The United States the land of freedom. above her knees, while a shout of approbation greets him from the gazers around the table beneath. Now the bidding goes on, under the excitement of this exposure of her person, brisker than ever. It reaches 900 dollars, and then another move is tried. She is taken down, the men are made to fall back, and a path is made to the furthest side of the building; and between those files of men she is made to walk briskly backward and forward. Hold up your head, miss; walk pert now, as if you were going to church to meet your beau! See there, gentlemen, there is muscle for you? the real Baltimore clip! step as light as an antelope's. What is bid, gentlemen?' While she is thus walking the gauntlet of these rude men, any one that chooses may stop her and handle any part of her body, ask her any question he chooses; then, for the last time, she ascends the stand, and is soon knocked down to the highest bidder, at not far from 1,000 dollars. Chivalrous Virginia is growing rich on the sales of her own children." He then goes on to say the many sad and harrowing sights he witnessed, of the sale of mothers with infants nursing on their bosoms, men and boys stripped naked that their muscular development may be better seen :-- Oh, Slavery thou art a bitter draught! 27, New Broad-street, April 12, 1856. Legal house breakers of the Court of Queen's Bench. LORD CAMPBELL'S JUSTICE IN THE COURT OF AN UNPRIVILEGED PLEADER. TOWARDS the close of the sitting an elderly man appeared on the floor, and said he wished to apply for a criminal information against an attorney and some officers of the court, for having violently broken into his premises and taken his things from him. Campbell's Lord Campbell intimated that, according to the practice of Lord the court, no one except a gentleman of the bar could move for gentlemen a criminal information. of the bar necessary to The applicant said he was not aware of that. He thought protect the courts of law were open to every individual. Lord Campbell told him they must abide by the rules of the court. The applicant said he had no means to employ a barrister. Lord Campbell: The court can do nothing more than say that they cannot hear your motion.-Morning Star, 15th April, 1856. judicial criminals. INQUISITION ATROCITIES PERPETRATED IN MODES OF LIFE IN AFRICA. THE Rev. Mr. Beachman has recently returned from a visit to Africa, and in the sketch of the social condition of the negroes inhabiting the Gold Coast and its vicinity, he furnishes a truly awful picture, thus: and bloody customis on the west Scarcely has one of their barbarous and bloody customs been Barbarous abandoned, from the earliest period of which anything is known of them. They still even pave their court-yards, palaces, and even the streets or market-places of their villages or towns, with the skulls of those butchered in the wars, at feasts, funerals, or as sacrifices to Bossum. coast of Africa. buried Still their wives and slaves are buried alive with their deceased husbands or masters. When Adahanzen died, 280 of his wives were butchered before the arrival of his successor, which put a stop to it, only to increase the flow of blood and the number of deaths in other ways. The remaining living wives were buried Women alive, amid dancing, singing and bewailing, the noise of muskets, alive. horns, drums, yells, groans and screeches; the women marching by headless trunks, bedaubed themselves with mud and blood. Their victims were marched along with large knives passed through their cheeks. The executioners struggle for the bloody office, while the victims look on and endure with apathy. They were too familiar with the horrid sacrifice to show terror, or to imagine that all was not as it should be. Their hands were chopped off, and then their legs were sawed off, and their heads sawed off to prolong the amusement. Even some who assisted to fill the graves were then hustled in alive, in order to add to the sport or solemnity of the scene. Upon the death of the king's brother, four thousand victims were thus sacrificed. These ceremonies are often repeated, and hundreds slaughtered at every rehearsal. Upon the death of a king of Ashantee, a general massacre takes place, in which there can be no computation of the many victims. At their Yam customs, Mr. Bowditch witnessed spectacles of the most appalling kind. Every cabocer, or noble, sacrificed a slave as he entered the gate. Heads and skulls formed the ornaments in their possession. Hundreds were slain; and the streaming and steaming blood of the victims was mingled in one vast brass pan, with various vegetables and animal matter, fresh as well as putrid, to compose a powerful Fetiche. At these customs the same scenes of butchery and slaughter occur. The king's executioners traverse the city, killing all they meet. The next day desolation reigns over the land. The king, during the bloody saturnalia, looked on eagerly and danced in his chair with delight. The King of Dahomey paves the approaches to his residence, and ornaments the battlements of his palace with the skulis of his victims; and the great Fetiche tree at Badagry has its widespread limbs laden with human carcasses and limbs. The want of chastity is no disgrace, and the priests are employed as pimps. "Murder, adultery and thievery," says Bosman, "are here no sin." Representa tion of the LEGAL OPPRESSION OF THE POOR. THE character