless they can be removed to some foreign land. Yet this charge cannot be sustained. There is nothing in the constitution of the society which will admit of such a construction, and all consistent and enlightened colonizationists disavow the principle. By no means does the colonization enterprise oppose the bestowment of freedom upon the slaves unless upon the condition of their removal; but it assumes the ground, that as it is impossible for the African race to obtain in this country the possession of equal privileges with the Europeans by any other means than by an amalgamation, and that thus they must continue in a state of comparative degradation, it will be immensely for their advantage to remove, and that the actual and complete emancipation of the slaves is not likely to be carried out in any other way. They also assume the ground that, under existing circumstances, colonization affords the safest and most effectual mode by which the benevolence of the north can operate upon the slavery of the south. This is quite a different thing from actually opposing an emancipation on the soil. Should any of the southern states think proper to pursue such a course with respect to their slaves, no sincere and consistent colonizationists but would hail the event with gratitude and joy, although they might believe that those who had thus obtained their deliverance would be in a still better condition constituting an independent nation by themselves.

The colonization enterprise has, moreover, been represented as a humbug and a failure. Almost from the commencement of its operations its enemies have resorted to every artifice to bring it into discredit; but it has continued its benevolent work through evil as well as good report, until it has reared monuments of its labor which may bid defiance to the attacks of defamation. It is now too late to represent it as a failure. Its efforts have already been crowned with too great success, and it has before it too fair a prospect of prosperity, to suffer any material injury from the slander of its revilers. It is now seventeen years since the American Colonization

Society commenced settling a colony of free blacks near the mouth of the River Mesurado, in the vicinity of the British colony of Sierra Leone, on the western coast of Africa. As a matter of course, the colony at its commencement was subjected to many difficulties. It had to encounter diseases incident to new settlements, and the hostility of neighboring tribes. But notwithstanding the obstacles against which it had to struggle, it has prospered to such a degree that, at the present time, Liberia, the name of the district of country purchased of the African tribes, extending along the coast about three hundred miles, has a population of between five and six thousand inhabitants, (emigrants from the United States, and their chil dren,) most of whom have obtained their freedom through the influ. ence of colonization. Along this line of coast are nine villages, the largest of which, Monrovia, contains more than five hundred houses. Within these limits five colonies have been planted, viz., the parent colony, of which Monrovia is the capital and seat of government; Edina and Bassa Cove, under the auspices and guidance of the Pennsylvania and New-York Societies; Greenville, a territory lately purchased by the Mississippi Society, and settled in part by the emigrants it has sent out; Louisiana, in Africa, a recent purchase of the Louisiana Society; and Cape Palmas, or Maryland, in Liberia, the settlement of the Maryland Society. According to abundant and unexceptionable testimony, their farms and villages, their school-houses and churches, their vessels of commerce, their legislative councils and courts of justice, all testify to the general prosperity. To different parts of the coast vessels built at the wharves of Monrovia, manned and commanded by her citizens, convey the articles of American and European skill in exchange for the gold, ivory, camwood, and mahogany, palm oil, rice, coffee, oranges, tamarinds and bananas, drugs and precious gums, and other various products of that vast and fertile country, thus inviting the native population to turn from the slave-trade to agricultural pursuits and a lawful commerce.

In Liberia there are eighteen churches, and forty ministers of the gospel of different religious denominations. Sunday schools and Bible classes are established generally in the churches into which the child. ren of the natives are gathered, along with those of the colonists. No. where is the sabbath more strictly observed, or the places of public worship better attended. A more temperate, moral community, is not to be found on the face of the earth. In the Pennsylvania and New-York, and in the Maryland Society's colonies, the sale and use of ardent spirits are prohibited by law. At Monrovia and Bassa Cove, public libraries, consisting of from twelve to fifteen hundred volumes, have been established. The colonists have also a newspaper, the Liberia Herald, published at Bassa Cove, which sends forth periodical intelligence of their proceedings and success. There are, in the different villages, several societies for benevolent purposes and literary improvement. At a missionary meeting in Bassa Cove, not long since, one hundred dollars were collected for the support of mis. sionaries among the neighboring heathen tribes. About thirty white missionaries, of different denominations, are aided and protected in the settlements of the colonies, while devoting themselves to the work

of instructing the surrounding heathen in Christianity, and several colored missionaries have already been prepared for usefulness. According to the report of a late colonial agent, an African population of at least 100,000 have already felt something of the benign influence of this colony. The slave-trade, which was formerly prosecuted along the whole western coast, is now broken up wherever the influence of Liberia extends. Thus much, at least, has the colonization enterprise effected. And certainly here is too great an amount of good accomplished to render it entitled to the appellation of a humbug or a failure. And is it benevolence that would efface those fair scenes which have thus been created on the African shore, blot out from existence those churches and schools, those farms, and villages, and merchant vessels, and restore those gloomy objects which they have superseded, the groves consecrated to devil worship, the uncultivated landscapes, with their benighted inhabitants dancing and yelling at their pagan orgies, polluting the air with human sacrifices, and dyeing their cocoa and plantain shades with torrents of blood shed by the tyrant's caprice, or poured in the battle's fury?

