him up as the type of an honest man in the cause of freedom, in the exhibited and exhibitor, you have a specimen of what Mr Cairnes calls the Canters! And if they will turn to the following articles in the extraordinary ukase of General Banks, issued on February 3d 1864, he will find what is the creed of the Canters, and the character of the men who are presented by them as fitting subjects of your admiration and

esteem!

"XII. Labourers shall render to their employer, between daylight and dark, ten hours in summer and nine hours in winter of respectful, honest, faithful labour, and receive therefor, in addition to just treatment, healthly rations, comfortable clothing, quarters, fuel, medical attendance, and instruction for children. Wages per month as follow, payment of one-half of which, at least, shall be reserved until the end of the year-For first-class hands, $8 per month; for second-class hands, $6 per month; for third-class hands, $5 per month; for fourth-class hands, $3 per month.

"XIII. Labourers will be permitted to choose their employers, but when the agreement is made, they will be held to their engagement for the year under the protection of the government. In cases of attempted imposition, by feigning sickness or stubborn refusal of duty, they will be turned over to the provost-marshal of the parish for labour upon the public works without pay.

"XXIV. It is, therefore, a solemn duty resting

upon all persons to assist in the earliest possible restoration of civil government. Let them participate in the measure suggested for this purpose. Opinion is free and candidates are numerous. Open hostility cannot be permitted. Indifference will be treated as crime, and faction as treason. Men who refuse to defend their country with the ballot-box or cartridge-box have no just claim to the benefits of liberty regulated by law. All people not exempt by the law of nations, who seek the protection of the government, are called upon to take oath of allegiance in such form as may be prescribed, sacrificing to the public good and the restoration of public peace, whatever scruples may be suggested by incidental considerations. The oath of allegiance, administered and received in good faith, is the test of unconditional fealty to the government and all its measures, and cannot be materially strengthened or impaired by the language in which it is clothed.

"XXV. The amnesty offered for the past is conditioned upon an unreserved loyalty for the future, and this condition will be enforced with an iron hand. Whoever is indifferent or hostile must choose between the liberty which foreign lands afford the poverty of the rebel states, and the innumerable and inappreciable blessings which our government confers upon its people."

The Editor of the Manchester Courier, March 3, 1864, comments on the above as follows:

"Since the day when Boris, to maintain an usurped authority by his mere autocratic fiat, established serf

dom in Russia, no more wantonly and shamelessly despotic act has been done than the proclamation for the re-enslavement of the negroes just issued by General Banks-with which the civilised world by this time rings. Les extremes se touchent, in this case, with a vengeance; and the Czar Boris and the Republican Banks, so worthily matched in identity of crime against humanity, may pass to posterity together as signal examples that in no climes nor under any form of institutions does triumphant Might pay respect to Right. By the side of this Banks, Butler really appears an Angel of Light. Butler's ordinances at New Orleans embodied the sneaking, cowardly passions of the low-minded tyrant, worked out with the sophistical cunning of a pettifogging lawyer; but those who chose to keep quiet, the fairer sex especially, could avoid his annoying and degrading proscriptions. This ukase of Banks is a really important Act of State, which establishes a new landmark in American history. The tyranny that has enslaved whole races has usually crept slowly and stealthily towards its end, unless when effected by wholesale conquest; but General Banks, who came to Louisiana as a deliverer, has set the first example in history of an entire population, high and low, rich and poor, being in one hour, in a country professedly the most free on earth, consigned . to degrees of subjection and slavery from which even the organised despotism of Russia now shrinks with shame.

"What makes this act extraordinary in a purely

political point of view, independently of the outrage offered to humanity, is that it is an open and direct contravention, not only of the fundamental laws of America and of the abstract rights of man, but also of the specific proclamation of Abraham Lincoln for the abolition of slavery, on which alone rests any justification the Northerners can offer for persisting in their efforts to conquer the South. It is always thus in revolutions. When we see passing before the mind's eye, in the bloody phantasmagoria of '89, the phantoms of the Dantans and the Robespierres with their atrocious decrees, the philanthropist of yesterday, the tyrant and murderer of to-day, and each distorting the logic of the public duty of civilians till the very principles of freedom became new fetters for mankind, we are not so much surprised as filled with horror, because those men whirled along in a seething pandemonium, scarcely were masters of their own volition. No such excuse can be made for the chiefs of the Northern States of America. They have ample room and verge enough, both as regards time and space. Abraham Lincoln was no more under the necessity to emancipate the negroes than General Banks was to re-enslave them. Each is to be regarded as a deliberate, cold-blooded act of State. It would be an insult to the reader's understanding to detain him with proofs that the condition of things set up by this proclamation of Banks is nothing more nor less than the re-establishment of slavery, minus, indeed, the actual property in the negro, but creating

a property in the negroe's labour, and forcing him to work, whether he will or no, at rates of wages on which he has no control, while depriving him of that hold on the sympathy of his master, which existed when he feared to lose the value of his living healthy body. With a singular ingenuity, this pro-Consul of Yankeedom copies and legalises under new names all the most odious features of the old system of slavery. At the same time, he leaves to the newlymade negro serf absolutely no protection against their abuse by masters who have already had their friendliness turned to exasperation against their slaves. flaunting themselves under their very noses as free men. Take their regulations item by item, and it will be seen that they not only re-establish all the worst evils of slavery, but deprive the slave of the only protection they left him.

"So much for the Black Serfs created by this document. Now, as to the White Serfs, worse than the atrocious iniquity of the act is its blundering stupidity. All sensible Yankees, who were not compelled to do homage to abolitionism, had long condemned Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, not on the grounds of humanity, but on being mis-timed, and therefore in that sense a political blunder. It certainly was not the way to win back the Southerners, but rather to nerve them to fight to the last. Had General Banks, then, by this Edict for the Establishment of Serfdom, offered a grand bribe to the discontented Southerners in giving them at least the interest of the