JAMES'S POWDER, AND HIS SQUIB.
SOME of the Virginian slaveholders, true to the kind of logic which one expects from Legrees, have made five attempts to burn down the house of the English consul, Mr. G. P. R. James, as a reply to some objections urged by that gentleman to negro slavery. It appears that years ago, before Mr. James attained that world-wide celebrity which has irrevocably placed him at the summit of English literature (we are sure he will be the last person to contradict us), he concocted a "squib" against the slave-owning system. The missile flew so silently and harmlessly through English air that nobody seems to have listened to it, but the case appears to have alighted on American ground, and to have been treasured up by the fortunate finder as evidence against the pyrotechnician and historiographer. Mr. James receives his appointment and goes to Virginia, the squib is produced, and excites the fierce rage of the man-stealers, who, as has been said, make five attempts to burn down the great novelist's house. Whether, being as cowardly as Mrs. Stowe has taught us to regard them, the conspirators made their efforts in the night, and being scared by the noise made by the distinguished author in snuffing his candle, the click being mistaken for the cocking of a rifle, or whether, in the frantic tipsiness which, the authoress of Uncle Tom tells us, accompanies their social orgies, they endeavoured to set fire to a stone wall, or to the Life and Times of Louis XIV., or any other impracticable mass, we are not informed—perhaps cowardice and clumsiness were united, as in every other effort in defence of slavery. Anyhow, Mr. James's property had, at the last advices, escaped the vengeance of those who, brutalised by slave-owning, can hardly think much of arson. Meantime, we have been anxious to see this celebrated squib, and having applied in vain to Mr. James's London publishers, we have been compelled to send over to America for it. The document arrived by the United States' Mail steamship Washington, which reached Cowes on Friday night, bringing mails to the 8th, and it was instantly forwarded to us by a special train on the South Western line. We hasten to give it.