276 EEPUBLICS or SPANISH AMERICA. 



the whites, have been hitherto the most powerful causes of 

 the security of the mother countries, and of the maintenance 

 of the Portuguese dynasty. Can this security, from its 

 nature, be of long duration ? Does it justify the inertness 

 of governments who neglect to remedy the evil while it is 

 yet time? I doubt this. When, under the influence of 

 extraordinary circumstances, alarm is mitigated, when coun- 

 tries in which the accumulation of slaves has produced 

 in society the fatal mixture of heterogeneous elements, may 

 be led, perhaps unwillingly, into an exterior struggle, civil 

 dissensions will break forth in all their violence, and Euro- 

 pean families, innocent of an order of things which they 

 have had no share in creating, will be exposed to the most 

 imminent dangers. 



We can never sufficiently praise the legislative wisdom of 

 the new republics of Spanish America, which since their 

 birth, have been seriously intent on the total extinction of 

 slavery. That vast portion of the earth has, in this respect, 

 an immense advantage over the southern part of the United 

 States, where the whites, during the struggle with England, 

 established liberty for their own profit, and where the slave 

 population, to the number of 1,600,000, augments still more 

 rapidly than the whites.* If civilization, instead of ex- 

 tending, were to change its place ; if, after great and 

 deplorable convulsions in Europe, America, between Cape 

 Hatteras and the Missouri, were to become the principal 

 seat of the light of Christianity, what a spectacle would be 

 presented by that centre of civilization, where, in the sanc- 

 tuary of liberty, we could attend a sale of negroes after the 

 death of a master, and hear the sobbings of parents who are 

 separated from their children ! Let us hope that the gene- 

 rous principles which have so long animated the legislatures 



* In 1769, forty-six years before the declaration of the Congress at 

 Vienna, and thirty-eight years before the abolition of the slave-trade, de- 

 creed ill London and at Washington, the Chamber of Representatives of 

 Massachusetts had declared itself against " the unnatural and unwarrant- 

 able custom of enslaving mankind." (See Walsh's Appeal to the United 

 States, 1819, p. 312.) The Spanish writer, Avendafio, was perhaps the 

 first who declaimed forcibly not only against the slave-trade, abhorred 

 even by the Afghans (Elphinstone's Journey to Cabul, p. 245), bu 

 against slavery in general, and " all the iniquitous sources of colonia 

 wealth." (Thesaurus Ind., torn, i, tit. f J, cap. 2.) 



