THE

The conductors of the Whig Review have heretofore expressed their own opinions, decidedly and without reservation, in regard to the extension of slavery, and other questions akin to, and springing out of, it. Any farther expression on their part would be merely to repeat what has been already said, or to fortify their own position with new arguments. The ground which they have taken they esteem to be strictly Whig and constitutional, and therefore intermediate, and conciliatory, between the extreme positions of the North and South. The question of the extension of slavery is simply a controversy between a certain class of propertyholders and the rest of the nation, and tends to confound all other distinctions of party. Opinion, on the one side, is arrayed against interest and opinion on the other, and a contest is excited in which argument ends almost of necessity in recrimination. Opinion will not yield when interest does not compel it, and interest is always ready to fortify itself with opinion.

That there has been of late a great improvement, however, in the public mind, in regard to the right method of conducting this dangerous controversy, we have evidence in a prospectus, lately issued by Southern representatives, Whig and Democratic, at Washington, of a new paper to be estab

|

lished by them, for the defence of their institutions and their constitutional rights. The entire subject is to be thrown open to discussion, opinions are to be sifted and controverted, and of course reason and argument are to take the place of passion and recrimination.

In view of this marked improvement in public sentiment, the conductors of the Whig Review will feel themselves justified in persevering in the plan which they have now, for some time, adhered to, of giving the sentiments and arguments of both sides in regard to Slavery, without reserve. They have admitted, and shall continue to admit, articles from Northern and Southern pens indifferently, and biographies of statesmen representing constituencies of both extremes. No adequate or useful accounts of political actions or opinions can be given from a merely neutral point of view. Keeping therefore within the limits. of courtesy, and of the doctrines of the National Whig Party, the Review will in future not feel itself bound to exclude sound Whig articles, advocating the views of either extreme. Our readers will then have before them a better chart of public opinion, by which they can mark out for themselves such a course as may seem to them to be the right one..

empire, and wastes his revenue upon it, as he does upon his park and his stud of hunters; Asia is his conservatory, which he protects, not only for the tropic elegancies which she yields him, but for the beauty of her submission. Such a conqueror is the Englishman, and such before him, though inferior, was the Roman.

When we add to this peculiar genius for government which marks the English, as it did the Roman conqueror, that singular liberality of sentiment which accords to all freedom of opinion, which sedulously refrains from forcing the conscience or controlling the belief by any but the most natural and legitimate methods; and to this, urbanity in negotiation, a skill in touching the generosity and moving the affection of inferiors, we have, in great part, the secret of the superior success of England in extending and confirming her empire; in rooting her colonies in the soil of foreign countries, and creating between the aborigines and their new masters satisfactory ties of dependence and amity. Here, doubtless, is at least the moral secret of her success, and it belongs to the character of the Englishman, as it does with equal or even greater force to his brother, the American. Thus these two have been the most successful colonizers and founders of states.

Other advantages, however, it is necessary to take into consideration,—the mechanical ingenuity and warlike skill of the Anglo-Norman, and the courage and indomitable firmness of purpose, the single, far-sighted, adventurous will,-the placidity of temper and constitution, adapting itself readily to all climates and circumstances, the love of toil for the glory of overcoming, as well as for the physical fruits of toil,- -a certain reliance on good fortune, or rather upon Providence, and a conviction of being always on the side protected and favored by the Dispenser of all good. To sum all up, we trace the successes of English and American colonization to those leading moral traits, generosity, statesman-like prudence, and veneration for rights and laws, which characterize the race. In all of these, too, the Roman though much inferior, may be compared with his modern representative; for Rome was especially the originator of those na

tional codes by which the civilized world is governed in modern times.

