with comparatively barbarous nations, dealers procured slaves by barter, at a very cheap rate. Salt, for example, was anciently much taken by the Thracians, in exchange for human beings. Even had the cost of slaves been higher than we have good authority for estimating it, the wealth of the Romans was certainly so immense, that great capital might be supposed to have been engaged in a trade which had become absolutely necessary; besides, we have many positive testimonies to the fact, of great numbers of foreign slaves being imported into Italy. Man-stealing appears to have been, at all times, a very prevalent crime amongst the ancients; there is every reason to think that Terence was kidnapped from Carthage; the Persa and Pænulus of Plautus shew that such practices were not unusual in the East, when they, or their originals, were written; and St. Paul, in denouncing man-stealers as sinners of the worst class, impresses us with the belief that these offences were very frequent. The number of Roman laws passed, at various periods, against man-stealing, [plagium,] evinces at once the sense which the Legislature entertained of its enormity, and the difficulty experienced in its suppression.' pp. 29-31.

Free-born Romans might be reduced to slavery by the operation of law. Criminals doomed to certain ignominious punishments were, by effect of their sentence, deprived of citizenship, and sunk into a state of servitude. They were then termed "slaves of punishment," [servi pœnæ,] and belonged to the fisc, in later times, whence we may judge them to have been the property of the public during the commonwealth. This severe consequence was inferred by condemnation to death, or to the arena, or to labour for life, in the mines or the public works; and a pardon, or a remission of the penalty, left the convict still a slave, unless he was restored to his former rank by a special act of grace. But the condition of penal slaves was entirely abolished by Justinian. We must not omit here to mention, that during the early persecutions of Christianity, reduction to slavery in a very horrid form, was employed as a punishment for the embracing of our faith.' pp. 38-39.

6

6

Michaelis, in his Commentaries on the Laws of Moses, is disposed to defend the legislative policy which would perpetuate slavery, on this ground; that, where it does not subsist, many 'crimes which might otherwise be more advantageously, and per"haps more effectually, and at the same time also more mildly punished by condemnation to slavery, must be made capital 'offences; such as theft and wilful bankruptcy! Nor is there', he adds, any proper means of preventing the idleness of 'beggars; for work-houses, which, after all, form almost a species ' of slavery, cost the public more than they bring in. Nor, again, can the settlement of debts be in any way so summarily and securely effected, as when the creditor has it in his power to sell the debtor for his slave! Upon the whole, the establishment of slavery under certain limitations', the learned German con

6

Michaelis, Laws of Moses, Vol. II. p. 157.

tends, would prove a profitable plan. When we meet with such sentiments as these in the pages of a philosophical and Christian jurist of the eighteenth century, we cease to wonder at the injustice and cruelty of the penal laws of other days. But this very defence of slavery includes the important admission, that it is a penal condition,-one which might be deemed a sufficient punishment of crimes of the deepest dye,-a substitute for capital punishments, milder only than the extreme sanction of the law, and, for the purpose of terror, not less effectual. Without entering upon the argument relating to the expediency of such a mode of punishment, we put it to our readers, What is the character of that system which inflicts the punishment of guilt upon the innocent? which, without the pretext of national hostility, wages perpetual war against human nature in the persons of those who have never sinned, nor their fathers, against society? The same relation which this severest of secondary punishments bears to capital punishments, the crime of inflicting it upon the innocent must bear to murder. The difference is merely one of degree; and as to colonial slavery, the nature of the bondage makes it little better than slow murder. Negro life is constantly melting away, and the race is diminishing under the dreadful penalty of slavery; a penalty inflicted not for the crimes of its victims, but for the gains of their masters: a system of gratuitous and arbitrary punishment of the unoffending, for the pure advantage and convenience of a handful of white tyrants! The marked dis

tinction between the ancient and the modern slavery, as to its origin and principle, is forcibly put in an eloquent sermon, just published, on The Sinfulness of Colonial Slavery', by Mr. Halley, the Classical Tutor at Highbury College.

