tence of death; one of this number not appearing to take his trial was outlawed; the other was executed on the spot.

Thirty-six were condemned to the galleys or to a temporary imprisonment from two to eight years. The remaining thirty-two, against whom appeared very slight grounds of accusation were sent off to Spain and placed at the mercy of the king, who absolved them in 1802, on condition that they should no more reside in the province of Venezuela, and with a promise to employ them in Spain in the same rank and offices which they held in America.

If we consider according to their origin the seventy-two persons, who either were, or were not suspected to be concerned in this conspiracy, we reckon amongst them twenty-five Europeans and forty-nine Creoles. If we distinguish them with respect to their colour, we discover thirty-nine blacks and thirty-three men of colour. If we examine them according to their employments, we find them consisting of thirteen of the regular military establishment, among whom were comissioned and non-commissioned officers, and privates; and twenty-eight officers, &c. of militia, six clerks of the fiscal department, twenty-three citizens and mechanics; and, lastly, two clergymen, one of hem a curate.

If the criminal object of this conspiracy did not strike us with horror, we would feel disposed to admire the talents, intelligence and secrecy with which its measures were concerted. What would have proved fatal to Spain, was the steps which had been taken to prevent her from finding defenders in any class of

the people. The fire had been skilfully applied to all the branches, and had they been more combustible, I repeat it, the whole tree, under whose shade the rights of the mother country and general tranquillity reposed, would have been at once reduced to ashes.

All you Europeans, and descendants of Europeans who inhabit the New World under the laws and protection of your respective mother countries, imitate, in every case, where the spirit of faction would threaten your repose, imitate the wisdom, which the inhabitants of Caraccas have manifested upon this important occasion. Like them shut your ears against the delusive, perfidious morality in which all-destroying anarchy is ever enveloped. She makes virtue her theme, and vice her practice; promises a profusion of blessings, and diffuses a multiplicity of evils; in a word, she has the tongue of an angel, and the heart of a tigress. Let those perverse men who betray principles of an innovating or revolutionary tendency be abandoned to the rigour of the law. Revolutions, though at considerable intervals indispensable in great states, are always a calamity to the people who are engaged in them; and that calamity is more or less lasting, more or less terrible, in proportion as those who direct them are more or less wise and enlightened, and according as the people have an interest more or less uniform. But in the colonies the great mass of property is in the hands of a class, which is far, very far, from being the most numerous. The public offices, honours and dignities are, particularly in Spanish America, in the hands of a num

ber of citizens still more circumscribed. Both have to dread the hatred and jealousy of those who possess neither dignity nor riches. The security of property depends solely upon the law; and in all the Spanish possessions, the law is so happily combined with religion, as to lend one another mutual assistance, to insure order, harmony and public tranquillity.— To overthrow these two fundamental supports, is to break down those precious barriers which government opposes to the passions of men; it is to subject the feeble to the discretion of the strong, the man of wealth to the mercy of the man in desperate circumstances; it is to deliver up the virtuous to the fury of the ambitious, the pacific to the inconsiderate enterprises of the turbulent; or, to continue the amplification, it is to kindle a civil war between the obscure man and the man distinguished by his birth or appointments; between the poor and the rich, the slave and the free; it is to dig a frightful precipice in which the pre-eminence, fortunes and lives of citizens of all classes, of men of all colours are swallowed up and destroyed. Such an image strikes with horror and ought to determine every citizen to shed the last drop of his blood in support of those beneficial institutious to which he owes the peace and happiness which he enjoys.

Slaves.

The simple word slave extorts involuntary groans in favour of those unfortunate creatures, whom their let condemns to have no other will than that of their

masters, incessantly to toil without deriving any ad vantage from the sweat of their brow; to enjoy no rank nor consideration in society; to find in the laws but a feeble protection for their lives; and to be exposed to every injury, to every bad treatment from their inhuman masters, whose property they are. But this evil, great as it is, is but a necessary consequence unhappily arising from others which have preceded it in America. The European powers resolved to invade this vast continent in order to augment their commerce by the commodities peculiar to its climate.— After the greater part of its inhabitants were destroyed, the small remnant who escaped the sword of the conquerors, have obtained, as an indemnification for the blood of their ancestors, the privilege of passing their days in the lap of idleness. It was natural to expect that the land thus deprived of its native cultivators should have its deficiency supplied from that country whose arms inflicted so great a calamity.But as its population was too scanty to furnish wherewith to settle its transmarine possessions, and the temperature of the torrid zone was not congenial enough with that of the temperate, to admit the practicability of transplanting Europeans to America without risking the lives of the emigrants, (of which the first experiment furnished a convincing proof) the court of Spain fluctuated between the necessity of sanctioning the slavery of the Indians, in order to make them the instruments of culture, and that of renouncing the great riches which was promised by the fertility of the lands of the new world. At this very period came Barthelemy De Las Casas, priest,

monk, and finally bishop of Chiapa, to present himself in 1517 to Charles V. in order to plead the cause of the Indians. From the general principles upon which natural 'liberty is founded, he deduced the strange conclusion that the slavery of the Indians was a crime, that of the Africans a necessity. He demanded with all the enthusiasm of a philanthropist the liberty of the former, and with the obduracy of a tyrant the slavery of the latter. By his advice four thousand of these wretches were purchased and thrown into the great islands of St. Domingo, Cuba, Jamaica and Porto-Rico. At this period, and after this manner, was the slavery of the blacks established in America. All the European powers, which successively acquired foreign possessions in this quarter, have pursued the same system, which severe philosophy can never approve, but which rational policy regards as a misfortune attached to the interest of possessing colonies; to the rigour of the climates in which they are situated, and the kind of labour which culture requires; to the encouragement held out in the European domestic markets for colonial productions obtained at the least possible expense, and to the impossibility of cultivating these lands by Europeans,

The Spaniards do not carry on the slave trade.

The Spaniards have never carried on the slave trade in a direct channel, nor thought of establishing counting-houses upon the coast of Africa. They consider that species of traffic as too repugnant to the principles of the christian religion; but by ingeniously