. Is it said that more ought to have been accomplished within the space of seventeen years? It is answered, that what has been done has been effected in despite of a very zealous and active opposition, which has spared no pains, and hesitated at no artifice, to prejudice the public mind against the cause; and that the people whom it has endeavored to form into free and enlightened states have not been such men as colonized New-England, but, for the most part, men who have experienced the deteriorating influence of servitude. It should be remembered, too, that the first settlers of every new country have many hardships to struggle against, in laying the foundations of society-hardships which their successors know little how to appreciate. When it is remembered how many years of toil and suffering it cost our forefathers in establishing colonies on the shores of Massachusetts before those colonies began to present the appearance of prosperity, and how many years of arduous labor, and how many lives it cost the companions of Smith to lay the foundation of the Virginian commonwealth, the present flourishing condition of Liberia becomes rather a matter of surprise. The truth is, there is every reason to believe that that colony has increased from the beginning in a degree commensurate with the true interests of the enterprise. It was necessary that there should be pioneers, and that these pioneers should not be numerous, to prepare the way for future emigrants. To have crowded in vast. multitudes without such preparation would have been neither humane nor politic. If five thousand appear but a small number, compared with the two and a half millions still in slavery, let it be remembered that these are a sufficient number to demonstrate the practicability of the colonization plan, the most that the society expected to accomplish at its first formation, and to prepare the way for a future vast accession of emigrants. Who that could have beheld the settlements of the Tyrian colony, on the shores of northern Africa, seventeen years after their commencement, would have dreamed that he beheld the rising great. ness of Carthage, empress of the seas? Who that could have witnessed the huts erected amidst the lagunes of the Adriatic, by a few fugitives from Alaric's conquering sword, seventeen years after their VOL. XI.-Oct., 1840. 34

arrival, could have imagined the future splendor of the mighty Venetian republic? Or who that should have chanced to journey along the bleak and pine-clad shores of Massachusetts, seventeen years after the landing at Plymouth, would have supposed that in less than two centuries a great empire would have arisen out of those wilds? Let none then, who consider what great things have arisen from small beginnings, mock at the infancy of the African colonies, nor venture to assert that He who orders all human affairs may not render them the germ of enlightened, great, and powerful nations! Is it still objected, that the colonization enterprise is not adequate to the removal of slavery from our land; that even in case all the slaves were liberated, it would be impossible to provide the means of convey. ance to Africa? Granting that it were so, and that colonization merely effected, through its influence, the disinthrallment of a few thousands, or, if you please, merely effected the emigration of some hundreds of the free blacks to a country where they could constitute, by themselves, a free and independent state, it would still have enough of the character of a benevolent institution to entitle it to the patronage of all the good, and to render it too sacred for the assaults of detraction.

But let us for a moment inquire, if it is true that its operations must, of necessity, be thus limited? Let it be remembered that those who organized the American Colonization Society, did not expect that the society itself would be able to transport all the slave population of the south to Africa. What they undertook to do, and what has, in a great measure, been already done, was to demonstrate the practicability of the colonization scheme, and to prepare the way for the nation itself to undertake the work, and carry it forward on a larger scale. They wished to lay a foundation on which the national and state governments might erect an ample structure. And who shall assert that this great and wealthy nation is inadequate to the removal of our whole slave population, even within a few years. The annual increase of the whole colored population of the United States during the ten years from 1820 to 1830, was 56,000 per annum; and some men have most absurdly asserted, that our whole marine is insufficient to convey this number to Africa. And yet it can be demonstrated that 42,000 tons of shipping, which is not more than one forty-second part of the registered and licensed shipping of the United States, making only two trips a year, and affording each emigrant six times the space allowed on board the slavers, or one ton and a half each, would accom. modate the whole. It has been stated, on the authority of some recent calculation, that no less than 365,000 are every year torn away from Africa, to bow their strength in slavery: and who shall say that this nation, with a surplus of ten millions annually, is unable to carry back to that country less than one-third as many as a band of pirates drag yearly from its shores? But suppose that 100,000 were to be colonized annually. In thirty years it would transfer our whole colored population to Africa, by an outlay of three millions annually, a sum which the weekly contributions of three cents, by one-seventh of our people, would supply; or, if voted as a measure of justice for the many wrongs which the Africans have received from our hands, would afford a very proper channel for the overflowings of our national treasury. There