singular fact that Townshend never alluded to their former intimate intercourse at Leyden, may partly account for this disparaging tone. There had been a quarrel in the set of Leyden students, in which Townshend, according to Carlyle, had rather shown the white feather; and this may explain his silence.

We have left ourselves no space for any of the more general sketches of social manners with which the autobiography is filled. The journeys of the clerical brethren-a tried company of jokers-to the south, and the various visits which Dr. Carlyle, both before and after his marriage, was continually making to England, as well as different parts of his native country, are full of humorous descriptions of men and things. Harrogate, in 1763, is a picture not so very dissimilar from Harrogate in the nineteenth century. There would seem to be a fixity of manners, and even of personal characters, in such places which resists those changes of time to which most sublunary things succumb. The Dragon and the Granby hotels, with their well-disciplined table-d'hôtes, their periodic balls, their chronic billiards, and their large ingredient of half-pay officers and secular or pedantic clergymen, remain to this day with wonderfully little variation from their original type. The "Select Society" and the "Poker Club" will be more appreciated by those who are conversant with the characters of the leading men of Scotch society at this period. The latter club derived its name from its origin in the efforts of most of Carlyle's set to stir up and keep alive an agitation for the extension of the Militia to Scotland. For although so frequent a visitor in the southern portion of the island, Dr. Carlyle preserved his Scotch national feelings unimpaired; and it is not a little amusing to observe, in the covert sneers at "John Bull" which creep into his narrative now and then, the remnants of those prejudices which so long survived the union of the crowns under one sceptre.

A host of minor personages cross the scene in Dr. Carlyle's pages; indeed, the stage is crowded with sketches of character, which jostle one another out of the memory of the reader. This is perhaps one great defect in the work. But it is a defect which springs from a superabundance of power where the majority of biographers are the most deficient; and it will be readily pardoned in consideration of the interesting results which it insures in so many cases. It is no slight thing, after such a lapse of time, to have the illustrious men of that age resuscitated by the master-hand of their contemporary, and brought again before us in body and soul. With how different a feeling will many a student, when he arises from the perusal

of this autobiography, glance his eye down the shelves of his library, no longer dealing in his mind with empty names of standard authors, but listening to the voices of real men, and entering into their writings in a far more intelligent manner when he has thus seen them face to face. We do not often pray for autobiographies, for as a class of literature they are of very unequal merit; but we shall heartily rejoice to see as many more autobiographies as possible, if they are half as well worth reading as "Jupiter Carlyle's.'

ART. XI. THE SLAVE STATES AND THE AMERICAN UNION.

The Federalist on the New Constitution. By Publius. Written in 1788. Essays by General Hamilton, Mr. Jay, and Mr. Madison. 2 vols. New York, 1802.

Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, in Illinois. Columbus: Follett, 1860. North America; its Agriculture and Climate. Containing Observations on the Agriculture and Climate of Canada, the United States, and the Island of Cuba. By Robert Russell. Kilwhiss: Black, 1857.

A Journey in the Back Country. By Frederick Law Olmsted. Vol. III.: "Our Slave States."

Now, when the stability of the American Union is "on its trial," it is not a little curious to review the fears entertained by the great men who elaborated the federal constitution of the United States, and to see their estimate of the dangers which were likely to beset it. In the volumes, whose title we have placed first on the list at the head of this Article, we have the most elaborate statement of the doubts and hopes entertained on this subject by the first Federalists, Hamilton and Jay. We find, of course, the greatest anxiety expressed to secure a stable equilibrium between the power of the Federal Union and the power of the individual States. But amidst all the dangers which are supposed to beset it from different sides, it never seems to have occurred to these able statesmen that there was already in the Union the germs of a fundamental divergence of general policy between different classes of States, which, if the most anxious care were not taken to reduce and finally to obliterate it, could not but mature in time, first into chronic hostility, then into open conflict. The strongest and most conservative members of the federalist party, in defending their

views against Jefferson and the section which was most jealous for the powers of the individual States, while they were fully alive to the danger of individual disruptions taking place, and anxious to provide against them, assumed with full assurance that the struggle would only be between the federal government and isolated States. They reiterate that there is little danger of any one insurgent State finding sufficient common cause with others to produce any alliance that would endanger the majority. The federalists conceived that the individual State-action would always be so much stronger than the reciprocal ties between any class of States, that occasional contumacy on the part of one would never be likely to find powerful aid, or to become the centre of a network of similar political tendencies, in other States. They foresaw many of the dangers which have actually arisen from the wilfulness and selfishness of individual State legislatures. They never once foreshadowed the growth of a broad division of general interests between the North and the South.

