welfare of our cities. While, then, it must be conceded that we are able to cool a city to any degree required by the habits, comfort and health of its inhabitants, it must also be acknowledged that we have the power to regulate the quantity of moisture it may hold in solution, and thus diminish and probably remove two fertile sources of disease in all climates. And that results so essential to the welfare of a southern city can be effected at a pecuniary cost not only within the ability of its inhabitants to pay, but certainly not exceeding that necessary for lighting an equal space, in the most favored situations, with coal gas, or supplying it with water, may be easily ascertained by examining our estimates of cost, and comparing them with published reports of the expense attending those establishments. But supposing that double or even quadruple the assigned cost be necessary to effect the object, it would still be one within the ability of a flourishing community to attain, and one in which the benefits to society would be an ample return for the expense in the attainment.

ART. VII.-1. Letters to Wilberforce, recommending the Encouragement of the Cultivation of Sugar in our Dominions in the East Indies, as the natural and certain means of effecting the general and total abolition of the Slave Trade. London. Longman, Hurst & Co. 1822.

2. Letters to the Liverpool Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, on the injurious effects of high prices of produce, and the beneficial prospects of low prices on the condition of Slaves. By JAMES CROPPER. London: Hatchard & Son, Piccadilly. 1823.

3. East and West India Sugar. London, 1823. 4. Treatise on the principal Products of Bengal,— Indigo, Sugar, Cotton, Hemp, Silk and Opium. By JOHN PHIPPS. Calcutta. 1832.

It is not intended, in the present article, to consider the question, whether Great Britain can succeed in the attempt she is now making to break up the cultivation of cotton in our Southern States, and transfer the same to her East

India possessions. Our object is merely to show some part of the machinery which she has long been constructing, for this purpose. Every one can form his own opinion of the probable success or failure of the experiment, after taking a view of the means employed to make it succeed. Our Southern States and the British possessions in India are rivals in agriculture. The soil of the one produces the same rich staple commodities as that of the other. New Orleans and Calcutta are the two great rival cities in the world, whose imports and exports are similar. British India has superceded our Southern States in the cultivation of indigo, and is already a formidable rival in the cultivation of rice. sugar and tobacco. The attempt now making to supercede us in cotton, is well worthy of serious attention, The very country, which grows the same agricultural products as our Southern States, is the one our people appear to know and care the least about. They are not unacquainted with the grain-growing countries of Europe, but their acquaintance is very limited indeed with the history, resources, and political condition of those immense territories in Asia, under British power, which grow indigo, tobacco, rice, sugar and cotton. The people of the South have been dreaming that their old enemy, Lord Cornwallis, was dead, and that he would never trouble the South more. Though dead, he lives in marble and on canvas in Great Britain, and in the cotton, sugar, rice and indigo plantations throughout the British empire in India. He was defeated, it is true, in the South, by Washington and Lafayette, but, in less than ten years after that defeat, he succeeded in conquering fifty millions of people in Asia, stripped Tippoo Saib of half his dominions, and, as if in vengeance for his defeat in America, raised up in Asia a powerful competition, which now threatens to rob the South of her agricultural wealth.

In 1698 the East India Company purchased three little villages, extending about three miles on the eastern margin of the Ganges. The ground, on which these villages stood, forms the site of the great city of Calcutta, containing at present upwards of 600,000 inhabitants. It is the only commercial rival which New Orleans has to dread in the whole world.

The conquests of Lord Cornwallis in India, as well as those of his predecessors, were greatly facilitated by makVOL. I.NO. 2.

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ing the Zemindars there act the same part which the British are endeavoring to make the abolitionists act here. Deluded by a name, the Zemindars were suborned to sow the seeds of sedition and disunion in the provinces and principalities of the Mogul empire. Elated with the idea of becoming free and independant land owners, they cooperated with the incendiary agents of the East India Company, in arraying caste against caste, Hindoo against Mahomedan, Nabob against Loubardar, and state against state. After the poor deluded people of India had exhausted themselves in butchering one another in civil war, the company's officers marched into their country, and, with a few soldiers, attached province after province to the British empire. In theory, all the land belonged to the Mogul, practically, it belonged to the ryots, or peasantry, who worked the soil, and paid the Mogul about one fourth of the products, as rent or taxes. The Zemindars were tax collectors, or revenue agents, under the Mogul government. Their office was hereditary, and they were possessed of great power and influence. Yet they could not resist the delusion which British artifice threw around the name of free land owners. Accordingly, in 1789, after the Company got possession of the country, the Governor General of India declared the Zemindars to be the actual landowners, and gave them power over the soil, to sell or alienate it at pleasure. But they were required to pay to the Company the taxes which the ryots had formerly paid to the Mogul.

