band and wife, and commanded that man shall not put them asunder; is his law to interfere with the pecuniary interests of the buyer? By no means. He is a good fieldhand, and will fetch a large sum in the cotton-states. Away with him. So, too (with the exception of special restrictions as to age, in some of the states), the child may be taken from its mother and sold into a distant region. There are negro-growers, whose business is to raise slaves for the market, and who, as soon as the children have arrived at a profitable age, sell them away from their mothers, with no more care for their feelings than if they were beasts of burden. All this the institution of slavery sanctions; and therein it stands self-condemned as the antagonist of the divine law.

Another feature of American slavery is the systematic mental degradation of the slaves. We say systematic, because it belongs essentially to the system, and is carried out sys

1 From the New American Cyclopaedia, article "Slavery," we copy the following legal view: "Of the marriage of slaves it is difficult to speak with positive certainty. The prevailing, if not universal, rule would seem to be, that the incapacity of a slave to make a valid contract extends to the contract of marriage. It has, indeed, been distinctly held that the marriage usual in these states, which is only cohabitation with consent of the master, is not legal marriage. Chancellor Kent, quoting from this case, appears to refer the invalidity of the marriage to the want of legal formalities; but in the same case it is put on the ground of their entire inability to contract. There are statutes which speak of their marriage, but not in such a way as to declare their marriages legal, and attended with the legal incidents of marriage. Even in Louisiana such a marriage is held to be a moral marriage, but to produce no civil effect whatever, because slaves are deprived of all civil rights. So far as the law or the usage on this subject can be ascertained, a slave cannot as a married person commit adultery or polygamy, nor be held liable on a wife's contracts, or for necessaries supplied to her, nor be made incompetent as a witness on the ground of the relation of marriage. Nor does it appear that any consent of the master can make the marriage legal, if it do not have the force of emancipation. And as what is called the marriage of the slave rests wholly on the master's consent, there is no hing in the law to prevent him from revoking his consent, annulling the marriage, and separating the parties." Let the reader remember that this systematic degradation of marriage, and with it the whole family relation, — this putting the master in the place of God, with power to separate husband and wife at will, is not simply an incident of the system, but one of its legitimate results. The fountain is bitter, and this is one of the bitter streams which it sends forth.

tematically by the laws. According to the theory of slavery, the whole person of the slave, soul and body, is a chattel, to be held and used for the master's interest. The slave has no more right to use his intellectual than his corporeal powers, for his own personal advantage. Now, the masters judge that the acquisition of knowledge will diminish the value and security of their property in slaves. Accordingly it is made, in most of the slaveholding states, a high crime and misdemeanor to teach a slave (and, in some of them, a free negro) to read and write, or to give them any book or pamphlet, though it might happen to be the word of God. All this follows, very logically, from the nature of the system. When men are to be governed as men, by equitable and wholesome laws, the more intelligence they possess the better. But when they are to be despoiled of their rights as men, and converted into articles of merchandise, the more profound the ignorance in which they are immersed, the more secure the tenure by which their masters hold them. So early as 1740 South Carolina, while yet a province of Great Britain, enacted a law forbidding, under penalty of a heavy fine, the teaching or causing any slaves to be taught to write, or the employing of any such slaves as scribes in any writing whatsoever. The preamble to this law reveals the whole secret. It is in the following words: "Whereas the having of slaves taught to write, or suffering them to be employed in writing, may be attended with great inconveniences." "With great inconveniences"-to the masters, namely; and it is their interests which the slave-laws always consult, at whatever costs to the slaves themselves. So it is in regard to reading also. To be able to read the word of God would be to the slave a privilege how inestimable! But then his ability to read this, includes his ability to read other things also. He might read the newspapers, the debates in Congress, the writings of Clarkson and Wilberforce, and even the opinions of Washington and Jefferson, condemnatory of slavery. All this would doubtless be "attended with great inconveniences" to the master. So the slaves must be kept by legal enactments in ignorance,

that they may be safer and better property. Such is the spirit of American slavery, and it is as opposite to that of the gospel as midnight is to noon.

We might proceed further in unfolding the unjust and anti-scriptural character of the institution. But here we rest the matter. Four murders, well proven, are enough to hang a man. The four iniquitous principles of American slavery that have now been set forth, all of them essential parts of the system, are enough to condemn it, as alike opposed to the Bible and unperverted human reason.