of "village Hampden," says the editor of the editor of Weekly Dispatch, is rather a troublesome role to undertake. the Wkly We would rather delegate to some bucolic "dauntless breast" Dispatch. the duty of withstanding "the little tyrant of his fields." When we wander among the green lanes we would rather not think, but only feel. When we "walk forth to meditate in the magistrates widow and orphan. mothers fields until eventide," we would rather deal in reverie than disquisitive speculation. But the world and the "ignorant present time" will not leave us alone. Now, reader, we do not in the least exaggerate what we are about to state to you. A English poor widow, mother of several little children, who struggles to punish the keep them plump, whole and clean, out of her toil at the washtub, put a petition into our hands, as "the glimmering landscape faded on the sight," and we "homeward plodded our weary way." Her son Tom and his cousin Charley, the son of another poor hard-working woman, are precocious youths of the ripe age of seven years. They have been summoned to the bench six miles off! We have seen the summonses. Of course Innocent they could not read a word of them, and if they could, they submit to would not have understood a word they imported. Yet formal magisterial injustice. summonses were served upon them to answer a complaint "for that he the said Tom, and he the said Charley, had played at the game of pitch and toss in a public thoroughfare, to the annoyance of the inhabitants." Their mothers were silly enough to attend the bench with them; to hear them condemned in 58. fine and 5s. costs each, with certification that, if not paid in eight days, they must be imprisoned for seven days! While we subscribed, in common with our neighbours, to pay thesc fines, we at the same time advised the mothers of these Bumbleridden infants to let the magistrates take their own course and imprison them at their peril. The answer was the children were in such a "parlous fear" and state of nervous excitement, that if a policeman but took hold of them they would receive a shock that would injure them for life. Two other boys of eight and nine have been similarly fined, "for playing at peg-top and marbles." We have no doubt whatever, that children of such tender years cannot be held to plead to any charge. Even if they had property to pay the fine it would be in custody of their guardians, who could not obtain the sanction of a court of equity for such an application of the funds of their wards. To serve on an infant of seven years, not yet divested of its first Magisterial milk teeth, a detailed charge in writing in any view of its com- nockers of prehending it, is a mockery of law. Parents are not liable for such delicts penally, and civilly the fines could not be sued for against them as necessary furnishings. We should like to see the magistrate who would actually dare to grant a warrant for the incarceration of an infant, incapable in the eye not only of common sense, but what is more germane to the matter, of law law. By the sacred code of consent of moral discrimination; and if he issue judgments which he dare not enforce, he but brings authority into coninjustice is tempt. But we have not introduced these cases to the notice of magis.erial to be opposed. Govern ment illtreatment of its sub jects. Constables are shame fully dismissed. Magistrate's our readers on account of the transient interest of their own merits, but because they are typical of the way in which our Government deals with its subjects-of the way in which classes of subjects deal with each other. The constables who refused to listen to the complaints on which these convictions proceeded have actually been dismissed for using that discretion for the exercise of which they ought to have rather been commended; but we can scarcely blame the particular magistrate who adjudicated for dealing with the case according to the traditions of customary justice of peace practice and magistrates' clerkmade-law-the system of society under which the spirit which clerk-made suggests such proceedings rose up is really the fons et origo mali, (the spring and source of evil). Just think for a moment; infants of seven years of age taken away by policemen six miles from home, dragged before a court of justice and condemned to gaol in default of their poor widowed mother mustering up two weeks of the earnings without which she must fall behind in her rent, and her children must go without their dinner, and that in a community of Christians; the magistrates magistrates, being devout men, saying their responses every Sunday in their crimson-cushioned pews louder than the clerk. Morning News, 15th April, 1856. law. Devout The editor of the Sun's regal reward. IMPERIAL MUNIFICENCE. STATE PATRONAGE OF LETTERS. "A munificent pension," says the Sun, "has recently been beaccount of stowed upon Mr. Joseph Haydn, the laborious compiler of the wellknown Dictionary of Dates. A munificent pension of-ahem!how much? Can any one guess? Actually, a pension of £25. a year! Otherwise, a reward of-£2. 18. 8d. a month! or 98. 7d. a week! or just 1s. 44d. a day! A reward for-what? For the work of a shoe-black? For journeymen tailoring? For sweeping the staircase of Buckingham Palace, or weeding the gardens of Osborne, or rolling the gravel walks of Balmoral? Nothing of the sort. Instead of this, for long years of intellectual labour |