other punishment, whether retributive or purgatorial, will be needed. Naked truth, unfilmed eyes, will do all that the most righteous vengeance could desire. Every now and then we have a glimpse of such perceptions while on earth. Times come to us all when the pas sions, by some casual influence or some sobering shock, have been wholly lulled to rest, when all disordered emotions have drunk repose of the question and he makes no an- | Mr. Greg condemns; but we do not swer to it. We especially recommend to know where else, except in Isaiah, to find the notice of the reader the few sentences a more terrible or a more powerful picin which he suggests the idea that any ture of a real and spiritual hell: extraordinary or importunate search for human aid, such as those which love and When the portals of this world have been wealth make continually, is as much an hind, and this "body of death" has dropped passed, when time and sense have been left beinterference with the rigid sequence of away from the liberated soul, everything which nature as any appeal for divine aid can clouded the perceptions, which dulled the visbe. "If," he 66 says, as philosophers have ion, which drugged the conscience while on maintained, we all and always live under earth, will be cleared off like a morning mist. the dominion of settled law; if the pres- We shall see all things as they really are-ourent in all points flows regularly and inex-selves and our sins among the number. No orably from the past; if all occurrences are linked together in one unfailing chain of cause and effect, and all are foreseen by Him whose foresight is unerring; if indeed they are mere portions of an order of events of which the motive power has been set in action from the beginning,then is not aid rendered to us by our human friends in consequence of our entreaties as an effect of that cause-as and when for a few brief and ineffectual inmuch a disturbance of the ordained law stants the temptations which have led us astray, of sequence as if God Himself had direct- the pleasures for which we have bartered away ly aided us, in compliance with our the future, the desires to which we have sacrificed our peace, appear to us in all their prayers to Him?" This will show, though Mr. Greg gives no conclusion, wretched folly and miserable meanness. From and evidently feels no certain conclusion tion of what our feelings will be hereafter, our feelings then we may form a faint imaginapossible in such a question, that he treats when this occasional and imperfect glimpse it in a different spirit, and with a differ- shall have become a perpetual flood of light, ent feeling of its gravity and profound irradiating all the darkest places of our earthly interest, from that which has shown itself pathway, piercing through all veils, scattering in many recent arguments-arguments all delusions, burning up all sophistries; when such as discredit science without having anything really to do with her and which disgust us by that irreverence for human nature which is even more revolting to the human spirit than profanity towards God. The most striking passages in Mr. Greg's volume will, however, be found in the last of its chapters the singular and touching paper called "Elsewhere," in which, by way of showing the mistakes of "divines" in setting forth the conventionally religious view of future rewards and punishments (drawn, we presume, from the vulgarest type of old-fashioned sermons, but probably supposed by Mr. Greg to represent the preaching of his own day), he sets forth his own views on this profoundly interesting subject. The idea of entirely spiritual retribution is not an original one, and commends itself more completely to the mind than any other conception of final punishment. But though the idea is not new, it has seldom been more powerfully expressed. The following picture might probably be equalled in the pages of some "divine of higher range and older date than those "From the cool cisterns of the midnight air." the sensual man, all desires and appetites now utterly extinct, shall stand amazed and horrorstruck at the low promptings to which he once yielded himself up in such ignominious slavery, the reflected image of his own animal brutality; and shall shrink in loathing and shame from when the hard, grasping, sordid man, come now into a world where wealth can purchase nothing, where gold has no splendour, and luxury no meaning, shall be almost unable to comprehend how he could ever have so valued such unreal goods; when the malignant, the passionate, the cruel man, everything which called forth his vices now swept away with the former existence, shall appear to himself as he appeared to others upon earth, shall hate himself as others hated him on earth. We shall see, judge, feel about all things there, perfectly and constantly, as we saw, judged, and felt about them partially in our rare better and saner moments her We shall think that we must have been mad, if we did not too well know that