this matter. The
influence of our democratic despotism is exerted against the liberties of
Europe. Political reformers in the Old World, who have testified to
their love of freedom by serious sacrifices, hold but one language on
this point. They tell us that American slavery furnishes kings and
aristocracies with their most potent arguments; that it is a perpetual
drag on the wheel of political progress.

We have before us, at this time, a letter from Seidensticker, one of the
leaders of the patriotic movement in behalf of German liberty in 1831.
It was written from the prison of Celle, where he had been confined for
eight years. The writer expresses his indignant astonishment at the
speeches of John C. Calhoun, and others in Congress, on the slavery
question, and deplores the disastrous influence of our great
inconsistency upon the cause of freedom throughout the world,--an
influence which paralyzes the hands of the patriotic reformer, while it
strengthens those of his oppressor, and deepens around the living martyrs
and confessors of European democracy the cold shadow of their prisons.

Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham, the President of the British Free Suffrage
Union, and whose philanthropy and democracy have been vouched for by the
Democratic Review in this country, has the following passage in an
address to the citizens of the United States: "Although an admirer of the
institutions of your country, and deeply lamenting the evils of my own
government, I find it difficult to reply to those who are opposed to any
extension of the political rights of Englishmen, when they point to
America, and say that where all have a control over the legislation but
those who are guilty of a dark skin, slavery and the slave trade remain,
not only unmitigated, but continue to extend; and that while there is an
onward movement in favor of its extinction, not only in England and
France, but in Cuba and Brazil, American legislators cling to this
enormous evil, without attempting to relax or mitigate its horrors."

How long shall such appeals, from such sources, be wasted upon us? Shall
our baleful example enslave the world? Shall the tree of democracy,
which our fathers intended for "the healing of the nations," be to them
like the fabled upas, blighting all around it?

The men of the North, the pioneers of the free West, and the non-
slaveholders of the South must answer these questions. It is for them to
say whether the present