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which the tasks of our Southern slaves are exemption from labor, and from that grinding and irritating and humbling injustice of low wages, to which the comforts and domestic ease of our Southern serfs are comparative independence and affluence? Let her look at home and around her, and reform a multitude of crying abuses in her own neighborhood, before she comes to read to the citizens of the South, the sons of freedom and the friends of equity, her gratuitous homilies about duty and humanity. And as to her clamor about Free Trade, we are satisfied, that she means that trade shall be free in England so long and no longer, than she can make large profits out of its freedom. Let its freedom once cross her path, and she will seize upon it with an iron grasp and enslave it, even though the Liberty she pretends to adore, as a heaven-descendeď nymph, emits her last and dying breath in the struggle!

What, then, are the instrumentalities, by means of which the influence of our loving mother, England, is obtaining a firm foothold, and extending itself far and wide among the free States of our American Republic? Need we ask? Does not every body know? If we go out into our streets, knock at the doors of our opulent citizens, or even of those who are in comfortable circumstances, and enter, what do we see? English Reviews and English Periodicals, cheap American editions of them, every where, and in the hands of every one, who makes the slightest pretensions to literature. And what do these works contain? Mere literary criticisms of books, from the pens of able writers? If this were the case, they would be harmless, nay instructive. No. They are great political organs, espousing the cause of some selfsufficient British party or other, pervaded by British feeling, inculcating British doctrines, sustaining British Establishments and the cause of the British Monarchy, or of the British Ministry, maintaining the glory of the titled orders of England, and the insignificance of the commonalty, hooting at American democracy, ridiculing the experiment of the American government, as a splendid bubble, and denouncing slavery in the Southern States of this country, as the greatest crime that ever was committed by any civilized people. These are the doctrines contained in these British Reviews, which are asserted and insisted on, with great force of talent, on almost every page of them. What is the

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consequence? It is a natural and a necessary one. stant dripping, it is an old adage, but not less true on that account, will wear a stone. The young men of our country grow up to manhood, Englishmen in their feelings, in their principles, in their speculations, in their modes of thinking, in an eager ambition of rank and of artificial and marked distinctions in society, soaring to something above and beyond their reach which savours of English pomp and circumstance, instead of being true-hearted American citizens, satisfied with the plain simplicity of republican manners, regarding sterling merit as its own best reward and as the noblest badge of honor, cherishing an ardent love for the country that gave them birth, and feeling a deep and glowing reverence in their breasts for its liberty, its laws and its institutions. Are not many among even the older class of our citizens,--men of mature minds, who have attained to affluence and to all of honor to which they are entitled, or which their country has to bestow upon them, beginning to be dissatisfied with the democracy of their fathers, beginning to sigh after the fleshpots of Egypt, and to cherish British aspirations? Does even the high title of "Honorable" satisfy all those who have attained it, and are there not some among them who would prefer to be addressed in more grandiloquent phrases, such as, 'My Lord', 'Your Grace,' 'Your Highness,' or, even, 'May it please your Majesty? Are there not some among us who are disgusted with the People, who dislike to associate with them, who pronounce them vulgar and ignorant, and who earnestly desire to rise to a station far above those, from whom they have received all their power and consequence? Have we not, in fine, some friends of monarchy among our own American citizens, who, if they do not express their ambitious wishes, yet cherish them in secret? We have heard that there are such, and we believe it to be the case. And what has brought it about? It is these British Reviews and British doctrines, which are every where circulated in our country, and about which, if people say little, they think a great deal, which are doing this deadly and wide-spread and wide-spreading mischief. We have read them, and meditated upon them, till our feelings have become wholly English, till our souls have lost their original American character, and have become fashioned and shaped entirely after an English model, till our very

blood has been corrupted by an Anglican infusion, stretching to the seat of life, till our country seems fast degenerating from its high and pure character of a free republic, to its former degraded condition of a British colony, dependant on England for its thoughts, its principles, its doctrines, its life, breath and being.

