SELECT REVIEWS. NEW SERIES. FOR JANUARY, 1813. Sixth Report of the Directors of the African Institution; read at the Annual General Meeting on the 25th of March, 1812. To which are added, an Appendix and a List of Subscribers. 8vo. pp. 178. London. 1812. [From the Edinburgh Review, for July, 1812.] IT gives us sincere pleasure to resume, from time to time, our notices of the proceedings of this excellent and useful institution; both because we thereby obtain fit opportunities of keeping the attention of our readers directed towards the important subjects of Africa and the West Indies, and because we always find materials for extending our knowledge of that unexplored continent. The latter reason will be found peculiarly applicable to the present publication, which is inferior, in importance and originality, to none of those that preceded it. Before proceeding to the proper subject of this article, we must remark, that a change appears to have taken place in the office of secretary of the institution. We regret to find that Mr. Macaulay is no longer able to continue the discharge of those duties, which he had with distinguished ability performed, at great personal loss and inconvenience, since the beginning of the institution. Any praise of ours, however, would be unavailing, after that honourable testimony borne to his merits in the unanimous resolution passed at the general meeting, which is inserted at p. iv. of the volume before us. Mr. Macaulay had formerly refused a similar testimony of regard, voted at the general meeting of 1810; about which time, he also, with a disinterestedness rare indeed, abandoned to the actual captors his VOL. I. New Series. A share of a large pecuniary penalty incurred by a slave trader. He is succeeded in the office of secretary by Mr. Harrison of Queen's College; a gentleman of distinguished reputation at the university, and who having recently quitted the bar, is enabled to bestow an undivided attention upon the duties of his new employment. Our attention is, as usual, first directed to the execution of the abolition laws-the great pillar of African civilization-indeed, the point from which the course of improvement in that vast continent may be said to spring. That the English traders are at last checked, we believe, cannot be doubted. They will not risk a conviction of felony, and sentence of transportation to Botany Bay. The American government, too, having abolished the traffic, and the decision in the noted case of the Amedie having shown British cruizers in what manner they may enforce the American prohibition,-few vessels bearing that flag are now engaged in it, compared with the former amount. But, on the other hand, a prodigious slave trade is still carried on by those famous allies of ours, the Portuguese and Spaniards. Cuba is daily extending her cultivation-the Brazils are more and more crowded with miserable victims. In short, so thriving is this enormity, that the directors do not hesitate to state, from their own information, that between 70,000 and 80,000 negroes were carried over in the year 1810. This dreadful commerce was confined chiefly to the coast between Cape Palmas and Benguela. The Portuguese treaty confines the trade in vessels of that nation to places actually in possession of the Portuguese crown; and had it not been for the small island of Bissao, (a place of no earthly value, except for the purposes of the slave trade), this traffic must have been wholly destroyed to the northward of the equator. This islet, however, has become an entrepôt for all the slave merchants whom the vigilance of our cruizers has driven from the other parts of the coast; and though the treaty nominally excludes the Portuguese from every part of the coast north of the equator, except Bissao, this denunciation is of little avail, while they can smuggle over negroes from all parts of the coast, in canoes, to Bissao; from whence they have a right to transport them in open day to the Brazils. Mark the baneful effects of this exception. Bissao is situated at the mouth of the Rio Grande. An intelligent naval officer lately visited its banks; and he describes the devastation which prevails there, as exceeding all belief. He distinctly states, that the country, on both banks, is quite unpeopled by the slave trade.' Now, there is nothing like putting the case home to ourselves. Suppose the French had got possession of the little island called the Bugio, at the mouth of the Tagus; and, without any pre text even of a quarrel with Portugal, were to assemble an immense force in that river, sufficient to overpower all resistance, and every night were to send some hundreds of boats to scour the shores, and carry off two hundred of the stoutest and healthiest and happiest of the people in Lisbon and its neighbourhood; and suppose this were to last, without interruption, for two years, so that those banks which used to swarm with Portuguese, became a perfect desert, the few whom the French left having perished helplessly by famine and disease. Suppose, moreover, that