For "The Friend.

ALEXANDER HUMBOLDT ON NEGRO SLAVERY.

The seventh volume of Humboldt's Personal Narrative of his travels in Spanish America, which has recently appeared, is chiefly devoted to an examination of the statistics and geography of Cuba and the West Indies.

The question of negro slavery is one of the objects of his investigation, and the views of this celebrated philosopher respecting it, are in a high degree interesting.

They are marked with the same accuracy and minuteness of detail, by the same comprehensive thought, elevated wisdom, and severe impartiality, which distinguish his other writings.

I had observed, says he, "the condition of the blacks in countries where the laws, the religion, and the national habits, tend to soften their fate; yet I preserved, on quitting America, the same horror of slavery which I had felt in Europe. It is in vain, that writers of ability, in order to veil barbarous institutions, by ingenious fictions of language, have invented the terms of negro peasants of the West Indies, black vassalage, and patriarchal protection: it is to profane the noble qualities of the mind and the imagination, to exculpate, by illusory comparisons, or captious sophisms, excesses that afflict humanity, and for which they prepare violent commotions.

Do they think they have acquired the right of dispensing with commiseration, by comparing the state of the blacks with that of the serfs of the middle ages, and with that state of oppression under which some classes still groan in the north and east of Europe?

Those comparisons, those artifices of language, that disdainful impatience, with which even a hope of the gradual abolition of slavery is repulsed as chimerical, are useless arms in the times in which we live.

The great revolutions which the continent of America and the archipelago of the West Indies have undergone, since the commencement of the nineteenth century, have acted upon the ideas and the public reason, even in countries where slavery exists and begins to be modified.

Many wise men, deeply interested in the tranquillity of the sugar and slave islands, feel that, by a liberal agreement of the proprietors, and by measures taken by those who know the localities, they might emerge from a state of crisis and uneasiness, of which indolence and obstinacy will augment the danger."

"If the legislation of the West Indies and the state of the men of colour does not shortly undergo a salutary change; if the legislation continues to discuss instead of acting, the political preponderance will pass into the hands of those who have strength to labour, the will to be free, and the courage to endure long privations.

This sanguinary catastrophe will take place as a necessary consequence of circumstances, without the intervention of the free blacks of Hayti, and without their abandoning the system of insulation, which they have hitherto followed.

Who would venture to predict the influence which may be exerted by 'an African confederation of the free states of the West Indies, placed between Colombia, North America and Guatimala, on the politics of the new world?' The fear of this event may act more powerfully on the minds of many, than the principles of humanity and justice; but in every island, the whites believe that their power is not to be shaken.

All simultaneous action on the part of the blacks appears to them impossible; and every change, every concession granted to the black population, a sign of weakness.

Nothing presses: the horrible catastrophe of Saint Domingo was only the effect of the inability of governors.

Such are the illusions that prevail amidst the great mass of the proprietors and planters of the West Indies, and which are alike opposed to an amelioration of the state of the blacks in Georgia and in the Carolinas."

"Slavery is no doubt the greatest of all the evils that afflict humanity, whether we consider the slave torn from his family in his native country, and thrown into the hold of a slave ship, or as making part of a flock of black men, parked on the soil of the West Indies; but for individuals there are degrees of suffering and privation.

"What a distance between a slave who serves in the house of a rich man at the Havanna or Kingston, or who works for himself, giving his master but a daily retribution, and a slave attached to a sugar estate.

The threats which are used to correct an obstinate negro, develope this scale of human privations.

The calessero is menaced with the cafetal, so the slave who works at the cafetal is menaced with the sugar fabric.

The black who has a wife, who inhabits a separate hut, who, affectionate as are the Africans for the most part, finds, after his labour, that some care is taken of him amidst his indigent family, has a fate not to be compared with that of the insulated slave lost in the mass.

This diversity of condition escapes those who have not had the spectacle of the West Indies before their eyes.

The progressive amelioration of the state even of the captive caste, explains that in the island of Cuba the luxury of their masters and the possibility of gain by their work, have drawn more than eighty thousand slaves towards the towns; and how the manumission of them, favoured by the wisdom of the laws, is become so active as to have produced, fixing on the present period, (1827) more than 130,000 free men of colour.

It is in discussing the individual position of each class, in recompensing, by the decreasing scale of privations, the intelligence, the love of labour, and the domestic virtues, that the colonial administration will find the means of ameliorating the fate of the blacks.

Philanthropy does not consist in giving 'a little more salt fish and some strokes of the whip less;' a real amelioration of the captive caste, ought to extend over the whole moral and physical position of man.

The impulse might have been given by those European governments, which have the sentiment of human dignity, and who know that whatever is unjust, bears with it a germ of destruction; but this impulse, it is afflicting to add, will be powerless, if the union of the proprietors of the colonial assemblies or legislatures, fail to adopt the same views, and to act by a well concerted plan, of which the ultimate object is the cessation of slavery in the West Indies.

Till then it will be in vain to register the strokes of the whip, diminish the number that can be inflicted at any one time; require the presence of witnesses, and name protectors of the slaves; all these regulations, dictated by the most benevolent intentions, are easily eluded; the loneliness of the plantations renders their execution impossible.

They support a system of domestic inquisition incompatible with what is called in the colonies, the acquired rights.

