was confounded, is probably a case of accommodation from the Oriental barkuk." Now it is true that our apricot, O. Eng. and Fr. abricot, comes from the Arabic al-birqûq, through the Sp. albaricoque, Pg. albricoque, It. albercocco. But the Arabic, in its turn, is derived from the Lat. praecox, praecocia, through the Greek of Dioscorides, who says, 1. 165, τὰ μῆλα ἀρμηνιακά, Ρωμαϊστὶ δὲ πραικόκκια. Dioscorides's treatise on Materia Medica was, as is well known, translated into Arabic, and was the chief authority in their schools. Through this the Arabians gained many words, and among them this.

ARTICLE IV.

THE STATE AND SLAVERY.

BY PROF. E. P. BARROWS, ANDOVER, MASS.

THE treatment received by the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among robbers, too truly represents the fate that has overtaken the question of American slavery. It has fallen into the hands of partisan politicians, and been made by them a powerful engine for the advancement of sectional interests, while the true welfare of the nation as a whole, and of the slaveholding states in particular, has been forgotten. This was not always so. It is well known that the patriots of the revolution, both North and South, regarded slavery as a great evil, and earnestly desired its extinction.

"Slavery has been opposed by eminent men in America from the beginning. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Jay, Hamilton, and many more of those who took a conspicuous part in laying the foundations of the government, regarded slavery as a great evil, inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the spirit of Christianity. They confidently expected that it would gradually pass away before the advancing power of civilization and freedom; and, shrinking

from what they regarded as insurmountable obstacles to emancipation in their own time, they consented, in the formation of the constitution, to give the system certain advantages, which they hoped would be temporary, and therefore not dangerous to the stability of the government."1

66

This statement admits of abundant corroboration from the documents that have come down to us from the early history of our government. Mr. Jefferson attempted to incorporate into the Declaration of Independence a clause reproaching Great Britain in the most severe terms for the introduction into the colonies of slavery and the slave-trade, which he calls "a war against human nature itself,” and a piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers." But the clause, being objected to, was struck out.2 Again, in 1787, when the ordinance was passed excluding slavery from the territory north-west of the Ohio river, all the Southern States then represented in Congress voted in its favor; and, according to Mr. Benton, it was "pre-eminently the work of the South. The ordinance, as it now stands, was reported by a committee of five members, of whom three were from slaveholding states, and two (and one of them the chairman) were from Virginia alone."3 This ordinance was coeval with the formation of our present federal constitution, and the Southern States insisted upon the insertion into it, as into the constitution, of a clause for the

1 New Am. Cyclopaedia, Article, Slavery.

2 The whole clause reads thus: "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

8 Thirty Years in the U. S. Senate, Vol. I, pp. 133, 134.

rendition of fugitives held to service. If the noble patriots and statesmen of that day could only have had foresight enough of the coming future, and enough of moral strength and union, now was the golden opportunity for prohibiting forever the extension of slavery into any territory then possessed, or that should afterwards be acquired. This would have saved us the terrible scenes of the present day. But the ordinance of 1787 extended only to the territory north-west of the Ohio river, and a great change soon came over the views and feelings of the South. The introduction of the cotton-gin, and of machinery for the manufacture of the article, multiplied immensely the facilities as well for throwing the raw material into the market, as for working it up into fabrics; while the enormous expansion of commerce increased to an equal extent the demand for cotton goods. Thus cotton, from being an inconsiderable article of commerce, rose rapidly to be a staple production, of primary importance not only to the United States but to Europe. And, since it was assumed everywhere in the Southern States as an indisputable axiom that the culture of cotton must be by slave labor alone, an immense pecuniary interest was created in favor of the institution of slavery, which operated among the southern slaveholders as it would have operated anywhere else, cementing them together most firmly in the maintenance and defense of that system which they had now learned to regard as the corner stone of their prosperity and sectional strength. Visions of unbounded wealth and power rose before their imagination, of which the cotton states were to have the monopoly, and thus, in connection with the principles of free-trade (a necessary concomitant of slavery, as will be shown hereafter), to control the policy of the civilized world. The consequent action of the southern slaveholders and this is equivalent to saying the action of the Southern States themselves; for, wherever slavery has taken firm root in any state, the slaveholders have a monopoly of wealth and power in that state - this action of the Southern States necessarily took a political form; for wherever slavery exists by the side of free insti

