them before us for a moment, when the proper officer, on a glance, decided the age, whether above or under fourteen; and they were instantly swung again by the arm into their loathsome cell, where another negro boatswain sat, with a whip or stick, and forced them to resume the bent and painful attitude necessary for the stowage of so large a number. The unfortunate women and girls, in general, submitted with quiet resignation, when absence of disease and the use of their limbs permitted. A month had made their condition familiar to them. One or two were less philosophical, or suffered more acutely than the rest. Their shrieks rose faintly from their hidden prison, as violent compulsion alone squeezed them into their nook against the curve of the ship's side. I attempted to descend in order to see the accom. modation. The height between the floor and ceiling was about twenty-two inches. The agony of the position of the crouching slaves may be imagined, especially that of the men, whose heads and necks are bent down by the boarding above them. Once so fixed, relief by motion or change of posture is unattainable. The body frequently stiffens in a permanent curve; and in the streets of Freetown I have seen liberated slaves in every conceivable state of distortion. One I remember, who trailed along his body, with his back to the ground, by means of his hands and ankles. Many can never resume the upright posture." One item of the immense mortality during the passage, consists of negroes thrown overboard when the slaver is chased, or when a storm arises. Many thousands perish annually in this way. On board ship, continuance of misery, frequently for many weeks in a cramped posture, aside from the mortality it occasions, spreads disease among the survivors. Dropsy, eruptions, abscesses, dysentery, and blindness, sometimes become general. Where slavers are captured, the whole amount of punishment is usually nothing more than the forfeiture of the ship. With regard to the crews, the laws which make slave-dealing piracy, and liable to capital punishment, is, practically, a dead letter, there being no instance of an execution for that crime. The poor negroes, on the other hand, when taken out of the captured vessel, have very little attention paid to them, and are cast adrift to shift for themselves. Lastly, the condition of the poor negroes at sea, when the slaver falls into British hands, is far from being improved. Perhaps, never was the utter inefficacy, the utter foolishness we may say, of all that has yet been done toward the suppression of the slave trade, been more strikingly made out than in the harrowing pamphlet recently published by the Rev. Pascoe Grenfell. Hill, entitled "Fifty Days on Board a Slave Vessel in the Mozambique Channel, in April and May 1843." The Progresso, a Brazilian slaver, was captured on the 12th of April, on the coast of Madagascar, by the British cruiser Cleopatra, on board of which Mr. Hill was chaplain. The slaver was then taken charge of by a British crew, who were to navigate her to the Cape of Good Hope. Mr. Hill, at his own request, accompanied her; and his pamphlet is a narrative of what took place during the fifty days which elapsed before their arrival at the Cape. We cannot here quote the details of the description of the treatment of the negroes given by Mr. Hill; but the following account of the horrors of a single night will suffice. Shortly after the Progresso parted company with the Cleopatra, a squall arose, and the negroes, who were breathing fresh air on the deck, and rolling themselves about for glee, and kissing the hands and the clothes of their deliverers, were all sent below. "The night," says Mr. Hill, "being intensely hot, 400 wretched beings thus crammed into a hold 12 yards in length, 7 in breadth, and only 3 feet in height, speedily began to make an effort to re-issue to the open air. Being thrust back, and striving the more to get out, the afterhatch was forced down on them. Over the other hatchway, in the fore-part of the vessel, a wooden grating was fastened. To this, the sole inlet for the air, the suffocating heat of the hold, and perhaps panic from the strangeness of their situation, made them press; and thus great part of the space below was rendered useless. They crowded to the grating, and, clinging to it for air, completely barred its entrance. They strove to force their way through apertures fourteen inches in length and barely six inches in breadth, and in some instances succeeded. The cries, the heat-I may say without exaggeration, 'the smoke of their torment'-which ascended, can be compared to nothing earthly. One of the Spaniards gave warning that the consequence would be 'many deaths.' " Next day the prediction of the Spaniard "was fearfully verified. Fifty-four crushed and mangled corpses lifted up from the slave deck have been brought to the gangway and thrown overboard. Some were emaciated from disease, many bruised and bloody. Antonio tells me that some were found strangled, their hands still grasping each other's throats, and tongues protruding from their mouths. The bowels of one were crushed out. They had been trampled to death for the most part, the weaker under the feet of the stronger, in the madness and torment of suffocation from crowd and heat. It was a horrid sight, as they passed one by one—the stiff distorted limbs smeared with blood and filth—to be cast into the sea. Some, still quivering, were laid on the deck to die; salt water thrown on them to revive them, and a little fresh water poured into their mouths. Antonio reminded me of his last night's warning. He actively employed himself, with his comrade Sebastian, in attendance on the wretched living beings now released from their confinement below; distributing to them their morning meal of farina, and their allowance of water, rather more than half a pint to each, which they grasped with inconceivable eagerness, some bending their knees to the deck, to avoid the risk of losing any of the liquid by unsteady footing; their throats, doubtless, parched to the utmost with crying and yelling through the night." On the 12th of April, when the Progresso parted company with the Cleopatra, there were 397 negroes on board. Of these only 222 were landed at the Cape on the 22d of May; no fewer than 175, a little short of half, having died. Many also died after being landed. The crew escaped, there being no court empowered to try them at the Cape. Abundantly does the narrative of Mr. Hill justify the bold sentence with which he concludes—“ While we boast that the name of Wilberforce, and the genius and eloquence which enabled him to arouse so general a zeal against the slave trade; while others are disputing with him the claim of being the true annihilator of the slave trade,' that trade, so far from being annihilated, is at this very hour carried on under circumstances of greater atrocity than were known in his time, and the blood of the poor victims calls more loudly on