records of dazzling achievements-surrounded on every hand by the melancholy memorials of once powerful kingdoms and republics, whose greatness and whose dominion, annihilated by the sectional dissensions of their own citizens, have passed away for ever; the splendour of whose glorious deeds, in the day of their pride, has only been exceeded by the magnitude of their ignoble fall; whose descendants have for ages lived, and groaned, and died, the despised and slavish subjects of a foreign master; I have asked myself, if the unhappy fate of subjugated and degraded Greece, is but a prototype of that which is in store for the great Confederacy of the New World!

So far as the solution of this question depends upon the preservation of the federal Union, I admit that I am less hopeful than at any previous period of my life. I see the indications of an unswerving purpose, on the part of the North, to obtain a triumph over the South, by means of its numerical preponderance; and well I know the spirit with which the South will meet the issue thus presented.

In view of the impending calamity of a conflict, whose beginning seems almost at hand, but whose end is shrouded in impenetrable gloom; with a vivid appreciation of the disasters which may soon involve us in a common danger, if not a common ruin; in the character of an humble citizen, whose passions have

been calmed by the startling proximity of the menacing danger, I have addressed these words, and now send them forth to my fellow-countrymen. That I am a Southerner, by birth, by education, and in all my hopes for the future, I am free to declare; but I am also an American, protected in a foreign land by the flag of the Union, and every day I live I appreciate more highly the value of the great Confederacy which that star-gemmed banner symbolises. Priceless indeed, compared to the pecuniary sacrifices necessary to maintain it in its integrity; priceless, even compared with the blood which might be shed in defending it against a foreign foe; but detestable as a tyrant, and valueless to freemen, when it can only be upheld by a sacrifice of the honour and the independence of its members.

LETTER

TO THE

RIGHT HON. HENRY LORD BROUGHAM.

Constantinople, Feb. 1861.

MY LORD,-Two events of recent occurrencetrifling in themselves, except when regarded in connection with the peculiar circumstances of the times in which they occurred-have contributed more towards the identification of your Lordship's name with the political convulsion which the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one is now witnessing in America, and with the antislavery movement, in which it has had its origin, than all which you have hitherto accomplished, during your long and brilliant career as an English

statesman.

With a zeal which has known no flagging-with a resolution which was appalled by no probable or possible consequences-with an ability which is fully accorded by your adversaries—and with an carnestness which would seem to preclude any doubt of your sincerity, you have laboured for the over

throw of that institution of African slavery in America, which has existed from a period long anterior to the incorporation of the Republic into the family of nations.

In this lifetime labour, however, you have been identified with others of your compatriots, who have exhibited the same pertinacity of purpose, and who have probably acquired a reputation almost equal to your own as the great exponents of English sentiment and English policy.

It has been the fortune of your Lordship, through the instrumentality of the two events referred to, to inscribe your name far above those of your fellowlabourers, in the roll of the recognised exemplars of British sentiment and British policy.

The first of these occasions offered to your Lordship the opportunity, in an assembly of distinguished dignitaries from almost every nation of the civilised world, of proclaiming, in effect, your belief in the equality of the races of man, and the special claim of an African then present to be regarded as a worthy and fit associate for the noble Peers of England.

If your Lordship had been contented with the utterance of this simple expression of opinion, it would probably have been forgotten by those who were your auditors almost as soon as uttered. by any accident, a representative man of the millions

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of Anglo-Saxon blood and Anglo-Saxon colour, who have sighed in vain to attain to that social rank and station which you so readily accorded in that august assemblage of princes, and nobles, and statesmen to this sooty African, had bestowed a passing notice upon this paragraph in your lordship's speech, the subject would doubtless have been dismissed, after a brief commentary, with the very natural and charitable observation, that a Peer of England had an undoubted right to choose his own associates, and might be expected to comprehend, better than another, the qualifications and characteristics of those who should be regarded as worthy of such association.

But your Lordship entertained a deeper purpose. You desired to hold up to obloquy a great nation on the opposite side of the Atlantic; and, in order to startle your audience by the magnitude and the enormity of its crimes, you proclaimed the presence of the diplomatic representative of that nation which held in the bonds of slavery millions of a race of people, of which you then and there presented a faithful type, and to whom you assigned an equality of social rank with the noble order of which your Lordship, in the estimation of your fellow-countrymen, is a faithful representative.

Your Lordship's design was skillfully, and artistically, and dramatically executed. To be received