artisan, a manufacturer, a skilled laborer of any sort, they can secure the products of the highest manufacturing and mechanical skill" (pp. 68, 69). Then there is the difference of the slave-trade:

"Trading in slaves was doubtless practised by the ancients, and with sufficient barbarity. But we look in vain in the records of antiquity for a traffic which, in extent, in systematic character, and above all, in the function discharged by it as the common support of countries breeding and consuming human labor, can with justice be regarded as the analogue of the modern slave-trade — of that organized system which has been carried on between Guinea and the coast of America, and of that between Virginia, the Guinea of the New World, and the slave-consuming States of the South and West" (p. 71).

The chapter on the internal development of slave societies is exceedingly impressive. The rude industrial state of the mean whites, and the absurdity of looking to them for social amelioration, are vividly set forth. Can we look to the slaves or their masters? It were equally absurd. The condition of the slaves, as such, is utterly hopeless: it contains no germ of promise. And as to their masters, what prospect is there of emancipation in a government based upon slavery as its "corner-stone"? Ultimate barbarism-not freedom and civilisation-is the inevitable goal of Southern slave society.

The chapter on the external policy of slave societies is full of power. We give a portion of it:

"In free societies, the paths to eminence are various. Successful trade, the professions, science and literature, social reform, philanthropy, furnish employment for the redundant activity of the people, and open so many avenues to distinction. But for slaveholders these means of advancement do not exist. Commerce and manufactures are excluded by the necessities of the case. The professions, which are the result of much subdivision of employment where population is rich and dense, can have no place in a poor and thinly peopled country. Science and literature are left without the principal inducements for their cultivation, where there is no field for their most important practical applications. Social reform and philanthropy would be out of place in a country where human chattels are the principal property. Practically, but one career lies open to the Southerner desirous of advancement agriculture carried on by slaves. To this, therefore, he turns. In the management of his plantation, in the breeding, buying, and selling of slaves, his life is passed. Amid the moral atmosphere which

this mode of life engenders, his ideas and tastes are formed. He has no notion of ease, independence, happiness, where slavery is not found. Is it strange, then, that his ambition should connect itself with the institution around which are entwined his domestic associations, which is identified with all his plans in life, and which offers him the sole chance of emerging from obscurity?

"But the aspirations of the slaveholder are not confined within the limits of his own community. He is also a citizen of the United States. In the former, he naturally and easily takes the leading place; but, as a member of the larger society in which he is called upon to act in combination with men who have been brought up under free institutions, the position which he is destined to fill is not so clearly indicated. It is plain, however, that he cannot become blended in the general mass of the population of the Union. His character, habits, and aims are not those of the Northern people, nor are theirs his. The Northerner is a merchant, a manufacturer, a lawyer, a literary man, an artisan, a shopkeeper, a schoolmaster, a peasant farmer; he is engaged in commercial speculation, or in promoting social or political reform; perhaps he is a philanthropist, and includes slavery-abolition in his programme. Between such men and the slaveholder of the South there is no common basis for political action. There are no objects in promoting which he can combine with them in good faith and upon public grounds. There lies before him, therefore, but one alternative: he must stand by his fellows, and become powerful as the asserter and propagandist of slavery; or, failing this, he must submit to be of no account in the politics of the Union. Here then again the slaveholder is thrown back upon his peculiar system as the sole means of satisfying the master passion of his life. In the society of the Union, no less than in that of the State, he finds that his single path to power lies through the maintenance and extension of this institution. Accordingly, to uphold it, to strengthen it, to provide for its future growth and indefinite expansion, becomes the dream of his life—the one great object of his existence. But this is not all; this same institution, which is the beginning and end of the slaveholder's being, places between him and the citizens of free societies a broad and impassable gulf. The system which is the foundation of his present existence and future hopes, is by them denounced as sinful and inhuman; and he is himself held up to the reprobation of mankind. The tongues and hands of all freemen are instinctively raised against him. A consciousness is thus awakened in the minds of the community of slaveholders that they are a proscribed class, that their position is one of antagonism to the whole civilized world; and the feeling binds them together in the fastest concord. Their pride is aroused; and all the energy of their nature is exerted to make good their position against those who would assail it. In this manner the instinct of self-defence and the sentiment of pride come to aid the passion of ambition, and all tend to fix in the minds of the slaveholders the resolution to maintain at all hazards the

keystone of their social order. To establish their scheme of society on such broad and firm foundations that they may set at defiance the public opinion of free nations, and, in the last resort, resist the combined efforts of their physical power, becomes at length the settled purpose and clearly conceived design of the whole body. To this they devote themselves with the zeal of fanatics, with the persistency and secrecy of conspirators.