us as the actual, though nintentional, aggravators of their miseries." The injuries inflicted by the abolition project may be briefly summed up: The number of negroes imported into America is twice as great as it was, while the mortality in the traffic has increased from about fifteen to thirtythree per cent. The evil, in short, has been doubled in extent, and doubled in intensity; so that if we take a given increase in extent to be of the same value as the same numerical increase of intensity, we may say that the issue of the struggle which was meant to abolish the evil of the slave trade, has been to quadruple that evil.” The whole of the foregoing article upon the slave trade, is abridged from Chambers's Miscellany. The representations as to the extent of the slave traffic, were true at the time of the publication of that article, that is, as late as the year 1846. At the present time (1853), the slave trade has sensibly diminished. Brazil and Cuba have long been the chief, if not the only market for slaves stolen from Africa. In spite of solemn treaties with Spain and Brazil, the slave trade has employed a large number of vessels, and a large amount of capital, to supply these two countries with fresh recruits for the production of cane and the manufacture of sugar. So useless have been these treaties, and so augmented, of late years, has this infamous trade become, that both politicians and philanthropists had begun to despond in their hopes of ever exterminating this foul blot upon the fair fame of our common humanity. But what benevolence and a sense of justice has failed to do, regard for their own interest is rapidly compelling these two last refuges of man's inhumanity to man to accomplish. Danger to the whites, from the disproportionate number of blacks, has finally constrained Brazil to prohibit the further introduction of slaves. At the dissolution of the last Chamber of Deputies, of that country, the Emperor gave his public assurance that the Brazilian slave trade was substantially at an end, and that the government had adopted vigorous measures for its entire suppression, and were prepared to inflict exemplary punishment upon all who should contravene the law. Similar danger to the Cubans has awakened there a very general hostility to the continuance of the traffic, and the hearty concurrence of the Captain-general, is all that is needed to enable the wise and the good to rejoice together, over the destruction of an infamous business, which the lust of gold has perpetuated in Christendom, ever since our Savior proclaimed peace on earth and good-will to man. E TOH of Germany-Romantic enterprise-Entrance into Germany--Highlands of the Rhine -Legends-The Rheingan-Frankfort-Heidelberg-Amusing Anecdote-German Students-The Consecration Song-The Landlady's Daughter-Life among the PeasantsPleasing Adventures-Sojourn in Frankfort-Amusing Scenes-Christmas and New Year's Festivities-The Court of Peace-The Jew Rothschild-Pedestrian Journey to the HartzThe Hessians-Specter of the Brocken-Alarming Situation-Leipsic-Dresden-The Madonna of Raphael - Fortress of Konigstein - Mountain Maidens - Bohemia Austrian Suspicion-Prague-Bigotry-Shrines by the way-side-Female degradation"The Tramping Jour."- Vienna-Austrian Tyranny- Joyous Emotions among the Alps-Adventure in a Mountain Cottage-Hohenlinden-Munich-Frankfort-A Home Scene. GERMANY consists of forty sovereign states inclusive of those belonging to Austria, Prussia, Denmark, and Holland. These states comprising this great confederation are all independent and distinct, except so far as they have delegated powers to the central government. The area of Germany is a little less than four times that of Virginia. Its southern and central parts are traversed by ranges of mountains in every direction, separated only by narrow valleys, while to the north the elevation. subsides into a wide sandy plain, little above the sea level. The Tyrol is wholly occupied by branches of the Alps, presenting many of the peculiarities of Switzerland. Central Germany is much diversified by picturesque scenery and abounds with verdant and well wooded valleys, which are watered by clear streams. The banks of the Meyn and the Moselle are remarkable for their varied scenery, and the Valley of the Rhine unites the grandeur of a fine landscape with the appearance of a highly fertile country. In the Austrian territories the plains are confined by the Alps; but are futile and deep, and sometimes as narrow as those of Switzerland. The soil of Germany is generally productive, and every species of grain is cultivated. Its extent and variety of elevations produce great variations in climate; that of Central Germany is the most agreeable and salubrious of any in Europe. The inhabitants of Germany are of three essentially different families the Deutsch, the Sclavonic, and the Græco-Latin; of these the High and Low Deutsch comprise about four-fifths; the Sclavonic a little less than one-fifth and the Græco-Latin a small fraction principally confined to the Italian portions of Tyrol, Friuli and Trieste. The pervading and legal language is the Deutsch. The Sclavonic people are found east of the Danube: and yet they retain their own dialect, but with a great mixture of German words. Germany, especially the Prussian and more Protestant part of the confederation, contains one of the best educated and most intelligent communities in Europe indeed in Prussia, parents are compelled by law to send their children to school. Few Germans can be found unable to read and write and unacquainted with arithmetic. In almost all the large towns classical and other schools abound, and the universities are numerous, well endowed and celebrated. Learned societies spread all over the country, and libraries and museums afford means to those engaged in the pursuit of knowledge. The Press of Germany has long been famous, and German authors, for research and talent, head the grand column of literature. Catholicism, Lutherism, and Calvinism are equally the religions of Germany, and enjoy in all the states perfect freedom of worship; about one-half of the people are Catholics. The states composing the confederation present every variety of government, from democracy to that of absolute monarchies. The whole of the Imperial power is concentrated in the supreme chief of the Empire, and in the Imperial Diet. The executive resides at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, and the Diet consists of an Upper and a Lower House, and is composed of deputies from each state. Germany was known to the ancient Romans, but not like and Britain, conquered and annexed to the Roman Empire. are described as having then been the rudest, the fiercest, and the bravest of all the barbarians. The surface was divided among a number of small nations, scantily cultivating the ground, despising all the arts of civilized life, led by their chiefs in war, but scarcely owning their authority in peace, and deter France, Spain |