For the National Era.

  Many thanks we owe to the appliances of our civilization—rather to the genius of mechanism—not only that our facilities for rapid travel to and fro are multiplied a thousand fold over those of our grandfathers, enabling us quickly to pass through incredible distances, visiting the works of art and the monuments of industry in their repositories, but that they may even be brought to us. It is by these means that hundreds in our city have been permitted to look upon this beautiful creation, who never could have left their shops, their professions, and their families, for this purpose.

  Yes, in St. Louis there has been exposed for several weeks the nude statue of a type of womanly beauty chained, with averted countenance, too proud in her innocence and too self-reliant to shrink before the unfeeling multitude, thronging the market-place in the chief city of the Turk. An exquisitely-wrought representation of a Grecian maiden, in that stainless marble, which is the most appropriate emblem of purity and truthfulness, leaning upon a broken column upon which are carelessly thrown her garments, while from a fold of these are espied a locket, as if the gift of a lover, and a cross, which shows her familiarity with the maxims of Christianity, but helpless to adjust these as modesty and taste would suggest—helpless on account of a chain which closely approximates one hand to the other. And why these fetters? Has she committed any crime for which she deserves punishment? Ah, some child-thief has stolen her, and brought her from her native Grecian hills, where she has known neither task-master nor chain, and conveyed her to this strange land of another language and another creed, and of sympathies which knew no compassion but for kindred—and offered her for sale to work out her life in unrequited service, or pander to lust! A daughter of the erudite Athenian or the iron-souled Spartan sold in the shambles of Constantinople!

  I gazed for a time on this beautiful work, while spectators came and went, some admiring the marble, some the polish of the surface, some the beauty of an arm, or the perfectly turned contour of the calf, others inspired with the worship of the beautiful, and carried from this human image of the Unseen, to the contemplation of the hidden but all-pervading spirit "in which we live and move and have our being." But there were others whose vision of the beautiful, the pure, and the truthful, was dimmed by a chain a despot had stretched from one hand to the other of the representation of those attributes, and bid this enslaved and living image of the Godlike follow the behest of mammon and sensuality.

  One of those, whose thoughts seemed thus to be disturbed by this grip of Satan upon this child of innocence, thus soliloquized:

  "Beautiful woman, before whom an unchaste thought would be sacrilege and contempt of all that is pure, lovely, and great, in my own soul; who has undertaken to despoil thee of all that is good and noble, and convert thee to a brute, to a beast of burden, or to a pet of indolence, luxury, and passion? The symmetry of thy form, the elasticity of thy tread, and the serenity of thy brow, prove this body the habitation of a soul of divine origin and an immortal destiny, which here requires to be free in a free body. Poor and helpless slave, though thou hast the attributes of humanity. Yes, thou hast been chained by fellow-men, who should have been thy helpers in the rugged path of this discipline of life, instead of treading thee in the dust. And thou standest not alone in thy fetters; for how many of thy fair sisters, with as pure a complexion and as fine a form, with feelings as sensitive, are brought from Circassia to this same Turkish mart! In Russia, also, how many of thy sisters are doomed to a life of slavery, though forbidden to be torn from their homes; and through all history, how many millions of maidens as beautiful as thou art have been bought and sold!

  "Thou, woman in marble, hast been brought from a land we call heathen, to show us Christians how much more pure and humane are our ways than theirs. We are in thy presence reminded that no divine image of humanity wrought as thou hast been in white can here be chained and worked like mere animals. By thee we are reminded that in our Christian land no Turk can lay his trafficking hand upon a skin that is white and say, mine, for I have paid my money. Noble image of purity and free spirit, all chained as is thy body, mayest thy memory long remain with me, to gladden my waking thoughts, to chasten my dreams, and to cheer me with the thought that with the spread of the Gospel slavery shall no more put its chain around a white wrist; but that, under the benignant sway of Christianity, this doom shall be confined to black people. It is true, Image of Beauty, that within a few steps of the spot which thy presence is consecrating, maidens as pure and as sensitive as thou art are weekly bought and sold in a place as public as the Turkish market-place where thou was exposed under the cry of the auctioneer. And it is true, also, that the buyers and sellers of these have chains and handcuffs and whips by which the unwilling slave shall be made to go whithersoever the master listeth, and do whatsoever the master willeth. But get away, obtruding affections; I am gazing upon an image as white as the driven snow, and in view of the wrongs of the kind she represents, contemplating the complete emancipation of all the white people of the earth, under the genial influence of Christianity; and I cannot have my thoughts perturbed by the intrusion of such black and thick-lipped images as these I see flitting before my eye of imagination. Away! away! I came not to think of ebony maidens or men, or what humanity requires for them, but to be regaled with the elevating and humanizing sentiments which I dreamed this image should inspire me with. My first emotions were delicious and my anticipations for my race were glorious, and why should they have become just now so painful?"

  Under the influence of this disappointment of feeling, our soliloquizing spectator was about to retire; but the statue, turning just then upon its pedestal, and seeming to look him full in the face, and though without gesture, for the hands were still enchained, and without motion of lip or contraction of feature, (for the statue never ceases to wear a look of disdain, similar to what our Saviour is said to have exhibited when he was speechless before Pilate,) addressed to his heart senitments plain to him as though uttered in audible accents, though all unheard by other lookers-on:

  "Why limit your sympathies?" was the mute language of the marble. "Why limit your application of the principles of justice? Now, know that justice and mercy are no artificial creation, but that they grew out of the constitution of the mind itself, and are common to all minds which are capable of appreciating and applying them. Away, henceforth, with your sophistries of the multiplied origins of the human races. Man is to be estimated for what he is, for what he feels, for what he thinks, for what he does, and not for whence he came. If your father came from the moon, your mother from Saturn, your uncles and aunts from all the planets and satellites of the solar system, and their offspring are found capable of common thought and sympathy, have the same conceptions of love, mercy, justice, right, and truth, ye are verily all one brotherhood, privileged with the same rights and amenable to the

  "I was fashioned by a hand whose every motion was the offspring of love for man in all his relations, with a sublime conception of the beautiful and the true, and it is therefore that he has sent me around the world to preach by this loveliness and nakedness, and by this cruel chain, joy to the forsaken, comfort to the destitute, and liberty to the captive. I was carved from Parian, rather than from Ebony, that I might more effectually appeal to perverted justice and partial sympathy; but I am the representation of the captive and the forsaken everywhere, and whatever sympathy I may secure for my enslaved sisters in Turkey, are due to my sisters of another hue in the land throughout which I am making my pilgrimage. Whatever claim of justice I may secure for me, and those like me, are due to those equally oppressed in your very midst. Think you that it was cruel to rob me of liberty, purity, and happiness? Though my skin were black as night, my soul would have the same aspirations, and need the same sympathies, my intellect would have the same laws and need the same development. Cease your sympathy for a slave in Constantinople, and go show kindness and justice to those over whom you have power."

  The spectator was much moved, and tears flowed faster than they had done for many years. The image, turning again upon her pedestal, averted her face, the spectator slowly arose, put on his hat, and went home sorely grieved, and touched to the very centre of his heart, for he had great possessions in the bodies of men, women, and children.

St. Louis, December, 1850.