Under the colonial system of England are embraced a great variety of policies: there is, for example, first, the treatment of her immediate dependencies. Ireland was originally colonized, and continues from time to time to be colonized directly from England; and the government of that dependency has the faults and the imperfections which attend the entire system of English colonial government; for while we claim for England the merit of the most successful colonization the world has ever known, excepting our own, it is necessary also to admit that through a natural obstinacy or short-sightedness, she adheres too pertinaciously to that system of measures which were unquestionably necessary and salutary in their operation during the times immediately following a conquest. When her colonies have grown to the full stature and ability of a nation, England refuses to accord them their necessary liberties and interests; and there ensues, between the dependency and the mother country, a series of revolutionary struggles. The English statesman insists that a colonist shall be always a colonist: and, in this respect, the governing classes of England compare disadvantageously with those of Rome in her best days. There is a systematic rigidity, a pertinacious adherence to the old system, a resolution not to admit the younger brother to the rights and honors of the elder. Rome, under her wisest Emperors, incorporated her provinces with the Empire, with such distinctions only, and precedences as the nature of the people themselves might render expedient; and here the universality of the Roman genius made itself conspicuous. England, on the contrary, carries her aristocratic distinctions into the general system of the imperial government. It may be, nay, it certainly is a necessity arising out of the form of her government, which is representative, that she should do so; for if one of her colonies reaches the dignity of an independent state by growth in numbers, wealth and civilization, there is no longer any reason why it should remain dependant. Discontents and rebellions follow, seemingly of course, and the result may be almost with certainty predicted. This result, however, is predictable only when the new state is composed

in great part of colonists from the mother, country, who carry with them the representative principle, with ideas of popular liberty.

It is necessary to make due allowance for this peculiarity, in judging of the colonial system of England; the spirit of defection goes out with the colonist, and when he finds himself strong enough, he begins to claim the prescriptive right of representation and self-government which belonged to his ancestors. The English colonies of the West Indies, by the peculiarity of their situation, and the sparseness of their white population, governing inferior masses of enslaved barbarians, offer a second, and wholly different, instance; they, of necessity, lean upon the mother country, because of their internal weakness.

Wholly different from the preceding were the mercantile colonies of eastern Asia.Conquests, in the strictest sense of the term, over a people accustomed to be conquered and governed, time out of mind, by invaders superior to themselves in military prowess and civil wisdom. The conquests in India, by the English, were not properly conquests over the Hindoos themselves, but over their Mahomedan masters, whose expulsion left India devoid of government. The English merchants and soldiers came naturally and properly in the place of those whom they expelled, and were immediately, and even cheerfully, recognised by the inhabitants as masters more humane, and governors more just and efficient than those who preceded them. Thus the colonization of England presents at least three distinct polices, or forms, of exercising domination. The first of these forms being that which she has always found most difficult to exercise, namely, over a colonization exclusively by her own people, as in Ireland and North America; second, over one like that of the West Indies, where a sparse population of her citizens required the constant protection and support of the mother country, and with these she has been more successful; and, lastly, over a conquest, more suitable to the Anglo-Norman genius, when coming as an invader, she ejects other invaders, and governs a civilized people expecting and wishing to be governed by a race superior to themselves. These are the large and simple phases of English colonial domination: other forms,

intermediate to these, of a mixed character, partake, more or less, of the nature of their types.

Running through all these lines of policy, and characterizing, almost without exception, every act of colonial legislation, we discover the motive of the home interest; the motive which actuates the mercantile land-holding, and manufacturing, legislator, who looks upon a colony only as a market or a factory, whence he may receive produce, and where he may sell, for his own profit, the products of English industry. To the eye of the merchant legislator a colony is a mine of wealth for the home interest, and must be governed for the advantage of that interest. The colonial ministry calculate exchanges; they adjust tariffs, and pass acts for the regulation of colonial commerce, conducive only to the wealth of England. The offices of the colonies must be filled by younger sons, pennyless nephews, and promising proteges, who are there to reap wealth and honors, to make them worthy co-mates of their more fortunate brothers and cousins at home. The army is established for the defence of the colony, and the colony is governed for the honor and the benefit of the army: England is everywhere: all things must flow back to England; she governs like a lord; she legislates like a merchant; and it happens from this cause as much as from the nature of the representative system, that no sooner is a colony of Englishmen strong enough to protect its own interests, it wishes to shake off dependence upon its employer and merchant-master at home. It wishes to labor and to trade on its own account. It will not be taxed, nor have its commerce and manufactures suppressed for the benefit of an English Plutocracy.

