Their eyes on America, they are at the moment of contemplating the abolition of slavery, committed to the bloody hands of violence.

Their eyes on history, it is given them to follow the peaceful and gradual extinction of this scourge, by the gentle but strong hand of Him who has ransomed sinners, upraised the weak, and delivered captives, our Lord Jesus Christ.

16

CHAPTER III.

THE THEORY OF SLAVERY.

Ir is fitting that, before summing up and concluding, I pause to ask the question, If Jesus Christ did not abolish slavery, who then destroyed it? who then will suppress it? Is it philosophy? is it human reason?

I ask philosophy, I ask human reason, to explain to me, if this be true, what is slavery? what is the nature, what the origin of this scourge?

Interrogate conscience, it answers that liberty is the most precious of possessions, the clearest, the most sacred of rights.*

But interrogate history, it teaches that half the human race has lived in slavery, is still groaning in it, relapses. into it unceasingly, and that tyrants and victims are eternal. How comprehend, how explain, this lamentable contradiction? how resolve this enigma?

This is a monstrous fact, yet it is the most ancient preserved in the memory of man. As soon as two men, as soon as two peoples, have been face to face with each other, the stronger has subjugated the weaker, and as

* "I have no need to reason to know that my liberty is inviolable. It is my right, like life itself. No one can take away my life without crime; and no one can mutilate, vitiate, or degrade my being without crime. I hold from the same God existence and the faculties which render it possible to me. It cannot be that Divine and human laws condemn the assassin and absolve the liberticide. Not only is my liberty mine, like my life, and no one can dispose of it in my place, but I am not master to dispose of it myself. It is not enough to say that liberty is a right; liberty is a duty. It does not depend on me to throw off the responsibility which God has imposed on me; it is not permitted me to desert the post where I have been placed by the Creator." Jules Simon, Liberté, Tom. I. pp. 25, 26.

soon as there has been a law, it has decided in favor of the stronger.

The most ancient of facts is also the most universal. Slavery was an institution of the Greeks and Romans, the Germans, the Scythians, the Ethiopians, the Persians, the Indians, the barbarians, more refined among some, more brutal among others, everywhere pitiless, incontestable. All exercised or endured it; sometimes it was shaken, never destroyed; and rebel or freed slaves held slaves in their turn.

This is a fact immemorial, obstinate, everywhere rising and springing up anew, indestructible, universal, at once natural and contrary to nature. Man, to exempt himself from labor, condemns another man to it; if he resist, he beats him; if he become useless, he sells him; if he be fruitful, he disposes of his progeny; in a word, over this being, his fellow, who has the same form, the same language, the same soul, and the same face, he exercises in every point the empire of the Arab over his steed. This pretended right philosophers do not condemn, but demonstrate; laws do not reprove, but organize.

Once more, how comprehend and how explain it? Who will dare answer coldly, Since this fact is universal and immemorial, it is, therefore, legitimate?

We might reply by the witticism of Voltaire: "For some thirty or forty centuries, the weasels have been in the habit of eating our chickens, yet we take the liberty of destroying them when we meet them."

The universality of slavery proves nothing more against the equality of men, than the universality of polytheism proves against the unity of God.

Let us seek again the secret of this enigma.

Is the theory of Aristotle on the inequality of souls found worthy of refutation? Would we lose ourselves with the Hindoos in the clouds of the doctrine of pre-existence ?

Do we prefer to believe in the differences of races, and do we hope to find in the color of the skin or the inclination of the facial angle the title-deed of one brother over another?

Are we to listen to the false economists who laud the organization of forced labor, the false jurisconsults who deduce servitude from a contract which lacks at once a lawful object and the consent of the parties, the false philanthropists and false Christians who make of slavery a happy system of moralization and a convenient catechumenate, the false liberals who found on the subjection of the greater number the political existence of the ruling minority?

To all these vain or cruel systems, whether founded on nature or utility, the human heart and history return a loud denial.

The Creator is ignorant of the inequalities invented by science. To all men, it has pleased him to give a soul; to all souls, liberty.

No, no, labor, morality, religion, politics, do not accept the odious services of the slavery which dishonors without seconding them.

Were it true, moreover, these explanations would need, in their turn, to be explained. If labor, morality, religion, and politics derived a real benefit from servitude, how could we comprehend this monstrous amalgam, how justify God for having thus rendered evil necessary and inherent to good? This would be a second enigma to resolve.

It is repeated readily enough, that servitude is among the imperfections which mark the first steps of humanity on earth; that it will gradually disappear through the influence of progress and in the course of time.

If humanity had been fated to pass through slavery as it passes through infancy, the law would have been common to all men without exception; who, therefore, would have had a right to be master?

If it had been an evil destined to disappear by degrees. and according to the laws of a continued progress, slavery would doubtless have been more cruel and more universal in the earliest days of humanity; after a few centuries it would have been seen to grow lighter, then finally to disappear. But this was not the case. In the beginning, it was confounded with domestic service in the bosom of patriarchal life. In proportion as society became enlightened and organized, slavery became organized also; the longer it endured, the heavier grew its weight, and the heathen tribes of Africa and the heathen slave-traders of the New World invented cruelties and forged chains which the ancients never knew. The moderns have possessed more slaves than the ancients, they have invented the slave-trade, slave-trading, the prohibition of emancipation, odious refinements unknown to antiquity. Far from decreasing, then, the evil is growing, as the movement of a falling body accelerates through the invisible law of gravity.

Slavery is not, therefore, an inferior condition, which will disappear through the lapse of time alone. What, in fine, is its nature, what its origin ?

Shall we, like almost all writers, return to the old theory, which derives slavery from the right of war, that is, from

the right of the stronger?

This theory is revolting to us. At our epoch, amidst formidable wars, the Christian powers hasten to restore prisoners without exchange or ransom, after treating them humanely.* This theory is, however, the most common and most plausible; for anger sometimes hurries away justice, and vengeance is the criminal punishment of another crime; we cannot pardon, but can nevertheless comprehend them.

Historically, war has indeed often been the origin of slavery; but it has proceeded from a thousand other causes, * Moniteur, May 28, 1859.