promise at the time of its first establishment) whereby the slaves, though reckoned as citizens in no other respect, are counted, to the extent of three-fifths of their number, in the estimate of the population for fixing the number of representatives of each State in the Lower House of Congress. Why should the masters have members in right of their human chattels, any more than of their oxen and pigs? The President, in his Message, has already proposed that this salutary reform should be effected in the case of Maryland, additional territory, detached from Virginia, being given to that State as an equivalent : thus clearly indicating the policy which he approves, and which he is probably willing to make universal.

As it is necessary to be prepared for all possibilities, let us now contemplate another. Let us suppose the worst possible issue of this war-the one apparently desired by those English writers whose moral feeling is so philosophically indifferent between the apostles of slavery and its enemies. Suppose that the North should stoop to recognise the new Confederation on its own terms, leaving it half the Territories, and that it is acknowledged by Europe, and takes its place as an admitted member of the community of nations. It will be desirable to take thought beforehand what are to be our own future relations with a new Power professing the principles of Attila and Genghis Khan as the foundation of its Constitution. Are we to see with indifference its victorious army let loose to propagate their national faith at the rifle's mouth through Mexico and Central America? Shall we

submit to see fire and sword carried over Cuba and Porto Rico, and Hayti and Liberia conquered and

brought back to slavery? We shall soon have causes enough of quarrel on our own account. When we are in the act of sending an expedition against Mexico to redress the wrongs of private British subjects, we should do well to reflect in time that the President of the new Republic, Mr. Jefferson Davis, was one of the original apostles of repudiation. Unless we abandon the principles we have for two generations consistently professed and acted on, we should be at war with the new Confederacy within five years about the African slave-trade. An English Government will hardly be base enough to recognise them, unless they accept all the treaties by which America is at present bound; nor, it may be hoped, even if de facto independent, would they be admitted to the courtesies of diplomatic intercourse, unless they granted in the most explicit manner the right of search. To allow the slave-ships of a Confederation formed for the extension of slavery to come and go, free and unexamined, between America and the African coast, would be to renounce even the pretence of attempting to protect Africa against the man-stealer, and abandon that Continent to the horrors, on a far larger scale, which were practised before Granville Sharp and Clarkson were in existence. But even if the right of intercepting their slavers were acknowledged by treaty, which it never would be, the arrogance of the Southern slaveholders would not long submit to its exercise. Their pride and selfconceit, swelled to an inordinate height by their successful struggle, would defy the power of England as they had already successfully defied that of their Northern countrymen. After our people by their

cold disapprobation, and our press by its invective, had combined with their own difficulties to damp the spirit of the Free States, and drive them to submit and make peace, we should have to fight the Slave States ourselves at far greater disadvantages, when we should no longer have the wearied and exhausted North for an ally. The time might come when the barbarous and barbarizing Power, which we by our moral support had helped into existence, would require a general crusade of civilized Europe, to extinguish the mischief which it had allowed, and we had aided, to rise up in the midst of our civilization.

For these reasons I cannot join with those who cry Peace, peace. I cannot wish that this war should not have been engaged in by the North, or that being engaged in, it should be terminated on any conditions but such as would retain the whole of the Territories as free soil. I am not blind to the possibility that it may require a long war to lower the arrogance and tame the aggressive ambition of the slave-owners, to the point of either returning to the Union, or consenting to remain out of it with their present limits. But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried

on for an honest purpose by their free choice-is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other. I am far from saying that the present struggle, on the part of the Northern Americans, is wholly of this exalted character; that it has arrived at the stage of being altogether a war for justice, a war of principle. But there was from the beginning, and now is, a large infusion of that element in it; and this is increasing, will increase, and if the war lasts, will in the end predominate. Should that time come, not only will the greatest enormity which still exists among mankind as an institution, receive far earlier its coup de gráce than there has ever, until now, appeared any probability of; but in effecting this the Free States. will have raised themselves to that elevated position. in the scale of morality and dignity, which is derived from great sacrifices consciously made in a virtuous cause, and the sense of an inestimable benefit to all future ages, brought about by their own voluntary

efforts.

AUSTIN ON JURISPRUDENCE.*

HESE Lectures and Fragments, with the volume

THES

on 'The Province of Jurisprudence,' of which they are the continuation, and a very few though very elaborate essays on miscellaneous subjects, published at long intervals, mostly in Reviews, are all that remains of the intellectual life of a most remarkable mind. Mr. Austin's name and writings are little known, except to students of the science which, though only one of those on which his writings prove him to have reflected, was the subject on which he principally wrote. But in that science, even the limited portion of his labours which was before the world had placed him, in the estimation of all competent judges, in the very highest rank; and if such judges are now greatly more numerous than when he began to write, the fact is in no small degree owing to his intellectual influence. He has been in nothing more useful than in forming the minds by which he is, and will hereafter be, judged. No writer whom we know had more of the qualities needed for

.

* Edinburgh Review, October 1863.-1. 'Lectures on Jurisprudence; being the Sequel to The Province of Jurisprudence Determined.' To which are added Notes and Fragments, now first published from the Original Manuscripts.' By the late John Austin, Esq., of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law. Two vols. 8vo. London: 1863.

2. 'On the Uses of the Study of Jurisprudence.' By the late John Austin, Esq., of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law. Reprinted from the Third Volume of 'Lectures on Jurisprudence.' London: 1863.