we had been wilful. Every urgent appetite, every boiling passion, every wild ambition, which obscured and confused our reason here below, will have been burnt away in the valley of the shadow of death; every subtle sophistry with which we blinded or excused ourselves on earth will have vanished before the clear glance of a disembodied spirit; nothing will intervene between us and the truth. Stripped sins. The pure and holy wife and the frail and sinful husband can live together harmoniously, and can love fondly here below, because the vast moral gulf between them is mercifully veiled from either eye. But when the great curtain of ignorance and deception shall be withdrawn; "when the secrets of all hearts shall be made known;" when the piercing light of the Spiritual World shall at once and forever disperse those clouds which have hidden what we really are from those who have loved us, and almost from ourselves; when the trusting confidence of friendship shall discover what a serpent has been nourished in its bosom; when the yearning mother shall perceive on what a guilty wretch all her boundless and priceless tenderness has been lavished; when the wife shall at length see the husband whom she cherished through long years of self-denying and believing love, revealed in his true colours, a wholly alien creature; - what a sud den, convulsive, inevitable because natural, separation between the clean and the unclean will then take place! The gulf which has always existed is recognized and felt at last; corruption can no longer assort with incorruption; the lion cannot lie down with the lamb, nor the leopard with the kid. One flash of light has done it all. The merciful delusions which held friends together upon earth are dispersed, and the laws of the mind must take their course and divide the evil from the good. But though the link is severed, the affection is not thereby destroyed. The friend, the husband, the lover, the son, thus cut adrift by a just and natural though bitter retribution, love still; nay, they love all the more fervently, all the more yearningly, in that they now discern with unclouded vision all that bright beauty, all that rich nature of the objects of their tenderness, of which their dim eyesight could on earth perceive only a part. Then will begin a RETRIBUTION indeed, the appropriate anguish, the desolate abandonment of which, who can paint, and who will be able to bear! To see those we love, as we never loved till then, turn from our grasp and our glance of clasping and supplicating fondness with that unconquerable loathing which virtue must feel towards guilt, and with of all the disguising drapery of honeyed words and false refractions, we shall see ourselves as we are, we shall judge ourselves as God has always judged us. Our lost or misused opportunities; our forfeited birthright; our glorious possibility — ineffable in its glory; our awful actuality-ineffable in its awfulness; the nature which God gave us-the nature we have made ourselves; the destiny for which He designed us the destiny to which we have doomed ourselves; all these things will grow and fasten on our thoughts, till the contemplation must terminate in madness, were not madness a mercy belonging to the world of flesh alone. In the mere superior mental capacities, therefore, consequent upon spiritual life, we cannot fail to find all that is needed, or can be pictured, to make that life a penal and a purgatorial one. . . . But there is yet another retributive pang in wait for the sinful soul, which belongs to the very nature of that future world; namely, the severance from all those we love, who on earth have trod the narrower and better path. The affections do not belong to the virtuous alone: they cling to the sinner through all the storms and labyrinths of sin; they are the last fragments of what is good in him that he silences or lays aside or tramples out: they belong, not to the flesh but to the spirit; and a spiritual existence, even if a suffering one, will but give them fresh energy and tenacity, by terminating all that has been antagonistic to them here below. Who shall describe the yearning love of a disencumbered soul! Who can adequately conceive the passionate tenderness with which it will cling round the objects of its affection in a world where every other sentiment or thought is one of pain! Yet what can be more certain, because what more in the essential nature of things, than that the great revelation of the Last Day (or that which must attend and be involved in the mere entrance into the spiritual state) will effect a severance of souls an instantaneous gulf of demarcation between the pure and the impure, the just and the unjust, the merciful and the cruel-immeasurably more deep, essential, and impassable than any which time, or distance, or rank, or antipathy could effect on earth? Here we never see into each oth-which purity must shrink from stain: to see er's souls: characters the most opposite and incompatible dwell together