In those early times, the claim of the master was founded in the acknowledged laws of war. These might have been unjust and immoral, inhuman and cruel. It is neither my business nor my inclination to justify war; but, still, it is essentially distinct from the practice of man-stealing. In the patriarchal age war was unquestionably tolerated, and slavery was the unavoidable result. But then each party was exposed to the danger. Every man, in hope of the spoils, put his life in jeopardy. He ventured, if he survived the day, his limbs and liberty upon the fortune of war. The understood condition of every combat was, in the words of the champion of Gath, "If ye be able to fight with me, then will we be your servants; but, if I prevail against him, then shall ye be our servants, and serve us."

When a property in man was thus established, the practice of seizing and selling the harmless and peaceable very soon commenced. The one facilitated the introduction of the other; but who cannot distinguish between the two? Is there no difference between the claim to a prisoner of war, who had attempted your life, and the title of the Midianite merchants, when they purchased Joseph, an inoffensive youth, from his brethren ? Retaliation is the principle of the former;

the latter is the unprovoked infliction of injury. The pure light of the gospel was necessary to discover the evil of the former, which, in the times of ignorance, God winked at, in those who had no conscience of the guilt; the iniquity of the latter, condemned even by heathen moralists, must have been detected by the feeble and obscure glimmering of the light of nature. For the former might have been pleaded the reason of self-defence, the right of reprisals, and even the humanity of sparing the life of a captive; for the latter nothing whatever could have been offered in extenuation. The mighty man of valour in that age might lead home his captives with the conqueror's song, "Blessed be the Lord, my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight;" but the reflections of the man-stealer, unless his heart were iron, must have been like those of the patriarchs, "We are verily guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear." There is as essential a difference between the two acts of enslaving, though the slavery were the same, as there is between the slaughter of a soldier on the field of battle, and the murder of a traveller for the sake of gold. Joshua was a man of war from his youth; but you can all distinguish him from the murderous assassin.

Colonial Slavery is the bondage, not of the warrior, but of the kidnapper and man-stealer. Were we to go back to the infancy and earliest rudiments of the world, we could not vindicate it, even by the license of that imperfect state of morals and religion. It is not retaliation, which was then permitted, but the original and unprovoked infliction of wrong. Were we Jews, it is forbidden by Moses; were we heathens, it is condemned by the light of nature. When did the negro race attempt to enslave us or our ancestors? When did their vessels visit our shores, and their armed men burn our villages, break up our families, carry away our children, and doom them to cruel, hopeless, exhausting, interminable hondage? Do you resign your Christianity to justify slavery, by an appeal to the law of Moses, or the license of the patriarchs? Where is even that un-Christian pretext? Had we seized an Algerine corsair, and sold his crew to work the plantations, we might have appealed for our precedent to patriarchal times. But that one race-the most inoffensive, and, from its situation and character, altogether indisposed, and utterly unable even if disposed, ever to interfere with the politics of Europe, should have become the common prey of every plunderer,-should, for ages, have its several tribes bribed and stimulated to mutual wars by a traffic with professed Christians, in order to supply the slave-markets of the world; should, though it had never lifted an arm against its oppressor, have seen its villages in ruins, its rivers and creeks infested with slave-boats, its fields stained with the blood of the wounded and defenceless, its shores watered with the salt tears of its children, torn for ever from the land of their birth and the love of their friends, and transported across the Atlantic to become an oppressed and degraded population, from Virginia to La Plata: this is the burden of Britain, the scarlet and crimson stain of Christendom, the opprobrium of our religion, the blaspheming of our God among the Gentiles. It is pure, gratuitous, unprovoked injury. What to be compared with this was

ever conceded to the hardness of Jewish hearts? What equal injustice was ever tolerated in the ignorance and rudeness of the patriarchal ages? Go out of your place from Jerusalem above, the mother of us all, to Mount Sinai in Arabia, in bondage with her children; as sons of the bondwoman more than the free, consult the schoolmaster of the infant world, in preference to Christ, the teacher of its maturer age; and, from its weak and beggarly elements learn, if you choose, your lessons of morality. Ask Moses, or even the fathers, why the negro may be excommunicated from the family of man?-why his unprovoked wrongs should remain unredressed?—why his wife and children are not his own?-why you may claim, what the conscience and laws of a Christian people dare claim in no other child of Adam, a property and freehold in his flesh and sinews, his life and his limbs ?