"The position of slaveholders thus naturally fosters the passion of ambition, and that passion inevitably connects itself with the maintenance and extension of slavery" (pp. 97, 98).

The career and designs of the slave power form the subject of the two following chapters. They are written with great force, and evince an extraordinary familiarity with our political history during the last thirty years.

In his concluding chapter the author shows the impolicy of European intervention, the duty of neutrality and the obligation to render us moral support. He also considers the possible modes of settlement, and suggests one of his own, which he thinks would involve an ultimate victory over slavery. His plan is to recognise the Confederacy with the Mississippi for its western boundary. We trust and believe that a much better plan even that of a regenerated, free, and unbroken Union-is in the decree of Almighty Providence.

G. L. P.

ART. VII.-BELIEF OF THE INDIANS IN INFERIOR

SPIRITS.

By J. A. VAN HEUVEL, Esq., Ogdensburgh, N. Y.

THE Indian nations of America, besides acknowledging a Supreme Being, believe also in good spirits subordinate to Him to whom they offer prayers and supplications.

"The Indians", says Lafitan, "believe not only in a Supreme Being, but also in spirits inferior to him. Their number is not fixed. Their imagination sees them in all things in nature; but especially in all such as are wonderful, whose origin is not known and have the character of novelty".*

"To all their inferior deities", says Charleroix, "the Hurons, Iroquois, and Algonquins, make various kinds of offerings. To propitiate the god of the waters, they cast into the streams and lakes tobacco and birds that have been killed by them. In honor of the sun, and also of inferior spirits, they consume in the fire a part of everything they eat. Strings of wampum, ears of corn, the skins, and often the whole carcases, of animals are seen along difficult and dangerous rocks, and on the shores of rapids, as so many offerings made to the presiding genius of the place".t

Mr. Bancroft, in his History of the United States, thus remarks on this part of the Indian belief: "The red man sees a divinity in every power. Every hidden agency, every mysterious influence is personified. A god dwells in the sun and in the moon, and in the firmament; a god reddens in the eastern sky; a deity is present on the ocean and in the fire; the crag that overhangs the riyer has its genius; there is a spirit in the waterfall; a household god makes his abode in the

* Mœurs des Sauvages, vol. i, p. 153.

Travels in Canada.

t

Indian's wigwam, and consecrates his home. So the savage deity, broken as it were into an infinite number of fragments, fills all place and all being. . . . Hennepin found a beaver-robe hung on an oak as an oblation to the spirit that dwells on the Falls of St. Anthony. The guides of Jontel, in the southwest, on killing a buffalo, offered several slices of the meat as a sacrifice to the unknown spirit of that wilderness. As they passed the Ohio, its beautiful stream was propitiated by gifts of tobacco and dried meat, and worship was paid to the rock just above the Missouri".*

Tobacco is an offering especially made to the inferior spirits. "There is", says an early traveller, "an herb in Virginia called uppowee, which is tobacco and is held in such estimation that they think their gods are extremely delighted with it, for which reason they make hallowed fires, and cast some of the powder therein for a sacrifice. Being in a storm upon the waters, they cast some up into the air; all done with strange gestures, stamping, and sometimes dancing, clapping of hands, holding them up, looking to the heavens, and uttering strange words and noises ".†

The adoration of these inferior deities is the ordinary wor ship of the American Indians. To the Great Spirit or Supreme Being their addresses are made only on particular great occasions.

Harmon, in his Journal, says of the Indians generally, offerings are sometimes made to the Supreme Being, but rarely. They occasionally supplicate of him success in their important undertakings.

Lederer observes of the Indians of Virginia: "Okee is their name for the Creator of all things. To him the high priest offers sacrifices; but their ordinary devotion is to lesser divinities, to whom they suppose sublunary affairs are committed".

It is, perhaps, from this that the early French Catholic missionaries who, Lafitan complains, did not make themselves

*History of the United States, chap. xxii.

Purchas' Collection.