ing to the rights of fraternity more than twenty millions of the human family-that man, who after so many years of reproach and contumely; after sufferings and perseverance which astonish as much as they instruct us, succeeded in turning the current of national feeling; in awakening the sense of national justice, and finally in obtaining, from the parliament of England, that glorious act, the abolition of the slave trade-An act to which the royal signature was affixed at noon day, and just as the sun reached the meridian: a time fitly chosen for the consummation of so splendid a transaction-a transaction which reflects more honor on the king, the parliament, and the people, than any other recorded in the annals of history. Where is this man, whose fame I had rather inherit than that of Cæsar for it will be more deathless as it is already more sacred. And should Africa ever arise from its present degradation, and rise it will, if there be any truth in God, what a perpetual flow of heartfelt eulogy will, to a thousand generations, commemorate the virtues, the sufferings and the triumph of the ingenuous, the disinterested, the endeared, the immortal Clarkson-the Negro's friend-the black man's hope-the despised African's benefactor!

Where is Lancster, who has introduced, and is introducing a new era in the history of letters, and rendering the houses of education, like the temples of grace, accessible to the poor? Owing to whose exertions and enterprizes thousands of children, picked from the dirt and collected from the streets, are this day enjoying the inestimable benefits of education, and forming regular habits of industry and virtue, who must otherwise have been doomed by the penury of their condition to perpetual ignorance, and probably to perpetual misery.

Ah! had this man lived but two thousand years ago, to say nothing of the effect which might have been produced on morals and happiness generally, by the general diffusion of knowledge, and the regular formation of habits-to say nothing of that vulgarity which would have been diminished, nor of that dignity which might have been imparted to the character of the species-Could this man have lived two thousand years ago, and all the rude materials in society have undergone only that slight polishing which, under his fostering care, they are now likely to undergo, how many mines of beauty and richness would have appeared! How many gems made visible by their glittering, would have been collected from among the rubbish! Or, to speak without a figure, had this man lived two thousand years ago, how much talent might have been discovered for the church, for the state, for the world, among those untutored millions who have floated unknown and unnoticed down the tide of time. Had this man lived two thousand years ago, how many Demosthenes might have lightened and thundered? How many Homers soared and sung? How many Newtons roused into action, to develope the laws of matter? How many Lockes to explore the regions of mind? How many Mansfields to exalt the bench? How many Erskines to adorn the bar! And perhaps some other Washington, whose memory has now perished in obscurity, might have been forced from the factory or the plow to decide the fate of battle, and sustain the weight of empire.

And yet Howard, Sharpe, Clarkson and Lancaster, were individuals; and individuals too, gifted by no extraordinary talents; fovoured by no pecu. liar theatre of action. They were only common men brought up in the midst of common life. No princely fortunes had descended to them; no paternal influence had devolved on them; no aspiring rivals provoked their emulation ; no great emergencies roused their exertions. They produced, if I may so speak, the incidents which adorn their history, and created for themselves a theatre of action. Animated by the purest virtue, and bent on being useful, they seized on the miseries of life, as the world

presented them; and by deeds of charity and valour performed in relieving those miseries, they converted the very abodes of ignorance and wo into a theatre of glory,

And, young gentlemen, after all that has been done by these patrons of virtue, these benefactors of mankind, remains there no prejudice to correct; no ignorance to instruct; no vice to reclaim; no misery to alleviate? Look around you-still there is room for youthful enterprise, for manly exertion. Go, then, into the world; cherish the spirit, imitate the example, and emulate the glory of these illustrious worthies. Let no disasters shake your fortitude; let no impediments interrupt your career. Come what will, of this be assured, that in every enterprise of good, God will be on your side; and that should you even fail, failure will be gloriousNor will it ever be said in heaven of the man who has sincerely laboured on the earth to glorify his God, or benefit his country, that he has lived in vain.

On Card Playing-BY PRESIDENT nott.

Games of hazard, particularly where cards are concerned, tend imperceptibly to gambling.

Play, at first, is resorted to as a pastime, and the gamester becomes an idler only. This is the inceptive step. But mere play has not enough of interest in it, to excite a continued attention, even in the most frivolous of minds. To supply this defect, the passion of avarice is addressed by the intervention of a trifling stake. This is the second step. The third is deep and presumptuous gambling; here, all the adventurer can command, is hazarded, and gain not amusement, becomes the powerful motive that inspires him. These are the stages of play at cards, that delusive and treacherous science, which has beggared so many families, made so many a youth, a profligate; and blasted forever, so many a parent's hope! But is a stake, at play, wrong in principle? It is so. Nor is the nature of the transaction changed by any increase, or diminution of amount. Not that it is a crime to hazard, but to hazard wrongfully; to hazard, where no law authorizes it; where neither individual prudence, nor any principle of public policy requires it. Property is a trust, and the holder is responsible for its use. He may employ it in trade; he may give it in charity. But he may not wantonly squander it away; he may not even lightly hazard the loss of it for no useful purpose, and where there is no probability, that the transaction will, on the whole be beneficial, either to the parties, or to the community.