tutions it creates separate and antagonistic interests, both material and moral, as we shall have occasion to show at some length in the course of the present Article. The maintenance of the supremacy of the Southern States, in all three of the departments of the national government, for the interests of slavery; the territorial aggrandizement of the slaveholding states for the interests of slavery; the administration of the national affairs generally in the same interest; the extinction in the Southern States of the spirit of loyalty towards the national government by the assiduous inculcation of the doctrine of state rights in its most extreme form, and thus the preparation of these states for secession, in view of the very probable contingency of a loss of the controlling power in the national counsels — this is the line of policy that was long ago fixed upon by southern leaders, and which has been pursued with a steadiness, earnestness, and sagacity worthy of a better cause. On the part of the free states this stupendous scheme for making, first of all, the United States, and through them the civilized world, subservient to the cause of slavery, was, at the beginning, acquiesced in, with the indifference of incredulity, and an overweening confidence in their own superior strength. But as the plot began more and more to reveal itself, they aroused themselves, as it became freemen, to meet it with stern resistance. The heat and acrimony generated by this controversy, protracted through so many years, and the many political intrigues that have very naturally clustered about it, have made it extremely difficult to discuss the question of slavery in its relations to the state with that calmness and comprehensiveness of view which belong to the true statesman, who seeks not the agrandizement of a political party, but the general welfare of the nation. We propose to consider the institution of slavery in its bearings on the interests of the state, material, intellectual, and moral. and to show that, by an internal law, inexorable in its operation, it must ever be an incubus on the prosperity of the states that cherish it, and a fearful element of discord in the nation at large. To some it may seem that such a

discussion is superfluous; but we are persuaded that now is the time for going deep down to the first principles of society. It is of the highest importance that the people understand not only the fact that the free states have always exceeded the slave states in prosperity, but the grounds of this superiority; and, further, that the present terrible struggle has not come about by any accidental combination of circumstances foreign to the element of slavery, but is the necessary result of the growth of the institution in the United States. Our argument in a previous Article was from Scripture. Our present argument will be from the public good-not simply the material good of the public, but its good, material and spiritual, in the widest sense of the term.

We begin with the operation of slavery on the slave states themselves. Mr. Bledsoe introduces his examination of the Argument from the public good with these remarkable words:

"Here, at the outset, we may throw aside a mass of useless verbiage, with which our inquiry is usually encumbered. We are eternally told that Kentucky has fallen behind Ohio, and Virginia behind Pennsylvania, because their energies have been crippled and their prosperity overclouded by the institution of slavery. Now, it is of no importance to our argument that we should either deny the fact, or the explanation which is given of it by abolitionists. If the question were, whether slavery should be introduced among us, or into any non-slaveholding state, then such facts and explanations would be worthy of our notice; then such an appeal to experience would be relevant to the point in dispute. But such is not the question. We are not called upon to decide whether slavery shall be established in our midst or not. This question has been decided for us. Slavery, as everybody knows, was forced upon the Colonies by the arbitrary and despotic rule of Great Britain, and that, too, against the earnest remonstrances of our ancestors. The thing has been done. The past is beyond our control. It is fixed and unalterable. The only inquiry which remains for us now is, whether the slavery which was thus forced upon our ancestors shall be continued, or whether it shall be abolished? The question is not what Virginia, or Kentucky, or any other slave state, might have been, but what they would be in case slavery were abolished. If abolitionists would speak to the point, then let them show us some country in which slavery has been abolished, and we will abide the experiment.”1

'Liberty and Slavery, pp. 227, 228.