umn those old words of dolorous pregnancy,
_Auri sacra fames_, while in the distance Spanish and Portuguese ships
ride at anchor, and on the shore white men massacre blacks. In another
we see a fair woman, typifying bounteous Nature, giving her nourishment
to a white infant at one breast, and to a black infant at the other,
while she turns a pitiful eye to a scene in the background, where a gang
of negro slaves work among the sugar-canes, under the scourge and the
goad of ruthless masters. A third frontispiece gives us the story of
Inkle and Yarico, which Raynal sets down to some English poet, but as no
English poet is known to have touched that moving tale until the
younger Colman dramatised it in 1787, we may suspect that Raynal had
remembered it from Steele's paper in the _Spectator_. The last of these
pieces represents a cultivated landscape, adorned with villages, and its
ports thronged with shipping; in the foreground are two Quakers, one of
them benignly embracing some young Indians, the other casting
indignantly away from him a bow and its arrows, the symbols of division
and war.

The most effective chapters in the book were, in truth, eloquent sermons
on these simple and pathetic texts. They brought Negroes and Indians
within the relations of human brotherhood. They preached a higher
morality towards these poor children of bondage, they inspired a new
pity, they moved more generous sympathies, and they did this in such a
way as not merely to affect men's feelings about Indians and Negroes,
slave-labour, and the yet more hateful slave-trade, but at the same time
to develop and strengthen a general feeling for justice, equality, and
beneficence in all the arrangements and relations of the social union
all over the world. The same movement which brought the suffering blacks
of the new world within the sphere of moral duty, and invested them with
rights, intensified the same notion of rights and duties in association
with the suffering people of France. This was the sentiment that reigned
during the boyhood and youth of those who were destined, some twenty
years after Raynal's book was first placed in their hands, to carry
that sentiment out into a fiery and victorious reality.

Montesquieu had opened the various questions connected with slavery. We
can have no better measure of the increased heat in France between 1750
and 1770 than the difference in tone between two authors so equal in
popularity, if so unequal