upon earth, and may love each other much, unsuspicious of the utter want of fundamental harmony between them. The aspiring and the worldly may have so much in common, and may both instinctively conceal so much, that their inherent and elemental differences may go undiscovered to the grave. The soul that will be saved and the soul that will be lost may cling round each other here with wild affection, all unconscious of the infinite divergence of their future destiny. The mother will love her son with all the devotion of her nature, in spite or in ignorance of his unworthiness; that son may reciprocate his mother's love, and in this only be not unworthy: the blindness which is kindly given us hides so much, and affection covers such a multitude of those eyes, never turned on us before save in gentleness and trust, now giving us one last glance of divine sadness and ineffable farewell; to watch those forms, whose companionship cheered and illuminated all the dark places of our earthly pilgrimage, and once and again had almost redeemed us from the bondage and the mire of sin, receding, vanishing, melting in the bright distance, to join a circle where they will need us not, to tread a path to which ours bears no parallel and can make no approach; and THEN to turn inward and downward, and realize our lot, and feel our desolation, and reflect that we have earned it;- what has Poetry or Theology pictured that can compete with a Gehenna such as this! The spiritual heaven which Mr. Greg offers to our view in contrast with this tremendous sketch of possibilities is less striking and less fine -as, we fear, a Paradiso must always be. We do not know whether, if Mr. Greg should ever see these pages, he would be interested personally to know the effect produced by the reading of this article upon a simple soul with no great reason to render for the faith that is in her. This woman fell a-crying as she closed the book, and burst forth into a broken prayer (all his arguments notwithstanding) that a man so near the kingdom of heaven might have the Christ in whom she trusted yet revealed to him. Such a conclusion is not frequent with such a book. From Macmillan's Magazine. SOUTH SEA SLAVERY: KIDNAPPING AND MURDER. cerned. But in drawing the picture we propose of the murder, fraud, outrages, and piracy of the South Pacific slave trade, we are anxious to do Queensland the justice she is entitled to. Her Government places a paid agent on board each vessel employed between the islands and the colony, as a check upon decoying and kidnapping, and has met the overtures of the Home Government by undertaking the cost of prosecutions brought by imperial cruisers before their Supreme Court. Apart and distinct from Queensland, another community, in the heart of the Pacific, was crying out for the importation of labour. In 1859, Mr. Pritchard, H. M. Consul in Fiji, came to England to communicate the cession by the King Cacoban (Thakomban, Thakoban) to her Majesty of the Fiji Islands. What he offered was the actual sovereignty over the whole group, ratified by all the chiefs assembled in council. The Government thereupon As far back as 1868 the deportation of despatched Col. Smythe, R. A., and Dr. the South Sea Islanders had challenged Berthold Seemann, a name well known the attention of the British Government. to botanists, to investigate on the spot. It was known that one of our Australian Colonel Smythe reported, in opposition colonies, Queensland, was regularly im- to the views of several naval officers who porting labour from the Pacific for planta- had served in those waters, that annexation work; and though there were few tion was not to the interest of Great Britinstances - we believe only one well-ain, asserting that it was not in the power authenticated-of these natives being of the King to carry out his engagements treated with neglect on a Queensland sta--an assertion which we can find nothing tion, it was notorious that they were not in the records of the mission to warrant. all there voluntarily, but that many had The Government acted upon this report, been enticed on board the vessels and and Capt. Jenkins, in H. M. S. Miranda, forcibly deported. In fact, so far as the was ordered to Fiji to communicate the actual procuring of labour, the trade was decision. Fiji was left to follow its own kidnapping. The Queensland Legisla- devices, and work out its own salvation, ture, to their credit, stepped in and passed with, we may well add, fear and trembling. an act to regulate Polynesian labour. Meanwhile it was gradually attracting to Since then the traffic has been carried on its shores a population, mixed indeed, as free from abuses as may be. We use but mainly drawn from the Australian the qualification advisedly; for though continent. Some were undoubtedly men we rise from a perusal of the voluminous of genuine enterprise, drawn by the promblue-books on the subject with a convic-ise of successful cotton-planting; but the tion that Queensland has purged herself