ON THE POLITICAL STATE OF ALGIERS.

(Concluded from VOL. VI. p. 425.)

"He," says M. Pananti, "who has not been at Algiers, who has not seen the lot to which the Christians reduced to slavery are condemned, does not know what is most bitter in misery, or into what state of debasement the hearts of the miserable sons of men may fall. I, who have seen, who have experienced it, cannot, by words, paint all that man feels and suffers when he is plunged into this horrible calamity. As soon as a man is declared a slave, he is stripped of his clothes, and their place is supplied by a coarse piece of cloth; he is left commonly without stockings and shoes, and his naked head is struck by the burning rays of the sun. Many allow their beard to grow in a horrible manner, in sign of grief and desolation; they live in a state of dirtiness, which excites equal disgust and compassion. A part of these unhappy men are destined to make ropes and sailcloth for the fleet; these remain always under the eye and rod of the Alguazils, who abuse strangely their barbarous authority, and extort from them the little money which they sometimes possess. Others remain slaves of the dey, or are sold to rich Moors, who destine them to the vilest uses; others, in short, are condemned, like beasts of burden, to transport wood and stone, and to execute all the roughest labours, while their steps are always weighed down by a chain of iron. Of all the slaves, these are the most unhappy. They have no bed to rest on, no clothes to wear, no food to support them. All their nourishment consists in two loaves, black as soot, which are thrown to them, as to dogs. In the evening they are shut up in the Bani, as malefactors in the galleys."

The galleys in fact were invented by Christians for captive Africans. The shameful commencement of this cruel and humiliating treatment is due to us; our fathers were animated by that religious hatred, of which our contemporaries are the victims; and it is because the punishment of Musulman captives appeared of all others the most cruel, that the idea was afterwards formed, of associating with them the vilest criminals in the banis of Rome, of Genoa, of Leghorn, and of Malta. Let us not hesitate to own, that we have been unjust, cruel, and persecuting: much more, it is we who have begun; but after having repaired our own offences against humanity, after having abolished the trade of the Negroes, and the Bani of the knights of Malta, we have a right to demand for ourselves the same justice which we render to men of a different faith. Europe condemns not, or will no longer condemn a freeman to slavery, for the single crime of being born a Musul

man; no more ought she to suffer the African to condemn the European for the single crime of being born a Christian.

"The slaves lie heaped together in open corridors; they are exposed to wind, rain, storms, to all the injuries of the air and seasons. In the country, they sleep without shelter in the open air, or else shut up in deep pits, which they descend to by a ladder, after which the mouth of the cave is shut with an iron grate. At the dawn of the day they are abruptly awaked by the injurious cry, To work, cattle; then driven to the working place with whips, like beasts of burden, accompanied with blasphemies and maledictions. Many are condemned to clear out wells or dig privies; they remain there for whole seasons in water up to the middle, and breathe a me phitic air. Others are obliged to descend into frightful precipices, with death over their heads, and death under their feet. Others are yoked to a wagon, along with mules or asses; but it is upon them that the greater share of the burden falls, and upon them particularly that the strokes of the whip most copiously descend. Many in quarries are crushed by the falling in of the earth; many too, descending into their vast depths, never again see the light. Persons are counted by hundreds who die every year for want of nourishment or care, of the blows which they have received, or merely of regret, dejection, and despair. Wo to them if they dare to murmur, or to utter the slightest lamentation. For the smallest negligence they receive two hundred strokes on the sole of the foot, for the slightest resistance they are punished with death.

"There is in slavery a certain character of disgrace, of meanness, of bitterness, which chills the soul, disgusts the view, and revolts the thought. Men despise and reject this degraded being, as in India they despise and reject the proscribed and accursed classes of the Parias and the Pulkis. The slaves, accustomed themselves to be oppressed and despised, think themselves as contemptible as miserable. These iron chains, which are with us a sign of crime and dishonour, degrade the soul of him by whom they are worn. Servitude extends even to the soul. The son of civilized Europe learns to think himself of a nature inferior to these savages of the African Syrtes; and man, born free, who had learned to turn his eyes to Heaven, thinks himself born to serve, and views himself as sunk to the vile condition of a beast of burden. The soul is often purified in the furnace of adversity; but in the condition of the slave there is something dismal and abject, which makes courage lose its temper, extinguishes the fire of every generous passion, and deprives man of his intelligence and dignity. The greatest of all misfortunes is, that virtue, which triumphs over all afflictions, which sometimes renders them precious to us, virtue itself is often weakened or extinguished in hearts oppressed by the cruelty of men, or

overwhelmed by the feeling of a degraded nature. Gloom renders the heart bad, while it sinks the courage; the virtues are all derived from a noble and exalted soul, while meanness engenders only vice. Religion itself, that pillar of Heaven, on which the Christian rests, when all is shaken around him, religion affords no longer consolation to a wounded heart. The unhappy no longer turn towards Heaven, when they feel themselves abandoned on earth. It were well if, in suffering, they mingled their tears together, if these unhappy persons supported each other in their affliction; but friendship, the sweet consoler of afflicted hearts, becomes mute for beings who never meet with pity. Instead of loving and supporting, they hate and envy each other. He who has suffered too much from the cruelty of men, and from an iron destiny, feels the source of compassionate tears dried up within him, and the flame of amiable sentiments extinguished in his heart; that heart itself becomes hard as stone. The Italian language gives the name of intristito, saddened, to a tree or a field which, never seeing the sun. produces no fruit, and is clothed with no flowers; the same name may be applied to a man whose mind is coldly and deeply perverted."