The state of slavery cannot be altogether peaceably ameliorated, but by the simultaneous action of free men, (white and coloured,) who inhabit the West Indies; by colonial assemblies and legislators; by the influence of those who, enjoying a great moral consideration among their countrymen, and acquainted with the locality, know how to vary the means of amelioration according to the manners, the habits and the position of every island.

"In preparing this task, which ought to comprehend at the same time, a great part of the archipelago of the West Indies, it is useful to cast a retrospective look on the events by which the freedom of a considerable part of the human race was obtained in Europe, in the middle ages.

In order to ameliorate without commotion, new institutions must be made to issue from those which the barbarism of centuries has consecrated.

It will one day be difficult to believe that till 1826, there existed no law in the great Antilles to prevent selling infants, and separating them from their parents, and to prohibit the degrading custom of marking the negroes with a hot iron, merely that the human cattle might be more easily recognised.

Enact laws to take away the possibility of a barbarous outrage; fix in every sugar estate, the relation between the least number of negresses, and that of the cultivating negroes; grant liberty to every slave who has served fifteen years, and to every negress who has reared four or five children, set them free on the condition of working a certain number of days for the profit of the plantation; give the slaves a part of the nett produce, to interest them in the increase of agricultural riches, fix a sum on the budget of the public expense destined for the ransom of slaves, and the amelioration of their fate; such are the most urgent objects of colonial legislation."

(To be continued.)

For "The Friend.

ALEXANDER HUMBOLDT ON NEGRO SLAVERY.

(Concluded from page 146.)

We can never enough praise the wisdom of the legislation in the new republics of Spanish America, which, since their birth, has been seriously occupied with the total extinction of slavery.

That vast portion of the earth has, in this respect, an immense advantage over the southern part of the United States, where the whites, during the struggle with England, established liberty for their own profit, and where the slave population, to the number of one million, six hundred thousand, augments still more rapidly than the white.

If civilization, instead of extending itself, were to change its place; if, after great and deplorable convulsions in Europe, America, between Cape Hatteras and the Missouri, become the principal seat of the light of Christianity, what a spectacle would that centre of civilization offer, where, in the sanctuary of liberty, we could attend a sale of negroes after death, and hear the sobbings of parents, who are separated from their children!

Let us hope that the generous principles which have so long animated the legislatures in the northern parts of the United States, will extend, by degrees, towards the south, and towards those western regions, where, by the effect of an imprudent and fatal law, slavery and its iniquities have passed the chain of the Alleghany, and the banks of the Mississippi: let us hope that the force of public opinion, the progress of knowledge, the softening of manners, the legislation of the new continental republics, and the great and happy event of the recognition of Hayti by the French government, will exert, either by motives of prudence and fear, or by more noble and disinterested sentiments, a happy influence on the amelioration of the state of the blacks in the rest of the West Indies, in the Carolinas, Guyana and Brazil. ***** On the solution of this problem, depends, in the West Indies only, and excluding the republic of Hayti, the security of 875,000 free men, (whites and men of colour,) and the softening the fate of 1,150,000 slaves.

We have demonstrated that this can never be obtained by peaceful means, without the concurrence of the local authorities, either colonial assemblies, or meetings of proprietors, designated by less dreaded names by the parent state.

The direct influence of the authorities is indispensable, and it is a fatal error, to believe that we may leave it to time to act.

Yes, time will act simultaneously on the slaves, on the relations between the islands and the inhabitants on the continent, and on events which cannot be controverted, when they have been waited for in the inaction of apathy.

Wherever slavery is long established, the increase of civilization has less influence on the treatment of slaves, than many are disposed to admit.

The civilization of a nation seldom extends to a great number of individuals; and does not attain those, who, in the fabrics, are in immediate contact with the blacks.

I have known very humane proprietors shrink from the difficulties that arise on the great plantations; they hesitate to disturb the established order, to make innovations, which, if not simultaneous, not sustained by the legislature, or, which would be a more powerful means, by the general will, would fail in their end, and perhaps aggravate the wretchedness of those, whose fate they were meant to soften.

These timid considerations stop the good that might be done by men who have the most benevolent intentions, and who deplore the barbarous institutions, of which they have received the sad inheritance.

Acquainted with the local circumstances, they know that, to produce an essential change in the state of the slaves, to lead them progressively to the enjoyment of liberty, requires a firm will in the local authorities, the concurrence of wealthy and enlightened citizens, and a general plan, in which all the chances of disorder, and the means of repression, are calculated.

Without this community of actions and efforts, slavery, with its pains and excesses, will maintain itself as it did in ancient Rome, in the midst of elegance of manners, the boasted progress of knowledge, and all the charm of civilization, which its presence condemns, and which it menaces to overwhelm, when the time of vengeance arrives.

Civilization, or the slow decline of nations, only prepares the mind for future events; but, to produce great changes in the social state, requires a coincidence of events, of which the epoch cannot be calculated before hand.

In slave countries, where long habit tends to legitimate institutions the most contrary to justice, we must count on the influence of knowledge, intellectual improvement, and the softening of manners, only inasmuch as they accelerate the impulse given by governments, and facilitate the execution of measures once adopted.

Without the directing of governments and of legislatures, a peaceable change is not to be hoped for.

Above all, the danger becomes imminent, when a general inquietude pervades the public mind, and when, in the midst of political discussions, which agitate neighbouring nations, the faults and duties of governments have been discerned: the calm can then only spring from an authority, which, in the noble sentiments of its force and its right, knows how to direct events in opening itself the career of amelioration.