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tion became more dense, and the cultivation improved as the soil increased in fertility. Large fields of cotton and rice were met with, and numerous herds of cattle; and though still somewhat disturbed, the political state of the country became less turbulent. The route from Say to Kukawa was nearly the same that had been passed over a year before, and therefore needs not now to be retraced; it was traversed in about three months, and near the end of 1854 Dr. Barth was once more at the headquarters of his operations in Sudan. Here, too, he met with the reinforcement that had been sent to him from England—Mr. Vogel, a young German naturalist, and two English sappers, who were greatly surprised to find him alive, as his death was reported and fully believed at Tripoli—by whom, and the letters and dispatches received through them, he was presently fully posted up on home affairs. Mr. Vogel soon after set out on an expedition to Adamawa, intending to extend his explorations through Waday, in attempting which he lost his life; and Dr. Barth prepared to return to Europe. But in Africa how not to do it seems to be the great art of life, and therefore through a variety of dilatory movements his departure was delayed till May. Then with a small caravan, taking the road by Bilma and Murzuk, he came to Tripoli, and thence to London, where he arrived on the 6th of September, 1855.

The closing paragraph of his protracted narrative well becomes his position as that of a man who, feeling that having been occupied in an enterprise of great public interest, in which he has achieved something for the interest of humanity, he may fearlessly submit the record of his deeds to the verdict of the public:

Thus I closed my long and exhausting career as an African explorer, of which these volumes endeavor to incorporate the results. Having previously gained a good deal of experience of African traveling during an extensive journey through Barbary, I had embarked on this undertaking as a volunteer under the most unfavorable circumstances for myself. The scale and the means of the mission seemed to be extremely limited, and it was only in consequence of the success which accompanied our proceedings that a wider extent was given to the range and objects of the expedition; and after its original leader had succumbed in his arduous task, instead of giving way to despair, I had continued in my career amid great embarrassment, carrying on the exploration of extensive re FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XIII.—20

gions almost without any means. And when the leadership of the mission, in consequence of the confidence of her majesty's government, was intrusted to me, and I had been deprived of the only European companion who remained with me, I resolved upon undertaking, with a very limited supply of means, a journey to the far west, in order to endeavor to reach Timbuktu, and to explore that part of the Niger which, through the untimely fate of Mungo Park, had remained unknown to the scientific world. In this enterprise I succeeded to my utmost expectation. . . . I also succeeded in establishing friendly relations with all the most powerful chiefs along the river up to that mysterious city itself. .. No doubt, even in the track which I myself pursued, I have left a good deal for my successors in this career to improve upon; but I have the satisfaction to feel that I have opened to the view of the scientific public of Europe a most extensive tract of the secluded African world, and not only made it tolerably known, but rendered the opening of a regular intercourse between Europeans and those regions possible.

This summary of the results of these explorations, though creditable to the writer's modesty, comes very far short of doing full justice to the subject. By pushing out beyond where any of his predecessors in the same field had gone, Dr. Barth has somewhat diminished the area of the great "unexplored regions" which have hitherto formed so large a feature in African geography. But this is the least part of his praise. His observations are especially distinguished for their accuracy and thoroughness, and his annotations for their correctness and intelligibility. The knowledge imparted is valuable in itself, as well as available for other purposes. Africa is at length receiving a portion of the attention to which her immense capabilities entitle her, and very likely will be the scene of the next great act in the drama of the world's progress. The region over which Dr. Barth traveled, and the general character of which he ascertained, includes most of the space between the fourth and twentieth degrees of north latitude, and extends from the east of Lake Tsad, in longitude 20° E., to the water-parting between the Niger on the one side and the Senegal and Gambia on the other, in longitude 10° W. This whole region is occupied by numerous and powerful races of mongrel Berber, Arab, and Moorish negroids, all nominally Moslems, and all partially civilized, and having among them a very considerable degree of a kind of barbaric culture. Its history, as to its races, politics, learning, and religion, forms one of

the most curious and interesting chapters in the world's annals. A better acquaintance with it would tend to somewhat abate the intense egotism of Caucasian ignorance, by leading us to contemplate the not improbable idea of African savans of the eighth or tenth century discussing the possibility of ever elevating the white barbarians of the north, and questioning whether the Japhetic races were capable of civilization. But the prospects held out by this region, of mercantile profits and the conquest of trade, will interest a much larger class. Strangely enough, there is lying nearer to Western Europe than is any of the great fields of its foreign commerce, a country of vast extent, and of almost unbounded fertility, and accessible to sea-going vessels, that has been waiting through weary ages to pour its wealth into the lap of any who will receive it. Its agricultural resources excel those of India, and rival our own Mississippi Valley; and the labor to develop these is at hand ready to be employed, at prices that would render American slave-labor ridiculously expensive, and for which European fabrics would be received to any extent purchasable by such products. The whole region is now one vast cotton-field, and the production of that staple seems to be easily capable of an indefinite expansion; and there is no reason to doubt that that country alone could very soon be made, by native industry, to supply raw cotton for the whole of Europe. We are glad to know that Great Britain already has her hand as well as her eye upon that good land; we trust before many years her flag will wave along the Niger, the Bénu-wé, and on the bosom of the Tsad, and that her strong but beneficent hand will bind the warring chiefs of all Sudan in the bonds of a peaceful commerce, and so achieve the redemption of a great nation.