I have alluded to the Mosaic, in connexion with the patriarchal dispensation; but, as the servitude among the Israelites is often adduced in defence of Colonial Slavery, it may require a distinct examination. Slavery was, as we have already seen, not of Moses, but of the fathers. It was a more ancient institute, which we acknowledge he permitted, but did not establish. It had become, at that time, prevalent among many nations; but, as their languages shew, the general idea was, still, the service of prisoners of war, rendered to the conquerors to whose clemency, or cupidity, they owed the preservation of life. As Moses permitted war, I see not how he could consistently have prohibited slavery, in an age when the exchange of prisoners was utterly unknown. The Israelites, indeed, were warriors by a divine commission. The result of their battles must have been either bondage or death. Moses tolerated the smaller evil, slavery, to prevent the greater, indiscriminate massacre. He legislated for a people intrusted to execute the commination of Noah upon the posterity of Canaan, in which some would now unwarrantably involve all the tribes of Africa.' Halley, pp. 4-7.

That the Canaanites were negroes, has not, so far as we recollect, been gravely maintained by any writer; but it is strange to find biblical commentators, down to the present day, speaking of the descendants, not of Canaan merely, but of Ham, as condemned to degradation and servitude. From the race of Ham sprang the most famous conquerors of the old world; and we have sometimes thought, that the very best pretext that could have been devised by the whites, for reducing the black races to bondage, would have been the plea of retaliation, since the ancestors of the whites were held in subjection by sable lords, when a fair skin was no patent of nature's nobility. The ancient slavery was, however, very impartial in this respect, and, like Mohammed's law of polygamy, allowed a community of all

* We do not vouch for the fact, that Mohammed sanctioned polygamy with the view of allowing every man who could afford it, to have four wives of different colours, white, black, mahogany, and olive; but

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colours. Had the commination of Noah been intended to fall only upon Africans, it must be admitted to have been wholly frustrated, for the supposed curse has taken effect most indiscriminately; nor can the truth of the prediction be supported on such an hypothesis. Phrygia, Syria, Thrace, Illyria, and the hyperborean region of Europe, as well as Spain and Britain, supplied Greece and Italy with slaves; as the market of Constantinople is still supplied with Mamlooks from the region of Caucasus and the coasts of the Mediterranean. If the West India planter wishes to shield himself under classic precedents, he must not speak of the colour of his slaves as making the slightest difference in the matter. If it be right to hold negroes in predial servitude, it must be equally fair and just to sell Christian children in the Turkish market, and to work white slaves at Algiers. But we should greatly wrong the West Indians, did we suppose for a moment, that they found their right over their slaves upon the dark complexion, and crisped hair, and African blood of their property. To be white in fact, and white by law, are very different things in countries where to be a slave is to be a negro. The following statement occurs in the evidence given by the Rev. W. Knibb before the Select Committee of the House of Lords: 'I dare say it is consistent with your Lord'ships' knowledge, that many of the present slaves (in Jamaica) ' are the children of Englishmen and Scotchmen, some of them 'the sons of the daughters of such persons, and some of them as 'white as ourselves: they get English feelings, and they long for "English knowledge, and I think they have an influence on the 'mass."* This is not peculiar to Jamaica. In the slave States of America and in Brazil, the slaves are of all mixtures of race and all shades of colour. Slavery is everywhere without the slightest foundation in nature. The only line of demarcation between the slave and the free, is the arbitrary though impassable barrier of The chief distinction between the Oriental and the Occidental slavery is this; the Ottoman does not disdain to adopt a slave as his son, while the Jamaica planter has no scruple in selling his own child as a slave! For this, however, the Christian may plead pagan precedents.

caste.

It was quite legal for parents within the Roman territories to sell their children irredeemably as slaves; and it was very common among

such is the policy aseribed to him by a French writer, who contends that it is the only method of preventing the several races from persecuting each other, by placing them all on the same footing. Yet, what better is that common footing than domestic slavery?

Minutes of Evidence, p. 805. See also p. 251 of our last Number.