But I may not pass thus lightly over this article. The nature of gam bling considered as an occupation, and the relative situation of gamblers ought to be attended to. The issue which the parties join; the rivalship in which they engage, neither directly nor indirectly, promotes any interest of community. It has no relation to agriculture, none to commerce, none to manufactures. It furnishes no bread to the poor; it holds out no motive to industry; it applies no stimulus to enterprise. It is an employ ment, sui generis. The talent it occupies is so much deducted from that intelligence, which superintends the concerns of the world. The capital it employs, is so much withdrawn from from the stock required for the commerce of the world. Let the stake be gained or lost, as it will, society

gains nothing. The managers of this ill-appropriated fund are not identified in their pursuits, with any of those classes, whose ingenuity, or whose labours benefit society; nor by any of the rapid changes, through which their treasure passes, is there any thing produced by which community is indemnified.

Their situation with respect to each other, is as singular, ond unnatural as is their situation with respect to the rest of mankind. Here again, the order of nature is reversed; the constitution of God is subverted; and an association is formed, not for mutual benefit, but for acknowledged and mutual injury. Precisely so much as the one gains, precisely so much the other loses. No equivalent is given; none is received. The property indeed changes hands; but its quality is not improved; its amount is not augmented.

In the mean time, the one who loses, is a profligate, who throws away, without any requital, the property he possesses. The one who gains is a ruffian, who pounces, like a vulture, on the property which he possesses not, and has acquired no right to possess; and both are useless members of society, a mere excrescence on the body politic. Worse than this: they are a nuisance; like leeches on the back of some mighty, and healthful animal, which though they suck their aliment from its blood, contribute nothing to its subsistence.-No matter how numerous these vagabonds, for I will not call them by a more reputable name, may be in any community; no matter how long they may live, or how assiduously they may prosecute their vocation. No monument of good, the product of that vocation will remain behind them. They will be remembered only by the waste they have committed, or the injury they have done, while with respect to all the useful purposes of being, it will be as if they had never been.

And is there no guilt in such an application of property as this! Did Almighty God place mankind here for an occupation so mean! Did he bestow on them treasures for an end so ignoble !—If Jesus Christ condemned to utter darkness that unprofitable servant, who having wrapped his talent in a napkin only, buried it in the earth: what think you will be his sentence on the profligate, who, having staked and lost his all, goes from the gaming table, a self created pauper, to the judgment seat! Nor will the Judge less scrupulously require an account of the cents you have amusively put down at piquet, than he would, though you had played away at brag the entire amount of the shekel of the sanctuary.

But you do not mean to gamble, nor to advovcate it I know it. But I also know if you play at all, you will ultimately do both. It is but a line that separates between innocence and sin. Whoever fearlessly approaches this line, will soon have crossed it. To keep at a distance, therefore, is the part of wisdom. No man ever made up his mind to consign to perdition his soul at once. No man ever entered the known avenues, which conduct to such an end, with a firm and undaunted step. Tue brink of ruin is approached with caution, and by imperceptible degrees; and the wretch who now stands fearlessly scoffing there, but yesterday had shrunk back from the tottering cliff, with trembling. Do you wish for illustration? The profligate's unwritten history will furnish it. How inoffensive its commencement, how sudden, and how awful its catastrophe! Let us review his life. He commences with play; but it is only for amusement. Next he hazards a trifle to give interest, and is surprised when he finds himself a gainer by the hazard. He then ventures, not without misgivings, on a deeper stake. That stake, he loses. The loss and the guilt oppress him. He drinks, to revive his spirits. His spirits revived, he stakes to retrieve his fortune.. Again he is unsuccessful, and again his spirits flag, and again the inebriating cup revives them. Ere he

is aware of it, he has become a drunkard; he has become a bankrupt. Resource fails him. His fortune is gone; his character is gone; his tenderness of conscience is gone.-God has withdrawn his spirit from him. The demon of despair takes possession of his bosom; reason deserts him. he becomes a maniac; the pistol or the poignard close the scene, and with a shriek he plunges, unwept, and forgotten, into hell.

But there are other lights in which this subject should be viewed. The proper aliment of the body is ascertained by its effects. Whatever is nutricious is selected; whatever is poisonous, avoided. Let a man of common prudence, perceive the deleterious effects of any fruit, however fair to the eye; however sweet to the taste-let him perceive these effects, in the haggard countenances and swollen limbs of those who have been partaking of it, and though he may not be able to discover wherein its viciousness consists, he admits that it is vicious, and shrinks from the participation of a repast in which some secret poison lurks, that proves fatal to many and injurious to most who hitherto have tasted it. Why should not the same circumspection be used with respect to the aliment of the mind? It should undoubtedly. But gaming presents even a stronger case than the one we have supposed. For not only the fact but the reason of it is obvious. So that we may repeat what has been already said of games of hazard, that they impart no expansion or vigour to the mind, and that their influence on the affections, and passions, and heart are deleterious.