The Zemindars, being obliged to go through the legal formalities to collect their levies from the ryots, were unable to pay their taxes to the government, whose proceedings were summary. Their lands were gradually sold for arrears of taxes, and in a few years became the property of the British. The poor deluded Zemindars found out, after it was too late to remedy the evil, that they had brought disunion, civil war, and every evil upon their country for a mere name or shadow. They have almost all disappeared. Many of them died by starvation. No improvement took place in the condition of the ryots: so far from it, their situation was made worse. The overseers placed over them by the English are more exacting than ever the Zemindars were. After this manner, the British, not only obtained the sovereignty of a larger portion of

India, but alone obtained the right of property in the soil. They can afford to sell indigo, rice, cotton, sugar, &c., cheap, because the production costs them nothing. The ryots have to pay them so many bundles of indigo for every bigah, or Indian acre in cultivation, or so many pounds of cotton, sugar or rice. They do not, however, want to dispose of their agricultural products at so cheap a rate. They wish to break up all competition elsewhere, particularly the competition arising from slave labor in the United States. To prepare the mind for the facts, about to be introduced, disclosing the motives of Great Britain in sacrificing her West India Colonies to promote the aggrandizement of her Eastern Empire, it should be remembered that the productions of the East, in every age, as far back as history extends, have formed the basis of the most lucrative commerce in the whole world. Antioch and Tyre owed their opulence to the productions of the East, with which they supplied all nations trading in the Mediterranean. Alexandria, Cairo, Aleppo, Constantinople, Venice and Genoa, all derived their greatest wealth from being the emporiums, which supplied the rest of the world with the rich products of the soil of India. As soon as the discovery of the passage around the Cape of Good Hope diverted Eastern commerce from its ancient channels by way of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, all the above mentioned cities began to decline in importance, having lost eastern commerce, the principal source of their amazing wealth. At one time the city of Bruges was made the storehouse for eastern commodities, and supplied the more northern nations of Europe with them. "Never did wealth," says the historian Robertson, "appear more conspicuously in the train of commerce. The citizens of Bruges, enriched by it, displayed in their dress, their buildings, and mode of living, such magnificence as even to mortify the pride and excite the envy of royalty. Antwerp, when the staple was removed thither, soon rivalled Bruges in opulence and splendor. In some cities of Germany, particularly in Augsburg, the great mart for Indian commodities in the interior parts of that extensive country, we meet with early examples of such large fortunes accumulated by mercantile industry, as raised the proprietors of them to high rank and consideration in the empire." "But," continues Robertson, "the immense value of the Indian trade, which, both in

ancient and modern times, had enriched every nation by which it was carried on, was a subject familiar to the thoughts of all intelligent men, and they at once perceived that the discovery of the new route of navigation to the east, must occasion great revolutions not only in the course of commerce, but in the political state of Europe. On the first intelligence of Gama's successful voyage, the Venetians, with the quick-sighted discernment of merchants, foresaw the immediate consequences of it to be the ruin of that lucrative branch of commerce which had contributed so greatly to enrich and aggrandize their country."

Portugal enjoyed the lucrative Indian trade for nearly a century, and Lisbon became a second Venice. At length the Dutch began to participate in it, and Amsterdam became one of the most opulent cities in Europe. Finally the English were attracted to it. † * * * ***

Humanity was alleged as a motive for the West India emancipation act, but it appears, from a history of the controversy between the East and the West, that it was only an after thought. The East India proprietors have been somewhat disappointed in regard to the West Indies. They supposed that the emancipation act would have been sufficient of itself to destroy the cultivation of the sugar cane in the British West India Islands. It would have been, but for one circumstance. The West India proprietors have resorted to the artifice of procuring a fresh supply of slaves from Africa to supply the place of the emancipated negroes. Instead of calling them slaves, they call them indented servants or apprentices. The most of the sugar cane now cultivated in the British West Indies is by the hands of fresh importations of negroes from Africa. A large supply is obtained by capturing the Spanish slavers. We learned, while in the West Indies, that the negroes themselves preferred serving as slaves to the Spaniards than as indented servants to the English. The East India proprietors have lately come to an understanding with a large portion of the West India proprietors. Large inducements have been offered the latter,

We regret to say, that several paragraphs of the manuscript on the Indian trade, which should have been introduced here, are unfortunately lost. Eds, S.Q.R.