It may be, and often has been, said by slaveholders, that though this may be slavery in theory, yet in their practice it is something very different. If there are men unwillingly entangled in the system, and ready to do what lies in their power to disenthrall themselves, we have no word of censure for them. But if they set themselves to defend slavery as an institution, then we reply: True, you may conscientiously refrain from selling a slave, but your neighbor across the street is a slave-trader, whose business is to traffic in human flesh; and the institution which you abet sanctions his nefarious employment, and protects him in it with all the power of the state. In the case of your own slaves you may sacredly regard the conjugal and filial relations; but your neighbor over the way, who keeps the slave-pen, is every day trampling these relations under foot, without pity or remorse, and in this wickedness he has, of course, many co-adjutors. Yet the system which you uphold authorizes him to separate husband and wife, parent and child, and protects him in the monstrous iniquity. To the full extent of the slave. laws, and perhaps beyond them, you may instruct your slaves in the religion of the gospel; but the system which you defend sets itself, in the most determined spirit, against the work of educating and enlightening the slaves, and makes it a penal offence to teach them to read any book, God's holy word not excepted. In upholding the institution, then, you uphold all the abominations which it authorizes.

Respecting the results of slavery a volume might be written; but we do not propose, now, to go into any details.

The consideration of the manifold evils which grow out of
the system naturally and necessarily, will come up more
appropriately under the head of the relations of slavery to the
state. At present we simply remark that this institution,
like every other, must be judged of by its results its results
not in certain select cases and in limited periods of time,
but its results as they manifest themselves on the broad
scale. A bad institution, founded on bad principles, will
produce bad results, and the results will be the proof that
the system itself is vicious. This is the scriptural way of
reasoning. The tree is known by its fruits, the fountain by
its stream; an olive-tree bears olive-berries, and a bramble-
bush thorns; a salt fountain sends forth salt water. If we
know the tree or the fountain, we know the fruit or the
stream; and, conversely, if we know the fruit or the stream,
we know the tree or the fountain. All we ask is that
slavery should be judged, like every other institution, by this
equitable scriptural rule. But its modern abettors pursue a
very different course. With timber taken, as they affirm,
from the Bible, they build a fence around a field of brambles,
and then tell us that it must be an olive-yard, because it is
walled in by scriptural authority. We answer: Since your
field yields only a harvest of thorns, year after year, it must
be a plantation of brambles, not of olive-trees; and as to its
alleged scriptural hedge, that is made by human hands, out
of texts of scripture diverted from their true meaning. In
exactly the same way have hedges been built around the
alleged divine right of kings, and the divine right of the
Romish hierarchy. But God, both by his word and provi-
dence, repudiates all such defences, and so must we.
must and shall try the institution of slavery, as we try other
systems, by its principles and its fruits. And if we find it
to be "a root that beareth gall and wormwood," we shall
not be guilty of the folly and blasphemy of calling it a tree
of God's planting.

We

In bringing this Article to a close, we add a few remarks concerning the attitude of the New Testament towards Roman slavery. To some it has seemed inexplicable that,

In

since slavery is a relation of law, the apostles did not enjoin. on masters the duty of manumitting their servants in legal form. We suppose the reason to have been that God's views are comprehensive; that he looks at human nature on all its sides, and at the interests of society in all its relations, and will not interpose, by direct legislation, for the removal of even great abuses before the way is properly prepared to do so. But here we must restrict his forbearance to abuses of such a nature that good men who are involved in them can fulfil, towards him and their fellow men, the great law of love. This limitation is of vital importance. That an evil is organic and interwoven with the whole structure of society, is no reason why God should tolerate it, provided it strike at his law and the welfare of others in such a way that any connection with it implies of necessity the rejection of his authority or maltreatment of men. the days of primitive Christianity, idolatry was a statesystem, so interwoven with the institutions of the Roman empire that Christians found it exceedingly difficult to avoid participation in it without subjecting themselves to the charge of contumacy. Yet the apostles and their successors never yielded any tolerance to Roman idolatry, because it struck openly and directly at Christ's authority. But in the matter of Roman slavery the case was different. Though the institution was cruel and selfish, it did not compel the master to use all the despotic power which it conferred upon him. He could treat his servant, not as an article of merchandise, but as a Christian brother; and this the law of Christ enjoined upon him. Meanwhile there were weighty reasons why the apostles should not interfere with the legal relations of master and slave. At the time when Christianity was introduced, slavery was an old and inveterate institution in the Roman empire. The number of slaves was immense, and the influence of the system permeated the whole structure of society. Any plan for transferring this mass of bondmen from a state of servitude to one of freedom, in such a way as to benefit both parties, and thus society at large, must have had the intelligent co-operation