Will it be asked, Are we, then, to be deprived of the pleasure, the high gratification, the solid improvement which result from a careful perusal of those thrilling and learned works, in which the literature of an enlightened and classical people is, as it were, embodied? Shall we be restrained from holding communion with the finest scholars, with the master minds of old England, the land of arts, of arms, of letters and philosophy, simply because they speak out their own minds, thoughts and feelings fully and freely, and maintain, with great ability, the principles and maxims of a monarchical government, and those measures of national policy which they deem essential to the durability of their institutions, and the advancement of their country's fame and influence? Shall they be thrown contemptuously out of our doors and windows into the streets, as vile rubbish, the very touch of which is contamination? No! Let them come over the wide waters to our cities, our villages, the country halls of our ancestors, in cool and shady retreats, where the birds sing in the branches of the old Live Oaks with their venerable veils; let them be brought into our parlors, and be placed on our centre-tables as ornaments, and as honorable monuments of what the AngloSaxon race can do, to enrich and ennoble our own vernacular language; let us read them; let us ponder upon their page with a curious eye and a searching spirit; let us drink deeply and drink long at the glorious and refreshing fountain of English literature; let us scrutinize, let us observe narrowly, what old England is about; what are the doctrines she now-a-days promulgates and insists on, what are her plans, what are her movements, what she is now doing and what she is about to do. The study can do us no harm, if we are wary and true to ourselves; truth is single; truth is a unit; truth is powerful, in whatever soil it grows; light elicits light, wherever it springs up, and from whatever quarter it dawns over the soul. What is to hinder us from basking in its rays, and becoming brighter and better and VOL. I.-NO. 1. 8

stronger by the indulgence? Let us exult in our opportunity to do so and improve it; but in the name of God, of liberty, of our common country, and of our rights as Southern citizens, let us be cautious, let us be considerate ; let us not forget that the evil in these works is strongly mingled with the good, even if it have not the ascendency; that the false is blended with the true in unequal proportions, and that the poison of false and evil doctrines, if we would save ourselves from death, must be counteracted and completely controlled by some quickly-working and very powerful antidote. To what a pass has not our country already come! We may look upon its condition with grief and even with tears, for the mischief commences with our little children, as soon as reason begins to dawn over their opening intellects. We send them to school, and what books are placed in their hands and where do they come from? They come from England; they come from the Northern States of this Union, and they are anti-slavery primers, and spelling books, and catechisms, teeming with sly remarks, covert hints and subtle inuendos against slavery and slave institutions, which make a deep and lasting impression upon the plastic minds of our little ones, and cause them, even before they can read their mother tongue with facility, to look with distrust and jealous suspicion on the land of their birth, and even upon those fond and loving parents, who fling their arms around them and hug them to their bosoms! And when they grow up, where do we send them to obtain an education? To the Northern colleges. And what do they learn there from the books of ethics and the Professors who teach them? Abolition dogmas, strongly asserted and insisted on, and fresh from the mint of their prejudices, their envy and their ignorance. And when they return home, what are they? Do we know our own sons? Are they the sons of Southern citizens? Has not their nature been changed under Northern influences, and do they not almost lay claim to Northern parentage? They are abolitionists,—at least anti-slavery men, or strongly disposed to become either the one or the other. And what do we do with them in this emergency? What do we make of our sons? How do we dispose of their time and carve out their fortunes? Our conduct, on this occasion, is no riddle, any more than is the destiny to which we appoint them.

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We place in their hands British books, British Newspapers, British Reviews, British Periodicals of all classes that the throws up in such great numbers, and our sons become,for what else could they become under such circumstances?-they become Englishmen, with all their previous prejudices against our institutions, strengthened or confirmed by their reading. And how are these evils, these crying evils, to be reformed, to be cured, to be prevented in future? By the power of the Press, of the Free Press of our country, of the Periodical Press. The Periodical Press of the Southern States must control and baffle the power of the Periodical Press of Great Britain, at all those points where England is seeking to make inroads upon our liberties. There is no other course to be pursued, and it is the best course. All the fallacies of those pestilential heresies, which come to us from old England and New Englaud, and which are every where spread abroad through this region, sapping the vitals of the Constitution of the Union, and undermining and unsettling the foundations of our rights as Southern citizens, are to be detected, pointed out, fully exposed and completely frustrated in their influence, by the power of our master minds, bearing down upon them effectually through the medium of our Periodical Press. This must be done. This course must be pursued; for, if it is not done and is not pursued, and that immediately, our country is lost; our rights, as Southerners, are gone from us forever, and God only knows what will become of us, for man cannot understand or even imagine.

With a view, then, to protect the rights of our Southern soil from invasion, and to promote the cause of learning, arts and literature among us, we have projected this Southern Quarterly Review. As a political organ, it will maintain, in good faith, long-received and well-tried principles of the old Republican School, such as the following: That all men, though not equal by birth, talents or circumstances, are yet to be equally protected in the enjoyment of their just rights; that the People of the several States of this Union, are the source of all the political power that exists in it; that the Constitution of the United States, is the result of a compact between the several States, each State agreeing with each, and each with all the rest, to confer upon the Federal Government certain powers, and reserving to them

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