from the odium of a slave state, we maintain that no regulations can control the procuring of coolie labour. No one who considers the hundreds of islands scattered about the Pacific, the various dialects and languages, the powers of the chiefs over the tribes, and the possibilities of agents treating with the chiefs, will imagine that the Kanaka always comes on board, suâ sponte, or understands the nature of the agreement he signs. With the Queensland legal labour traffic, however, we are not at present con majority were the waifs and strays, the Bohemians of Australia, many of them bankrupt in name and fortune. On December 31st, 1871, the number of white residents had reached 2,040, scattered over several islands, while the native population was rated 146,000. There has been a steady increase since. In 1864 the Europeans in Fiji, in need of labour for their cotton-growing, turned their attention to the New Hebrides as a source of supply. In 1867 the New Hebrides missionaries of the Reformed Presbyterian Church furnished a statement to the Synod in Scotland, which very circumstantially sought to prove the native traffic was simply a slave-trade. Readers will, according to their bias, attach more or less credence to the assertions of missionaries. Where these latter encounter traders and settlers on the same semi-barbarous soil, jealousies will exist and counter-accusations be bandied: and the Pacific has proved no exception. Admiral Guillain, the Governor of New Caledonia, stated to Captain Palmer, of H. M. S. Rosario, that the missionaries at the Loyalty Islands connived at the kidnapping, and engaged in trade with the natives. Be that as it may, Captain Palmer ascertained that between May 1865 and June 1868, a brisk trade in natives had been carried on by British vessels. trade was established beyond a doubt. The rapid increase of white settlers, and the demand for black labour, were alike favourable to the "blackbird-catching," as the term goes, in the South Seas. The market was expanding, and the article rising in value. It was not to be expected that the men who were engaged in this nefarious traffic would be very scrupulous as to the means employed for catching the natives, or squeamish as to their treatment on shipboard. Murder was added to manstealing. The horrors of the trade were increased by native reprisals. Massacre was the only return these savages could make for the blessings of contact with the European trader and on Sept. 28, 1871, at the island of Nukapu, Swallow group, John Coleridge Patteson, MisBy August 1869 Lord Clarendon had sionary Bishop of Melanesia, paid the grounds to write: "A slave-trade with debt his countrymen had incurred, and the South Sea Islands is gradually being won the crown of martyrdom. established by British speculators for the We cannot here attempt to do justice benefit of British settlers. . . . Reports to the memory of that noble man and his of entry are evaded, fictitious sales of ves-noble work. Neither the one nor the sels are made, kidnapping is audaciously other are to be introduced Ex Tappyov. But practised. . . . An intolerable responsi- no record of the South Sea slavery would bility will be thrown upon her Majesty's be complete if it did not mention, howGovernment if the present state of things ever briefly, the story of its greatest vicas regards the introduction of immigrants tim. into the Fiji islands is allowed." Great as was the shock caused by the Bishop Patteson, in a letter to the news of the Bishop's murder, and irreBishop of Sydney, writes (1868): "I am parable as seemed the loss, a more fitting very anxious as to what I may find going end could not have been found to close on, for I have conclusive moral (though, such a life. We doubt if his life, if properhaps, not legal) proof of very disgrace- longed, could have wrought so much good ful and cruel proceedings on the part of as his death. No one in the Australian traders kidnapping natives and selling and Pacific Seas affects to question that them to the French in New Caledonia it was the result of kidnapping and murand in Fiji, and, I am informed, in Queens-dering which had been going on unland. Whatever excuses may be (and checked in the Melanesian group. Those have been) made as to the treatment they who know the Pacific, know that revenge receive at the hand of the planters, and is a religious duty binding upon the whole the protection they may have from a consul when landed, it is quite certain that no supervision is exercised over the traders at the islands. All statements of 'contracts' made with wild native men are simply false. The parties don't know how to speak to each other, and no native could comprehend the (civilized) idea of a 'contract.' One or two friendly men, who have been on board these vessels (not in command), and were horrified at what they saw, have kindly warned me to be on my guard, as they may retaliate (who can say unjustly or unreasonably, from their point of view?) upon the first white