TEXAS STATE LIBRARY
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to practice. Certainly I am not so partial to such modes of legislation as to be tempted to follow them myself. No; the decree reestablishing Slavery in Nicaragua was the result of observation, not of a priori speculation. It was only after a residence of fifteen months in the State - after attentively observing the soil, the climate and the products of the country - after narrowly watching the character of its inhabitants, together with their social and political organization, that I determined to revoke the act of the Federal Con stituent Assembly whereby Slavery was abolished. A review of the history of tropical America - insular as well as continental - will, I am satisfied, manifest the. wisdom of the measure, so severely criti cized in the Northern States and Europe. Negro Slavery on this continent had its origin, as you are aware, in a spirit of benevolence and philanthropy. In the annals of human- •ity there are few brighter names than those of Father LAS CASAS, the originator of the system; and certainly few wiser monarchs have ever reigned in Europe than the Spanish sovereign who put in practice the suggestions of the holy father. It is true that Lord BROUGHAM has lately characterized the measure of LAS CASAS as "a union of the most far-sighted interest with the most short-sighted beneYolence," but when did his lordship forsake his Benthamian principles, and cease to ac knowledge that in political affairs the most enlightened interest is the purest and most genuine benevolence? The admission of the noble lord at once destroys the economical argument for the abolition of Slavery in tropical America, and reduces it to a pure question of philanthropy. It was not until towards the close of the last century that people began to doubt the wisdom and benevolence of the policy inaugurated by LAS CASAS. Then the ideas of BUXTON, and CLARKSON, and WIL BERFORCE became fashionable in America as well as in Europe. At first these ideas were confined to a small portion of the English public; but caught up as they were by a religious party which controlled to a great extent Parliamentary elections, they soon became powerful in the British Legislature. The fashion spread to France, and the free-think ing legislators of that country were as eager to adopt the theories of WILBERFORCE as to follow the -example of the Puritans of the Long Parliament. The horrors of Haytien history for the last sixty-five years attest how dangerous it is to transplant political sentimentalism from England into France; and the condition of Jamaica, in comparison with that of Cuba, proves how little good British colonists have derived from humanitarian legislation. The· events which have followed the abolition of Slavery in tropical America strikingly illustrate the fact that Government is a science and not a fine art, and that its laws are to be sought for inductively - not through the sentiments or emotions. The Pharisaical philanthropy of Exeter Hall has made Hayti and all Spanish America the seat of dire and almost endless civil war; it is fast conYerting Jamaica into a wil derness. Further than this, it is making the whole western .coast of Africa one vast slaYe-ship, before which the horrors of the middle ages sink into insignificance. The slavery of the negro to his fellow-savage, productirn a8 it necessarily is of cannibalism and human sacrifice - has been a hundred fold increased by efforts to suppress the slave-
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