The Express. — 1858-07-13 (London, England)

BAYLIS. One, however, it came out afterwards, wanted to join his wife (who had before escaped) in New York ; another was on his way to Canada, where souse refugee friends had obtained a situation for:hins as waiter at an hotel in Toronto. A third had secretly amassed by " pig-raising" 600 dollars in the course of seven-and-twenty years' industry at over hours. Of the other man's ease no particulars are given. The woman was said to be charged nothing for her passage, " having " agreed with the captain that she would live with " him on his arrival at home" (Delaware being still a slave State); " but in what capacity," says the reporter, "we were unable to learn." This is, on the face of it, an improbable story ; and the oases of three out of the four men seem scarcely compatible with the charge against BAYLIS that he put it into the heads of these people to abscond, for the mks of the 50 dollars or less which each was to have paid for the passage. The supposition that any man would, for inch a sum of money, brave the laws of the slave States, in the face of much recent experience of their severity, would be inconceivable, if the facts of the previous intention of three of the negroos to escape, and of their correspondence with friends at a distance, had not come out to corroborate the improbability. BAYLIS'S own declaration is that he was taken in by a man in the town, name unknown, who applied to him for a passage to the Jerseys for the five, and that he had no idea that they wee slaves. He was " innocent of any evil " Intent." He had not made speed, having run aground on the Saturday evening, and again on Sunday, and taken things easy, making a fair start only on Monday morning. Large sums of money were found on board, Without any appearance of inquiry as to whom the money belonged, it was " confiscated to the State," together with the vessel, valued at 800 dollars. The examination of the captain and mate did not take place on the 9th, "in consequence of the great ex" citement in the public mind." The mate had not been tried when the report was published. On the 10th BAYLIS was tried in the Circuit Court, before Judge Num, found guilty, and sentenced—to forty years in the penitentiary'—tight years for each negro.  Forty years in the penitentiary ! In the States which have abolished capital punishment the extreme term of imprisonment for wilful murder is twelve yean; and here are forty years for giving a peonage to a party of fugitive slaves ! There have been eases enough of imprisonment of coastingcaptains for the same offence, within a few years, to show that life will not sustain such a sentence as awaits any man whose vessel is used as a harbours,* for fugitives, whether they come with or without his knowledge. One after another has been carried out to his grave, after a longer or shorter pining. What else eau BAYLIS, or his wretched wife, and his children thus strangely orphaned, expect in his can? Forty years !  Yet we ars disposed to think that nobody else be heves the sentence will be executed, if, contrary to expectation, the man should live under such a weight of penalty. Besides the instinct of mama sense that such laws cannot go on to be executed for forty years in a republic which is only eighty years old at this hour, there are more definite reasons for hope that the victim may be released ere very long. It is under slave-holders' law that he suffers; and the slaveholders are (as the world should ever remember) only 350,000 in a population of 27 millions. They are even no more than three-tenths of the white population of their own States. No sane man can believe that so insignificant a minority will sustain laws and punishments like this, when once the majority, not only of the nation but of their immediate neighbours, shall have become sensible of the disgrace in the eyes of the world of such unparalleled inhumanity. Nobody supposes that the crisis can be deferred forty years; and whenever it happens, the prises doors will be thrown open to such victims of the slave system as Captain