instead of carrying off all the captives to fight or serve in France and Germany, the spoilers hurried them away in the most crowded vessels, where they were laid in chains on their backs, and scourged or screwed every time they made a noise; till, after eight weeks of such misery, they arrived in the worst of climates, and there, were lashed to pieces under a burning sun until they died, or only survived to suffer and labour more, and curse the strength of constitution which kept them from a speedier release by death. If such a case as this were brought distinctly before us, should we not awaken all Europe with cries against France, and for the liberation of Portugal? Should we not say, that all the other oppressions of the French-all their common invasions-their spoliations and conscriptions, were a mere trifle compared with this; that human nature had put on a new shape; and that iniquity now visited us in a form which completely obliterated the recollection of every previous enormity? We will not stop to inquire what the Spaniards and Portuguese would themselves say to the matter; but certain it is, that the case we have been putting is exactly that which they are at this moment exhibiting to the world, with aggravations which each circumstance of the fact, that we might add to our own enumeration, would accumulate. All that we have supposed themselves to suffer, from the French, they are at this moment daily and hourly making a people endure, to the full as virtuous and deserving as they are. Every horror that we have fancied the enemy to enrage all Europe, by exhibiting in the Tagus, our faithful allies-the friends of Spanish and Portuguese liberty, whom we are supporting with all our treasures and forces, in a struggle with comparatively insignificant evils, are hourly perpetrating in Africa, against the most innocent and peaceful creatures in the world, without ever exciting one moment's indignation in any part of Europe. So inconsistent are the feelings of statesmen;-so ignorant or inobservant are nations of all that passes at a little distance; and so important are the mistakes of names, by which men are led, and the sanctions of use and habit by which they are restrained! -- But neither governments nor people must escape under cover of such reflections as these. It is fit that they should be roused, and taught greater consistency. They have no right to plead ignorance, or habit, or inadvertency. When they are reminded that these Africans are as much human beings-as much their fellow-creatures as if they wore a dingy brown, instead of a shining jet black hue,-bore the features of European ugliness, instead of the marks of African beauty,-and inhabited the filth of Lisbon, instead of the uncultivated richness of the Rio Grande; then it is too late to mete out a different measure of justice or of feeling to the two races, and to sit quietly by, while the one treats the other like brute beasts. We are now at war with France, literally, because she has carried away one prince from Spain, and driven another out of Portugal;-and those Spaniards and Portuguese allies of ours, are every day carrying off princes as independent as either Ferdinand or the Braganzas; and, in addition to this, laying waste their whole territories, and actually extirpating their nations. While we make such sacrifices for Spanish and Portuguese rights;—while by our assistance alone-God knows how costly to ourselves—those liberties are saved from the common enemy; is it too much to ask leave to remind the Spaniards and Portuguese, that others as well as themselves have rights; and that the charm of liberty and independence are not confined to the Peninsula-where, to say the truth, they never have been very much enjoyed! But it is said, we defend the Peninsula not merely from principles of justice, and from an abstract hatred of oppression, but because we consider our own interests as affected by the fate of the Spaniards and Portuguese; and, indeed, the strange contrast of our East-Indian and our European systems of policy may seem to favour this idea. Be it so:-Admit that our motives are not quite pure-quite free from interested views— Have we then no interest in checking the slave-trade of foreign nations?—Are our West-Indian colonies nothing to us?—Ör have we forgotten, that all their distresses are owing to the unnatural extension of culture by means of the African commerce? the rapid cultivation of Cuba and Brazil is as hostile to our own planters, as the free culture of the cane in our own colonies: And is it not hard upon them, that all our efforts to extirpate the trade should be confined to ourselves, while foreigners are in truth reaping the benefits of our abolition, and preparing to glut the markets with their produce?-Surely those settlements for which we have made such sacrifices, to the importance of which we have borne such unceasing testimony, by almost confining our attention to their defence and extension in every war, have not all of a sudden lost their value in our own eyes, at the |