an opening for alluding to the subject, I mentioned to him the advertisements and the cases about which I had caused inquiry to be made. He stated that the police were always on the look-out for such advertisements, and that the slave-sellers had an interest in representing the slaves as younger than they really were. I replied to this last observation, that, by giving an age from which importation since 1831 was to be concluded, the sellers were incurring danger of criminal proceedings, if the police did their duty. Senhor Sá e Albuquerque, however, did not seek to deny the responsibility of the Brazilian government as to slaves imported since 1831, and he encouraged me to place in his hands a minute of the information contained in the inclosed report. I called his attention at the same time to an advertisement in the leading Rio newspaper of the 19th instant, of which I inclose a copy, for the sale of forty-five slaves, among whom those marked with a cross in the inclosed copy are, some of them certainly, and all probably, illegal importations. I explained to Senhor Sá e Albuquerque that I made these observations and gave this information unofficially, and that I did not undertake to keep him informed of evidence furnished by the Rio newspapers of probable infraction of Brazilian laws made in execution of a treaty with Great Britain. The Slave-trade Correspondence, Class B, furnishes instances of official communications made by my predecessors to the Brazilian government in similar cases."

Sir Henry Howard, when he was Minister in Brazil, did his best to get the Brazilian government to do their duty in this matter. He wrote to the Earl of Clarendon, August 12, 1854:

"I have been induced to take up these cases with the Brazilian government, not from any exaggerated hope of really putting an end to similar illegal sales, but from the wish to deprive the slave-traders of that encourage

ment which so public and patent a violation of the law could not have failed to afford to them."

Mr. Consul Vereker alluded to this subject in a report on slavery in Rio Grande do Sul, addressed to Lord Clarendon on June 30, 1857:

"The events which are taking place in this district, disclosing a ray of hope to the unfortunate negro race, are unquestionably the result rather of the inevitable force of circumstances than of the direct action of the authorities or of the heartfelt convictions of the people. No substantial impediments are offered to the clandestine sales, as slaves, of persons of colour entitled to their freedom; no efforts are made to wrench from their wrongful claimants those negroes who have been imported since 1831, and their children."

On the 7th of March of this year two slaves, stated to be natives of the coast of Africa, were tried and acquitted at Rio on a charge of theft, the government prosecuting. They are said not to have known their ages when asked. Did it ever occur to the authorities to ask themselves whether these two Africans, against whom the law was being pressed for suspected robbery, had themselves been robbed against the law of their liberty?

When the Emperor, Ministers, Parliament, and people of Brazil are all, according to Senhor Andrada of the Brazilian Legation, eager and impatient for the abolition of slavery, some beginning should be made of emancipation of the million of illegal slaves, some steps taken to put the authorities in motion to rescue these poor creatures from illegal slavery, when they come before the public in law courts and in newspaper advertisements of sales.

The full possible extent of the wrong arising from this illegal slavery may be best seen by a particular instance. The following tale of a free African was told to the Chief of Police at Bahia, in 1862, and published in the Jornal da Bahia of February 12, and April 2, 1862. A free African woman named Dido had been hired out by the authorities, in 1842, to a certain Councillor, named Rebouças; he sent her off to a distant sugar plantation, gave her a new name, Ritta, and transformed the free woman into a slave. She had seven children, who should all have been free, as the mother was, but who all grew up slaves of Councillor Rebouças. Two of these children, of the ages of eighteen and fifteen, presented themselves in 1862 to the Chief of Police of Bahia to claim their freedom. One of their sisters, they said, was then in the House of Correction, about to be sold; two others had been given by Rebouças as a marriage portion with one of his daughters.

Thus the evil does not stop with the one illegally enslaved. The wrong multiplies itself in the children and children's children.

CHAPTER VIII.

SLAVERY IN BRAZIL.

LORD MALMESBURY'S SUSPENSION OF SEIZURES IN BRAZILIAN PORTS AND WATERS, 1852-HIS INSTRUCTIONS AS TO COASTING SLAVE TRAFFICSLAVE-TRADE SUPPRESSED UNDER ENGLISH PRESSURE-TESTIMONIES OF MR. SOUTHERN AND MESSRS. CANDLER AND BURGESS SIR HENRY HOWARD, MR. JERNINGHAM, LORD CLARENDON, AND MR. SCARLETT ON COASTING SLAVE-TRADE-FIVE THOUSAND SLAVES ANNUALLY TAKEN FROM NORTHERN PROVINCES TO RIO-SCARCITY OF LABOUR IN THE NORTH-MR. BRIGHT ON SLAVERY IN THE CONFEDERATE STATES-CONDEMNATIONS OF COASTING TRAFFIC BY BRAZILIAN STATESMENHORSEWHIPPING OF MOTHER AND SON BY A BRAZILIAN'S SLAVE AT JUIZ DA FORA, 1864-LORD BROUGHAM ON SLAVERY.

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MR. OSBORNE lately informed the House of Commons of the suspension by Lord Malmesbury, when he came into office in the beginning of 1852, of the orders issued by Lord Palmerston in 1850, under which slavers had been captured by our cruisers in Brazilian waters. Withdrawal," Mr. Osborne called it. "I find," said Mr. Osborne, "that Lord Malmesbury withdrew the order for British cruisers to enter the Brazilian ports and waters, and I must say that the conduct of Lord Malmesbury, who has been so much abused on this side of the House, in his management of our affairs with Brazil, has much redounded to his credit. The Brazilian Chambers, sensible of the kindness and conciliating disposition by which the conduct of the noble lord had been dictated, redoubled their efforts to suppress the slave-trade."

So effectual had been the work done under Lord Palmerston's orders by the end of 1851, that Lord Malmesbury was able to suspend the orders. I am happy to say that this suspension was not done with a "kindness and conciliating disposition" which involved a repudiation of the "Aberdeen Act," or of Lord Palmerston's mode of proceeding. On April 27, 1852, Lord Malmesbury communicated to Mr. Southern, then the Minister at Rio, the suspension of the orders of 1850. On June 18th, Lord Malmesbury wrote to Mr. Southern :

"I have to instruct you to take every fitting opportunity of stating to the Brazilian government that if the African slave-traffic should not continue to be effectually kept down in the empire of Brazil, it will become your duty to report that circumstance to Her Majesty's government, who will, on the first demand from you, immediately renew the lately suspended orders which were issued by Her Majesty's government in 1850, authorising Her Majesty's cruisers to make captures within the Brazilian waters."

Lord Malmesbury, who came in for the death of the ocean slave-trade of Brazil, came in also for the birth of a coasting slave-traffic, which has gone on increasing to the present time; and he ordered remonstrances to be made to the Brazilian government against this coasting traffic, about which it is said by the "Friend to both Countries," that the English government worries the Emperor of Brazil "with no more right, morally or legally, to interfere than with the shoe-strings of the Khan of Tartary." "You will take every opportunity," he wrote to Mr. Southern, "of urging the Brazilian government to adopt some stringent and effective measures of police at