UNITED STATES SINCE THE EEVOLUTION. 277 



limbs, conscious of safety still the marshal of the great 

 &quot;Republican Government follows his footsteps, till the 

 British waters of the St Croix, the St John, or the St 

 Lawrence throw him off the scent. 



Nay, it is with sorrow that an Anglo-Saxon writes 

 that the tendency of a large portion of the great Repub 

 lican Union is in an opposite direction. There are 

 already entire States upon which, if a free-coloured man 

 set his foot, he is forthwith consigned to prison and for 

 feits his freedom certainly for a time, it may be for 

 ever ! 



Then the slaves themselves have been encouraged 

 to increase from 698,000, their number in 1790, to 

 3,000,000 in 1850. The institution of slavery has been 

 introduced and legalised over an area many times as 

 great as that of the so-called slave States, at the period 

 of the Revolution. In reference to this large tract 

 England cannot surely be open to blame. It has also 

 been re-established over the vast territory of Texas, out 

 of which three slave States are to be formed. And I 

 would put it to any candid moralist, whether the intro 

 duction of slavery into North America by English 

 planters, and in the dim moral lights of the 17th and 

 18th centuries, can be compared as a national crime 

 with that of re-imposing it, with the lights of the middle 

 of the 19th, over a vast territory of nearly 400,000 

 square miles, from which, by a less energetic and less 

 educated people, it had previously been expelled ! With 

 the tendencies which have led to these results, the proba 

 bility is, that had the American Revolution not taken 

 place fortunately for the interests of humanity the 

 influence of the slave-holders, in the still united empire, 

 would at this moment have been so great in our United 

 Parliament, that the friends of emancipation would have 

 been still struggling among us, as they are in the States, 

 and slave-markets and slave-labour would still have pre- 



