lders only when she is in Yankee territory, and criticises the
Yankees only when she is in the Southern States. Allowing herself to
believe that the condition of the negroes was not so deplorable as she
had supposed, she even began to extenuate the institution of slavery by
arguments too transparently feeble to call for detailed confutation. It
is true, she says, that slavery is an evil to-day, but to-morrow it will
be a boon to humanity, and a boon to the negro world. Why? Because the
American negro, enlightened by the teachings of Christianity through his
contact with the white man, will, at some future time, return to Africa,
the home of his ancestors, a missionary of civilization, charged with
the glorious task of redeeming and regenerating it.

This was a new reading of the old falsehood, doing evil that good may
come. What could the negro think of a Christianity that justified his
subjugation by oppression? Or how could a race, kept in the bonds and
fetters of an accursed degradation, be fitted to play the part of
apostles and missionaries? Happily it is unnecessary to discuss the
subject, since slavery no longer exists in America.

* * * * *

Of those beautiful descriptions of nature which lend so great a charm to
Miss Bremer's fiction we find but few examples in her work on the United
States. Unfortunately she travelled as a philosopher, not as an observer
of nature; engaged in the study of social questions, she seems to have
had neither the leisure nor the inclination to survey the magnificent
scenery through which she passed. The area she traversed was very
considerable; from New York she crossed the continent to New Orleans;
she visited Canada, the lakes, the valley of the Mississippi, and made
an excursion to Cuba; but of all the landscapes, sublime, beautiful, and
picturesque that met her gaze, she says little or nothing. Even the
mighty Niagara has scarcely power to move her; the rolling prairies make
no impression on her imagination. From her book, therefore, we can offer
no quotations. In a country like America social questions change their
aspects with so much rapidity that Miss Bremer's opinions upon them are
already antiquated. It is Nature only that preserves her character. The
relations of the North to the South, of the slave-holder to the negro,
or of the Democratic party to the Republican, may undergo, in twenty or
thirty years a complete transformation; but Niagara