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and enterprise, the New-England men and the Scottish are very much alike. Dr. Currie, in his profound and elegant biography of Burns, enters at length into the causes which have rendered the great body of the Scottish people so very superior to those of any other European country; the result of his reasoning is, that this national superiority is owing to the combined efforts of the system of parish schools, giving to all the means of elementary education, and of a moderately paid, able, and well-informed clergy, coming into constant contact with, and instructing and regulating the people; to which he adds, as no small auxiliary, the absence of those poor laws which have impoverished, and deteriorated, and corrupted the whole people of England.

In this country we have unfortunately adopted the English poor-law system; which, so far as it yet operates, is a cankerworm knawing at the heart's core of our national morals, prosperity, and strength. The American people, however, possess one decided advantage over those of Scotland and every other country; namely, that of the political sovereignty residing in them; whence they exhibit in their own persons a moral fearlessness, confidence, and elevation, unknown and unimagined elsewhere. A native free-born American knows no superior on earth; from the cradle to the grave he is taught to believe that his magistrates are his servants : and while in all other countries the people are continually flattering and praising their governors, our government is compelled to be eternally playing the sycophant and acting the parasite to the majesty of the people. may, on the whole, be safely asserted that the NewEngland population surpasses that of all the rest of the world in steady habits, dauntless courage, intelligence, enterprise, perseverance-in all the qualities necessary to render a nation first in war and first in peace. Upon inquiry, I was informed by one of our southern generals, who particularly distinguished himself on our northern frontiers during the last war, that the New-England regiment in his brigade was peculiarly conspicuous for its exact discipline, its patient endurance of fatigue and

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privation, its steady, unyielding valour in the field, while his own native Virginians were more careless, more reckless, more inflammatory, more fit for a forlorn hope, or some desperate impracticable enterprise. He added, that he regularly found that all the rum dealt out as rations to his New-England soldiers had glided down the throats of his Virginian regiment, whose pay, in return, had been regularly transferred to the pockets of the more prudent eastern warriors.

In the middle states the population is not so national and unmixed as in New-England, whose inhabitants are altogether of English origin. They do not support religion by law; and a considerable portion of their people are destitute of clergymen, even in the state of New-York, and a still greater proportion in some of the other middle states. In some of them, elementary schools are not numerous, particularly in Pennsylvania, many of whose people can neither write nor read. Property is not so equally divided, and the distinction of rich and poor is more broadly marked than in New-England. Many of their settlements are more recent, and exhibit the physical, intellectual, and moral disadvantages of new settlements, in the privations, ignorance, and irreligion of the settlers, who were composed of many different nations, having no one common object in view, either in regard to religious, or moral, or social institutions. The English, Dutch, Germans, French, Irish, Scottish, Swiss, have not yet had time and opportunity to be all melted down into one homogeneous national mass of American character. The slaves in this section of the Union are more numerous than in New-England, and in Maryland sufficiently so to influence and deteriorate the character of the people. The moral habits of the middle states, generally, are more lax than those of New-England. New-York, indeed, partly from proximity of situation, but chiefly from its continual acquisition of emigrants from the eastern states, is rapidly assuming a New-England character and aspect.

In the southern states, religion receives no support from the law; and a very large proportion of the inha

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bitants are destitute of regular preaching and religious instruction. The elementary schools are few, and in general not well administered; many of the white inhabitants cannot even read. Labour on the seaboard is performed chiefly by slaves; and slavery here, as every where else, has corrupted the public morals. The mulattoes are increasing very rapidly; and, perhaps, in the lapse of years, the black, white, and yellow population will be melted down into one common mass. Duelling and gaming are very prevalent; and, together with other vices, require the restraining power of religion and morality to check their progress towards national ruin.

When speaking of the gradual relaxation of morals in the United States, as we pass from the north and east to the south and west, it is to be understood that the American ladies are not included in this geographical deterioration. In no country under the canopy of heaven do female virtue and purity hold a higher rank than in the Union. We have no instances among us of those domestic infidelities which dishonour so many families in Europe, and even stain the national character of Britain herself, high as she peers over all the other European nations in pure religion and sound morality. Our American ladies make virtuous and affectionate wives, kind and indulgent mothers; are, in general, easy, affable, intelligent, and well-bred; their manners presenting a happy medium between the two distant. reserve and coldness of the English, and the too obvious, too obtrusive behaviour of the French women. Their manners have a strong resemblance to those of the Irish and Scottish ladies.

