liberty, as it is called, their condition has, in all respects, become far worse than it was before. "There appears every reason to apprehend," says James Franklin, "that it will recede into irrecoverable insignificance, poverty, and disorder."*

Mr. T. Babington Macaulay has, we are aware, put forth certain notions on the subject of liberty, which are exactly in accordance with the views and the spirit of the abolitionists, as well as with the cut-throat philosophy of the Parisian philanthropists of the revolution. As these notions are found in one of his juvenile productions, and illustrated by "a pretty story" out of Ariosto, we should not deem it worth while to notice them, if they had not been retained in the latest edition of his Miscellanies. But for this circumstance, we should pass them

by as the rhetorical flourish of a young man who, in his most mature productions, is often more brilliant than profound.

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Ariosto," says he, "tells a pretty story of a fairy, who, by some mysterious law of her nature, was condemned to appear at certain seasons in the form of a foul and poisonous snake.

* Franklin's Present State of Hayti, &c., p. 265.

Those who injured her during the period of her disguise were forever excluded from participation in the blessings which she bestowed. But to those who, in spite of her loathsome aspect, pitied and protected her, she afterward revealed herself in the beautiful and celestial form which was natural to her, accompanied their steps, granted all their wishes, filled their houses with wealth, made them happy in love, and victorious in war. Such a spirit is Liberty. At times she takes the form of a hateful reptile. She grovels, she hisses, she stings. But wo to those who in disgust shall venture to crush her! And happy are those who, having dared to receive her in her degraded and frightful shape, shall at length be rewarded by her in the time of her beauty and her glory."

For aught we know, all this may be very fine poetry, and may deserve the place which it has found in some of our books on rhetoric. But yet this beautiful passage will-like the fairy whose charms it celebrates-be so surely transformed into a hateful snake or venomous toad, that it should not be swallowed without an antidote. Robespierre, Danton, Marat, Barrère, and the black Dessalines, took this hateful, hissing, stinging, maddening reptile to their bosoms,

and they are welcome to its rewards. But they mistook the thing: it was not liberty transformed; it was tyranny unbound, the very scourge of hell, and Satan's chief instrument of torture to a guilty world. It was neither more nor less than Sin, despising GOD, and warring against his image on the earth.

We do not doubt-nay, we firmly believethat in the veritable history of the universe, analogous changes have taken place. But then these awful changes were not mere fairy tales. They are recorded in the word of God. When Lucifer, the great bearer of light, himself was free, he sought equality with God, and thence became a hateful, hissing serpent in the dust. But he was not fully cursed, until "by devilish art" he reached "the organs of man's fancy," and with them forged the grand illusion that equality alone is freedom.

For even sinless, happy Eve was made to feel herself oppressed, until, with keen desire of equality with gods, "forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate:"

"Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of wo,
That all was lost."

How much easier, then, to effect the ruin of poor, fallen man, by stirring up this fierce desire of equality with discontented thoughts and vain hopes of unattainable good! It is this dark desire, and not liberty, which, in its rage, becomes the "poisonous snake;" and, though decked in fine, allegoric, glowing garb, it is still the loathsome thing, the "false worm," that turned God's Paradise itself into a blighted world.

If Mr. Macaulay had only distinguished between liberty and license, than which no two things in the universe are more diametrically opposed to each other, his passion for fine rhetoric would not have betrayed him into so absurd a conceit respecting the diverse forms of freedom. Liberty is-as we have seen- the bright emanation of reason in the form of law; license is the triumph of blind passion over all law and order. Hence, if we would have liberty, the great deep of human passion must be restrained. For this purpose, as Mr. Burke has said, there must be power somewhere; and if there be not moral power within, there must be physical power without. Otherwise, the restraints will be too weak; the safeguards of liberty will give way, and the passions of men

will burst into anarchy, the most frightful of all the forms of tyranny. Shall we call this liberty? Shall we seek the secure enjoyment of natural rights in a wild reign of lawless terror? As well might we seek the pure light of heaven in the bottomless pit. It is, indeed, a most horrible desecration of the sacred name of liberty, to apply it either to the butcheries and brutalities of the French Revolution, or to the more diabolical massacres of St. Domingo. If such

were freedom, it would, in sober truth, be more fitly symbolized by ten thousand hissing serpents than by a single poisonous snake; and by all on earth, as in heaven, it should be abhorred. Hence, those pretended friends and advocates of freedom, who would thus fain transmute her form divine into such horribly distorted shapes, are with her enemies confederate in dark misguided league.

§. V. The consequences of abolition to the South.

"We have had experience enough in our own colonies," says the Prospective Review, for November, 1852, "not to wish to see the experiment tried elsewhere on a larger scale." Now this, though it comes to us from across the Atlantic, really sounds like the voice of genuine