men they see, connecting them naturally with the perpetrators of the crime." tribe, and threatening every member of the wrongdoer's tribe. All the circumstances of the Bishop's murder prove it to have been a premeditated, prearranged act, executed for tribal reasons, without personal animosity against the victim. The body was unmutilated save by the death-stroke, and it was placed in a canoe that it might float back to his own people. It now remains to sketch the practices of the traders in procuring labour, and the atrocities perpetrated on the voyage. Unfortunately for the credit of our countrymen in Australia, fortunately for the case we desire to state, we have no need to cite "missionary yarns," nor quote from a volume which contains such unThe existence of a systematic slave- | warranted aspersions of the New South Wales authorities as Captain Palmer's | closed the secrets of the voyage to Mr. "Kidnapping in the South Seas." * Nor Marsh, British consul, who admitted him have we very far back to travel in point of time. On the 19th of November, 1872, at the Central Criminal Court at Sydney, Joseph Armstrong, James Clancy, S. M'Carthy, William Turner, George Woods, John Bennett, Thomas Shields, and Augustus Shiegott were charged with having on the 20th February, 1872, on board a British vessel called the Carl, unlawfully assaulted, beaten, wounded, and ill-treated a man named Jage, the said prisoners being master and part of the crew of the said vessel. On the following day Armstrong (the captain) and Dowden were tried for murder on the high seas. Clancy, M'Carthy, Turner, Woods, and Shiegott were sentenced to two years' imprisonment, Armstrong and James Patrick Murray deposed: "I Dowden to death. When the news am a medical man. I was part owner of reached Melbourne, the Victorian Govern- the British ship Carl, sailing under Britment at once put their police in motion ish colours. I was first residing at Melto arrest any persons in Victoria who might be implicated. Two men, Messrs. H. C. Mount and Morris, were arrested, brought before the Police-court on December 5th, and committed for trial on the capital charge. On the 19th and 20th they stood their trial in the Supreme Court, before the Chief Justice, a verdict of manslaughter being returned. From the evidence given in the respective courts, we shall construct a narrative of Queen's evidence, and gave him a certificate to that effect, to be his protection in Sydney. The New South Wales Government felt bound to abide by this action of the consul, and Dr. Murray was admitted "approver," and formed the principal wit|ness in the case. In Victoria, Matthias, Devescote, one of the crew, who was ar rested on the same charge as Mount and Morris, was accepted as Queen's evidence. We have no need to add to the horrors of the picture by any heightening of the colours. No descriptive language based upon the evidence could leave half such an impression as the plain, unvarnished disclosures of the agents who told the tales of their own deeds. the case. bourne. We left Melbourne for Leonka, On June 8th, 1871, the brig Carl left Melbourne for Leonka, Fiji. Her owner, Dr. James Patrick Murray, sailed as supercargo. On arrival, having changed her captain and crew, she started on her first kidnapping expedition in Western Polynesia, returning to Fiji to dispose of her labour. On a second voyage Dr. Murray was attacked by serious illness, and brought to death's door. Whether from genuine repentance, remorse, or sheer fright at the prospect of death, on the return of the Carl to Leonka, Dr. September there was a disturbance durMurray, the instigator and principal of ing the night. . . . . On the following the bloody deeds we have to relate, dis-night it commenced again, and the man on the watch fired. a pistol over the Lord Kimberley, in a despatch to Lord Belmore of hatchway, and shouted, to frighten them, 8th January, 1872, writes: "I request that your lord- as on the previous night. Other methods ship will inform Mr. Robertson that, in my opinion, his statement completely exonerates the Government of the were tried to quiet them, but all the Colony from the charges brought against them by Cap-methods failed; the men below (natives) tain Palmer in the work in question." Captain Palmer, in a letter to the Secretary to the Admiralty, 27th Janu- appeared to be breaking down the bunks, "and I have only to add that the paragraphs alluded armed themselves, as with spears, and ary, 1872, withdraws all the expressions complained of, and with the poles so obtained they to shall be expunged if my book should go through another edition." But the book may not reach a secfiercely attacked the main hatchway. ond edition, and many who have taken their impressions They endeavoured to force up the main ence from which we quote. The best cause is damaged hatchway with their poles. The row now appeared to have started in a fight be from the first will not see the Parliamentary correspond by such intemperate zeal. |