Whenever the condition of her conquered subjects, and the colonists mingled with them, has been such as to create a full dependence upon the mother country, the colonial system of England has worked better than any hitherto adopted, even by the wisest nations of antiquity; not so much because of the superiority of the motive, (which, we conceive, has been always, primarily, the maintenance of the home interest,) as because of the superior liberality of the Anglo Saxons and the Anglo Normans themselves ;-of their superior liberality and

magnanimity, which tempers a legislation founded upon trade, with principles and motives superior to the mere calculations of gain.

From such considerations the transition is easy to the American, or free system, which combines the three principles of Greek, Roman, and English colonization and territorial extension; for, first, the American colonist, wherever he goes, has extended over him the protection of the mother country, of the imperial free government of the Union; and, so far, our system assimilates to that of Rome under her mildest Emperors.

And, secondly, our system resembles that of the more cultivated Greeks, in the immediate recognition of new colonies as independent states,-democratic sovereignties; and, lastly, it combines also the system of England in its first motive,which is economy and the increase of wealth. The wealth of the nation as a whole, actuates the colonial legislation of America. But this motive is regulated and kept in check, and guided in its action, by the irresistible principles of the centre; namely, the three Inviolabilities, of individual liberty, of state sovereignty, and the supreme regulative power of the Nation, or Union. Thus we discover that the colonization of a free people is a free colonization; and that a colonial policy bears every feature of the system of government from which it emanates. In the features of the child we recognize, in their purity and simplicity, those of the parent.

Casting an eye then backward over the history of our nation to its origin, we find the first colonies planted upon our shores by an unusual and eccentric movement in the mother country. It had never been the custom of England to drive away her citizens for opinion's sake, until the times of the persecutions, during which a portion of her inhabitants were driven from their homes and fire-sides to find freedom in the wilderness. These colonists were exiled by a three-fold persecution, social, religious and political; they were oppressed first by an hierarchy, and they earried with them, in consequence, the germs of religious freedom: they were contemned and ousted from places of social honor by a haughty aristocracy, and they took with them, in consequence, an hatred

of hereditary privilege. They were denied the rights of free government, which they derived, or affected to derive, from their ancient constitutions; and they bore, in consequence, to their new homes the seeds of civil and political liberty.

Such, at least, were the ideas of the major part of those early colonists, who stamped its present character upon the American government.

But this was not all; they took with them what every Saxon, and every Anglo-Norman inherits, a feeling of nationality, an idea of empire, and of the union and oneness of many states, the highest form of political organization. Hence the pertinacity with which they clung to the mother country; hence their veneration for the crown, as a perpetual witness and evidence of the union and oneness of the empire. So powerfully however, did the old leaven of selfishness, conjoined with the passion of conquest and subjugation, work in the minds of the governing classes in England, so blindly and pertinaciously did they continue their denial of rights to the colonists,-the mercantile spirit looking askance and covetously upon the colonies, as mines of wealth, created for the benefit of the home interest,-notwithstanding the strong attachment, notwithstanding intimate relationship and mutual dependence, separa

tion became inevitable.

Thus was added, by the experience of suffering under the oppressions of the homegovernment, a new principle to guide the nation in the extension of its empire; and this was the principle of the State Sovereignty, remoteness from the centre detracting nothing from the rights of the citizen as the member of a representative State. In a word, the platform upon which they stood while contending for their liberties with the mother country, became as it naturally should, the platform of their separate empire.

While this original platform is adhered to in the extension, as well as the consolidation of the nation, we need entertain no anxiety for the future. The first provision in our system, is that the citizen shall not be deprived of his rights as an elector. It follows that, if circumstances like those of a remote colony, have deprived him, for a time, of the benefits of citizen-ship, and