When I affirm, that these games impart no expansion or vigour to the mind, I do not mean to be understood that they are or can be performed entirely without intellection. It is conceded, that the silliest game requires some understanding, and that to play at it, is above the capacity of an oyster, perhaps of an ox or of an ape. It is conceded too, that games of every sort require some study; the most of them however, require but, little; and after a few first efforts, the intellectual condition of the gamester, so far as his occupation is concerned, is but one degree removed from that of the dray-horse, buckled to his harness, and treading over from day to day, and from night to night, the same dull track, as he turns a machine which some mind of a higher order has invented. So very humble is this species of occupation; so very limited the sphere in which it allows the mind to operate, that if an indivual were to remain through the term of his existence, mute and motionless, in the winter state of the Norwegian bear, his intellectual career would be about as splendid, and his attainments in knowledge about as great as they would, were he to commence play in childhood, and continue on at whist or loo to eternity. For though the latter state of being, pre-supposes some exercise of the mental faculties, it is so little, so low, and so uniform, that if the result be not literally nothing, it approaches nearer to it than the result of any other state of being, to which an intelligent creature can be doomed, short of absolute inanity, and death.

How unlike in its effect, must be this unmeaning shuffle of cards; this eternal gaze, on the party coloured surface of a few small pieces of pasteboard, where nothing but spades, and hearts, and diamonds, and clubs, over and over again, every hour of the day, every hour of the night, meet the sleepless eye of the vacant beholder-how unlike must be the effect of this pitiful employment, continued for fifty or for seventy years, to that, which would have been produced on the same mind, in the same period, by following the track of Newton, to those sublime results, whither he has led the way in the regions of abstraction...-By communing with the soul of Bacon, deducing from individual facts, the universal laws of the material universe; or by mounting with Herschell, to the Atheneum of the firmament, and learning direct from the volume of the stars, the sci ence of astronomy?-How unlike to that which would have been produced

in the same period, by ranging with Paley, through the department of morals; by soaring with Harvey on the wing of devotion, or even by tracing the footsteps of Tooke, amid the mazes of philology?

Card-playing has not even the merit of the common chit-chat of the teatable. Here there is some scope for reason; some for a play of fancy, some occasion for mental effort; some tendency to habits of quick association, in attack, in repartee, and the various turns, resorted to for keeping up, and enlivening conversation Much less has it the merit of higher and more rational discourse, of music, of painting, or of reading.

Indeed, if an occupation were demanded for the express purpose of per. verting the human intellect, and humbling, and degrading, and narrowing, I had almost said annihilating, the soul of man, one more effectual, could not be devised, than the one the gamester has already devised and pre-occupied. And the father and mother of a family, who instead of assembling their children in the reading-room, or conducting them to the altar, seat them, night after night, beside themselves at the gaming table, do, so far as this part of their domestic economy is concerned, contribute not only to quench their piety, but also to extinguish their intellect, and convert them into automatons, living mummies, the mere mechanical members of a domestic gambling machine, which, though but little soul is necessary, requires a number of human hands to work it. And if under such a blight. ing culture, they do not degenerate into a state of mechanical existence, and gradually losing their reason, their taste, their fancy, become incapable of conversation; the fortunate parents may thank the school-house, the church, the library, the society of friends, or some other and less wretched part of their own defective system, for preventing the consummation of so frightful a result.

Such, young gentlemen, are the morbid and sickly effects of play upon the human intellect. But intelligence constitutes no inconsiderable part of the glory of man; a glory, which, unless eclipsed by crime, increases, as intelligence increases. Knowledge is desirable with reference to this world, but principally so with reference to the next; not because philosophy, or language, or mathematics will certainly be pursued in heaven but because the pursuit of them on earth, gradually communicates that quickness of perecption, that acumen which, as it increases, approximates towards the sublime and sudden intuition of celestial intelligences, and which cannot fail to render more splendid the commencement, as well as more splendid the progression of man's interminable career.

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But while gaming leaves the mind to languish, it produces its full effect on the passions, and on the heart. Here however that effect is deleterious. None of the sweet and amiable sympathies, are at the card-table called into action. No throb of ingenuous and philanthropic feeling, is excited by this detestable expedient for killing time, as it is called; and it is rightly so called; for many a murdered hour will witness at the day of judgment, against that fashionable idler, who divides her time between her toilet and the card-table, no less than against the profligate, hackneyed in the ways of sin, and steeped in all the filth and debauchery of gambling. But it is only amidst the filth and debauchery of gambling, that the full effects of card-playing on the passions and on the heart of man are

seen.

Here that mutual amity, that elsewhere subsists, ceases; paternal affection ceases; even that community of feeling that piracy excites, and that binds the very banditti together has no room to operate for at this inhospitable board, every man's interest, clashes with every man's interest, and every man's hand is literally against every man.

The love of mastery, and the love of money, are the purest loves, of which the gamester is susceptible. And even the love of mastery, loses