e the Beagle's last visit: nor is the
circumstance to be wondered at when we bear in mind, that the price of a
slave then varied from 90 to 100 pounds, and this in a country not
abounding in money.

The declining trade, the internal disorganization, and the rapidly
augmenting slave population of Bahia, all tend to prove that the system
of slavery which the Brazilians consider essential to the welfare of
their country, operates directly against her real interests. The
wonderful resources of the Brazils will, however, never be fully
developed until the Brazilians resolve to adopt the line of policy
suggested in Captain Fitzroy's interesting remarks upon this subject. To
encourage an industrious native population on the one hand, and on the
other to declare the slave-trade piratical, are the first necessary steps
in that march of improvement, by which this tottering empire may yet be
preserved from premature decay.

RESULTS OF SLAVERY.

It would, however, be a vain imagination, to suppose that this wiser and
more humane determination will be spontaneously adopted by those most
implicated in this debasing and demoralizing traffic. Indeed it appears
from the best information obtained on the subject, that since the
vigilance of our cruizers has comparatively put a stop to the trade on
the west coast of Africa--where it has received a great
discouragement--it has been greatly extended on the east. Could it but
have been foreseen by our Government that their efforts upon the west
coast, would in proportion as they were successful, only tend to drive
the traders in human flesh to the eastward, it is probable that Mombas
would have still been retained under our dominion; for such a possession
would have enabled us to exercise an effectual control in that quarter:
as it is, it gives additional reason to regret that the place was ever
abandoned. The horrors of the passage--horrors which no imagination can
heighten, no pen adequately portray--are by this alteration in the chief
seat of the accursed trade most fearfully augmented. The poor victims of
cruelty and fraud and avarice, in their most repulsive forms, are packed
away between decks scarcely three feet high, in small vessels of 30 or 40
tons, and thus situated have to encounter the cold and stormy passage
round the Cape: the average mortality is of course most frightful, but
the smallness of the vessels employed decreases the risk of the
speculators in human flesh, who con