The public morals, however, of the female population of our southern and western states are materially injured by the existence of the slave system. Even Mr. Morris Birkbeck, whose ultra whiggism has led him in his old age to fly with horror from the despotism of Britain, because she overthrew his friend Napoleon, the great patron saint of liberty in Europe; even he expresses grave doubts if the condition of his enslaved

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countrymen be quite so bad as that of the negroes in Virginia; and he runs a philosophical parallel, very much after the manner of Plutarch, between the situation of the English peasantry and that of the Virginian slaves, balancing their respective evils under various heads of inquiry; and, upon the whole, seems inclined to think that the British people are not yet reduced so low in the scale of oppression and suffering as the black inhabitants of our "Ancient Dominion." Indeed, the sensibilities of this veteran reformer were so much awakened, he says, as actually 'to cause him to shed tears when he saw some slaves sold in Richmond, the capital of Virginia; and he does not hesitate to affirm, that the superior morals of those states which have abolished slavery proves servitude to be, in truth, the bane of society.

Mr. Birkbeck says, that in May, 1817, he was at Petersburgh, on his way to Indiana, where he is now endeavouring to lay the foundations of a colony, to be peopled by English, who, like himself, are too virtuous and too wise to live under the British government, whose wickedness and tyranny are consummating its speedy perdition. He says he found a Virginian tavern like a French hotel, but more filthy, without its culinary excellence, and dearer than an English inn. The daily number of guests at its ordinary was fifty, consisting of travellers, shopkeepers, lawyers, and doctors. He found the Virginian planter a republican in politics, and full of high-spirited independence, but a slave-master, irascible, lax in morals, and wearing a dirk. He never saw in England an assemblage of countrymen who averaged so well in dress and manners. Their conversation gave him a high opinion of their intelligence-the prevailing topic was negro slavery, an evil which all professed to deplore, many were anxious to fly from, but for which none could devise a remedy.

One gentleman, an invalid, was wretched at the thought of his family being left, for a single night, without his protection from his own slaves. He was himself labouring under the effects of a poisonous potion,

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administered to him by a negro, his own personal servant, to whom he had been particularly kind and gene rous, and who thus recompensed his indulgence. It was stated, that severe and rigorous masters seldom suffer from the resentment of their slaves. On the 10th of May, 1817, Mr. Birkbeck saw two female slaves and their children sold by auction in the street at Richmond; a spectacle which exceedingly shocked him; he could scarcely endure to see them handled and examined like cattle, and when he heard their sobs, and saw the tears roll down their cheeks, at the thought of being separated, he could not refrain from weeping with them. Such is the consistency of an English patriot, who laments that his own native country was not enslaved by that virtuous republican, Bonaparte!

In selling slaves, our southern planters and dealers pay no regard to parting nearest relations, to separating parents and children, or tearing asunder husbands and wives. Virginia prides itself on the comparative mildness with which its slaves are treated; and yet, in the first volume of the American Museum there is a heartrending account of a slave being, for some offence, put into an iron cage, suspended to the branches of a lofty tree, and left to perish by famine and thirst, unless the birds of prey, to admit which the bars of the cage stood at intervals sufficiently wide, could terminate his life sooner, by plunging their beaks and talons into his vitals. In the mean time the eagle, the vulture, and the raven feasted upon the quivering flesh of the living victim, whose body they mangled at their own leisure; and the high-spirited republicans of the ancient dominion were gratified by knowing that the air was tainted by the putrefaction, and loaded with the expiring cries and groans of an agonized fellow-man, doomed to die by protracted torture.

Virginia supplies, annually, with slaves of her own growth, the states farther south, where the treatment of the negroes is said to be much more severe and more destructive of life. There are regular dealers, who buy up slaves, and drive them in gangs, chained to

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