Nor can we wonder that the danger, obvious as it is to us, did not occur to American statesmen till a much later date. The provision in the constitution for the extinction of the Slave Trade in 1808, was not the only ground for hoping that Slavery was to disappear gradually from among the political institutions of the States. No one among the representatives of the States, assembled in convention to draw up the Constitution, spoke of Slavery otherwise than apologetically. It was a grave and admitted evil, and it was understood that it would be gradually undermined. The great Virginian statesmen of the democratic party, Jefferson and Madison, held the strongest views as to the evil it involved. Even the representatives of North and South Carolina defended it purely on the score of interest, and held out hopes that with time they too might be able to adopt the course pursued by the elder States in not only prohibiting the Slave Trade but terminating the internal traffic, and thus reducing Slavery to the form of serfdom. The Northern politicians argued that the evil would die out without interference on their parts. "Let us not intermeddle," said one of the Connecticut deputies to the convention of 1787. "As population increases, poor labourers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country." And this was the general belief. It was not that the statesmen of the day were so obtuse as to ignore the vital differences likely to spring up between Free States and Slave States, but that they trusted to the growth of population, the influence of democratic institutions, and the appointed cessation of the Slave Trade, to sap the life of Slavery, and

gradually to assimilate the institutions of all the States. The great North-West had been solemnly set apart as ground which should never be soiled by contact with slavery. And it was believed that the South would sooner or later rid itself of the disgraceful anomaly. The idea of a permanent, equal, and parallel development of two great groups of States with fundamentally antagonistic institutions within the pale of the same federal Union, is a conception of comparatively modern date.

Nor did it become evident, even to the most far-sighted minds, that this was the great danger which must eventually imperil the Union, till the vehement and protracted strife arose which ended in the admission of Missouri as a Slave State in 1820, on condition of a permanent limitation of the institution to the South of the compromise line then drawn. It was then, first, that Jefferson, while sincerely deprecating Slavery in itself, though pleading for his old principle, that the sovereignty of the individual States should not be subjected to the regulative powers of Congress, discerned that a cloud had arisen which could not but spread into a dangerous and perhaps fatal tempest. "I have been amongst the most sanguine," he said, "in believing that our Union would be of long duration. I now doubt it much, and see the event at no great distance. My only comfort and confidence is, that I shall not live to see this." Nor did he. But he lived to see that the temporary compromise with which the dilemma was for the time staved off would not prevent its growing steadily into larger dimensions and assuming a more explicit form. In 1825, on occasion of an interference of Congress between Georgia and the Indian tribes, which she wished to invade, the Georgian representatives passed resolutions not unlike the language of grandiloquent denunciation now pouring forth in voluminous protests from the irritated Slave States. "The hour is come,' they said, "or is rapidly approaching, when the States, from Virginia to Georgia, from Missouri to Louisiana, must confederate, and as one man say to the Union, 'We will no longer submit our constitutional rights to bad men in Congress or on judicial benches. judicial benches. The powers necessary to the protection of the Confederated States from enemies without and enemies within, alone were confided to the United Government. All others were retained to the several separate and sovereign States. The States of the South will convey their products to the markets of the world. The world will open wide its arms to receive them. Let our Northern brethren, then, if there is no peace in union, if the compact has become too heavy to be longer borne, in the name of all the mercies find peace among themselves. Let them continue to rejoice in

their self-righteousness; let them bask in their own meridian, while they depict the South as a hideous reverse. As Athens, as Sparta, as Rome was, we will be; they held slaves, we hold them. In the simplicity of the patriarchal government we would still remain master and servant, under our own vine and our own fig-tree, and confide for safety upon Him who, of old time, looked down upon this state of things without wrath.""

Language of this kind, used on an occasion not directly involving the issue between the institution of Slavery and its opponents, was significant enough of the breach which it was beginning to open between the general political tendencies of the two classes of States. When next the disunionist feeling broke out, in 1832, it was again on a secondary question, not directly bound up with Slavery,-South Carolina, as the representative of the grievances which a protective tariff inflicted on the South, having taken up a rebellious attitude closely resembling that which she is now assuming. And though in this question the Slave States were divided, the interests of all of them not being in this instance quite identical, the conviction was clearly gaining rapidly in force and depth, that to work Slavery with real success the whole policy of the Slave States, financial as well as political, requires to be carefully adapted to its conditions. The belief has long been growing in the South, -and not without good reason,-that Slavery requires every sort of external advantage in order to be really remunerative; requires, in short, a policy calculated with one sole end, that of increasing the efficiency of Slave labour by every means at the disposal of the State. And hence the excessive irritation with which the South chafes under the regulative power of a body like Congress, which is largely actuated by a variety of considerations entirely foreign to the one aim to which the Slave States are necessarily devoted; hence their unremitting efforts to clip the powers of the Union, and to enlarge the free range of the local legislatures.

How incessant has been the pressure of the Slavery policy against the federal restrictions to which it was subjected, ever since the great pitched battle on the question of the admission of Missouri, we need not here record. The long and eventually successful agitation for the annexation of Texas, the Mexican war which naturally followed, the successful struggle for a stringent fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska conflict, and the southern victory which abrogated that solemn Missouri compromise the unreal nature of which Jefferson had so clearly foreseen, are all fresh in the recollection of our readers.