We would, in closing, as a simple act of justice, commend these noble volumes as deserving a wider circulation and a more general reading than they have received. Of their intrinsic worth there can be but one opinion among all who know them, while, in point of interest or entertainment, we confess to have found them peculiarly valuable.

ART. IX. THE STATE OF THE COUNTRY.

Southern Presbyterian Review, January, 1861. Article Sixth: THE STATE OF THE COUNTRY.

THE article in the Southern Presbyterian Review, on "The State of the Country," a production fresh from central South Carolina, is written by Dr. Thornwell, one of the leading minds of the Southern Presbyterian Church. As a defense of southern secession, it will, of course, be held as authoritative and conclusive in its own section. Before the bar of the civilized world, however, the very defense will be held a malfeasance. While the author was penning its unhappy periods, as near as we calculate, the organs of the different languages of Christian Europe, speaking the sentiments of both courts and people, were pouring forth their articulate anathemas against southern slaveholding treason. An earnest prayer in the noble heart of free Europe pulsated alike for the triumph of Garibaldi over the legions of Italian popery, and of Lincoln over the cabals of the American oligarchy. Doubtless there are in Europe as noble men, individually, as Dr. Thornwell, who are ready to utter their plea for the "peculiar institutions" of Southern Europe; but the pronunciation of a common infamy is emphatic upon them and him as advocates alike of causes accursed of God and man. Only the infamy upon him is deepest; inasmuch as the Italian "institution" is the remnant of a venerable past, while the South Carolinian is an upstart monster, a misbegotten cross between young despotism and modern democracy.

Dr. Thornwell denies that the desire of reopening the slave-trade is a motive for southern secession. In this he is doubtless sincere, for his Quarterly has opposed firmly, and on Christian grounds, the recommencement of that iniquity. But the developments even now transpiring convince us that, however free from participation he may now be, that project is a part of the political programme of the South Carolina traitors, and that Dr. Thornwell will be obliged in due time to give it his adhesion. He denies, too, that splendid dreams of empire and conquest have been a stimulant to the movement; but who can call to mind the schemes of fillibuster and Cuban purchase which have so filled the reveries of the cotton states for the last few years, without remembering that they were never surrendered-only for the time defeated. And while these schemes of fillibuster southward were agitating the public mind,

who can forget that the breaking of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas raid, and the plot to force a slavery constitution upon Kansas, were pushing the conquests of slavery northward. But one more national victory of the proslavery Democracy, and the decision of the Lemmon case would have opened the door to the remanding of slavery to the free states. But one turn still farther of the judicial screw, and emancipation even in our northern states would have been decided to be subversive of the rights of property, and contrary to the Constitution, and the plot would have been completed. Slavery would have been pronounced national; Abolitionists and anti-slavery men would have been lynched and hung as freely in New England as in Carolina; and Senator Toombs might have built his slave-pen under the shadow of Bunker Hill. To such a denouement were we firmly and rapidly marching. From it we were saved, not by the advocates of compromise and preachers of pseudo-conservatism, but by fearless hearts and unshrinking voices; by men in Church and State who breasted the brunt of battle and won the victory that culminated in the election of Abraham Lincoln. By that triumph the cohorts of the slave power, so lately exulting in the prospect of laying the nation beneath their feet, were routed, driven in dishonor from power, and amid the exposures of their corruptions and treasons, were broken in sunder, and urged by their own madness down the precipice of rebellion.

It is to the resistance of the extension of slavery into the territories, as indicated by the election of Lincoln, that Dr. Thornwell attributes the secession. We accept the issue. If the extension of slavery and the formation of new slave states are the condition of union with slaveholders, we are ready to give them a walking paper-abite, evadite, festinate. The extension of slavery, carried out by those additions which would be by a series of purchases, conquests, and annexations, successively demanded upon pain of dissolving the Union, is but another name for the absolute supremacy of slavery over this nation and continent. This would be to transform our republic into an oligarchy, the most despotic ever inaugurated over a civilized people. It would, indeed, forsooth "preserve the Union;" but it would preserve the Union at the expense of all that renders the Union dear.

Dr. Thornwell's main position, to which all his utterances are subordinate, is, that the proper attitude of our government, as between slavery and freedom, is one of "ABSOLUTE INDIFFERENCE OR NEUTRALITY." It is a question between North and South, upon which neither side should be favored. Freedom is to be held as

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