Nothing appears to us more striking than this observation of an eye-witness on the moral effects of slavery; that sinking of character, that contagious contempt which is felt even by him who is the object of it; that confession of inferiority, which force alone extorts from weakness; that drying up of the heart which shuts it against pity, when our own misfortunes exhaust in ourselves all our power of suffering. Many other observations confirm this sad truth. We know that in great national calamities, in plagues, in famines, in great military reverses, the heart, amid suffering and danger, closes itself against compassion; and selfishness, called forth in all its force for the preservation of our existence, stifles every other affection. We know that a race is seldom viewed with universal contempt, without becoming really contemptible; that the government which secures liberty, renders men more virtuous, by rendering them respectable in their own eyes; that despotism renders them degraded still more than it renders them miserable. The experience dates from the time of Homer, and has never been falsified. Yet it is not without grief we are forced to acknowledge, that even this inheritance, the noblest and most precious which remains to us, that virtue itself, as well as riches and liberty, may be taken away by fortune.

We cordially join, then, in the noble wish of M. Pananti, for the abolition of slavery in Africa, and the destruction of a government

which, to the shame of European nations, is maintained only by a robbery exercised against them. May there be established over all the coast of Barbary, a liberal government, which may restore to happiness this beautiful portion of the world, which may call a numerous people to civilization and opulence, which may make new openings to European industry in the market which is richest and nearest to us, and which will receive our manufactures in return for new sources of enjoyment, and for the means of subsistence, of which Barbary will long be the granary.

M. Pananti leaves no room to doubt for a moment, that the bombardment of Algiers, executed by an English fleet, far from ameliorating the condition of those who navigate the Mediterranean, or trade to Barbary, has augmented their dangers. The dey, it is true, has been constrained to set at liberty the captives who were found at Algiers; but his hatred against Christians, his resentment, and his desire of vengeance, thenceforth no longer knew any bounds. He has received from Europeans the most sanguinary affront, while his power has not been at all diminished. For we must not imagine that the death of eight or ten thousand men, women, or children, who perished in the bombardment of Algiers, or the burning of a great number of the houses of the peaceable inhabitants, is a national calamity in the eyes of an African tyrant. It is to him only an insult; and the sentiment is the more bitter, from having been inflicted by that race which he calls infidel, and which he despises. Accordingly, from that moment, he has not ceased to prepare for vengeance. The African governments, formerly always divided, have been united by a close alliance. The superiority of the Sublime Porte, after being long disowned, has been invoked anew, that it may afford them protection. The most marked and incessant activity has been employed, in adding to the fortifications, in making new levies of troops, and in building new vessels. The time cannot be distant when the consuls of Europe will be massacred at Algiers, the merchants settled there thrown into chains, and when new swarms of corsairs will infest the seas, and renew their system of piracy.

It is not by bombardment, a measure cruel, because useless, that the Barbary States must be punished; it is by an armed establishment fixed among them. The piratical governments must

be deprived of a country which they are unworthy to govern; the Moors must be rendered happy, instead of being punished for crimes which are not theirs, and which attach only to their masters. The whole tenor of history seems to prove that there is no region in the world, the conquest of which would be easier than that of Mauritania, since it has scarcely ever been attempted without succeeding. The Romans attacked Africa in the centre, and, after conquering Carthage, extended themselves along the two shores, and reduced Numidia and Mauritania into Roman provinces. The Vandals entered by the strait of Cadiz, and placed it entirely under their yoke, extending from west to east. Belisarius, with the Greeks, who called themselves Romans, attacked it anew in the centre, setting out from the ports of Sicily; he destroyed the power of the Vandals, and restored to Justinian those vast provinces, which it seemed ought no longer to belong to an empire so much weakened. Three times, in short, Africa was conquered from east to west by the Arabs; in 647, by Abdallah and Zobeir; in 667, by Akbah, lieutenant of the caliph Moaviah; and in 692, by Hassan, the governor of Egypt, for the caliph Abdalmalek. It appears to me, that none of these armies of conquerors ever exceeded forty thousand men.

The French and Spaniards had not, it is true, equal success in their attempts upon Africa. But the religious fanaticism which adds to the bravery of the soldier, almost always misleads the prudence of the captain. Nothing less than a miracle would have been necessary to render successful the expedition of St. Louis against Tunis in 1270; accordingly, it was a miracle which that pious king expected. The conquests of the Portuguese and Spaniards, at the end of the fifteenth and the commencement of the sixteenth centuries, were the work of a handful of men, whose success greatly exceeded the means by which it was attained, till the period when Charles V. wholly occupied by another train of ambition, renounced the empire which his predecessors had been on the point of founding in Mauritania.

The Spaniards had conquered Oran and Bugia, and had in 1509 rendered the kings of Algiers and Tremecen tributary; but the greatest obstacle to their success was found in the ferocity of their chiefs, and the fanaticism of their soldiers and priests. Their ge