toral or agricultural life; and, with the exception of Australasia, they have extended to every portion of the globe. The oldest monuments of human labor on the Egyptian soil are the results of slave-labor. The founder of the Jewish people was a slave-holder and a purchaser of slaves. The Hebrews, when they broke from their own thraldom, planted slavery in the promised land. Tyre, the oldest commercial city of Phoenicia, was, like Babylon, a market "for the persons of men."

Old as are the traditions of Greece, slavery is older. The wrath of Achilles grew out of a quarrel for a slave; Grecian dames had servile attendants; the heroes before Troy made excursions into the neighboring villages and towns to enslave the inhabitants. Greek pirates, roving, like the corsairs of Barbary, in quest of men, laid the foundations of Greek commerce; each commercial town was a slave-mart; and every cottage near the sea-side was in danger from the kidnapper. Greeks enslaved each other. The language of Homer was the mother-tongue of the Helots; the Grecian city that warred on its neighbor city made of its captives a source of profit; the hero of Macedon sold men of his own kindred and language into hopeless slavery. More than four centuries before the Christian era, Alcidamas, a pupil of Gorgias, taught that "God has sent forth all men free; nature has made no man slave." While one class of Greek authors of that period confounded the authority of master and head of a family, others asserted that the relation of master and slave is conventional; that freedom is the law of nature, which knows no difference between master and slave; that slavery is the child of violence, and inherently unjust. "A man, O my master," so speaks the slave in a comedy of Philemon, "because he is a slave, does not cease to be a man. He is of the same flesh with you.

Nature makes no slaves." Aristotle, though he recognizes. "living chattels" as a part of the complete family, has left on record his most deliberate judgment, that the prize of freedom should be placed within the reach of every slave. Yet the idea of universal free labor was only a dormant bud, not to be quickened for many centuries.

Slavery hastened the fall of the commonwealth of Rome. The power of the father to sell his children, of the creditor to sell his insolvent debtor, of the warrior to sell his captive, carried it into the bosom of every family, into the conditions of every contract, into the heart of every unhappy land that was invaded by the Roman eagle. The slave-markets of Rome were filled with men of various nations and colors. "Slaves are they!" writes Seneca; "say that they are men." The golden-mouthed orator Dion inveighs against hereditary slavery as at war with right. "By the law of nature, all men are born free," are the words of Ulpian. The Roman digests pronounce slavery "contrary to nature."

In the middle age the pirate and the kidnapper and the conqueror still continued the slave-trade. The Saxon race carried the most repulsive forms of slavery to England, where not half the population could assert a right to freedom, and where the price of a man was but four times the price of an ox. In defiance of severe penalties, the Saxons long continued to sell their own kindred into slavery on the continent. Even after the conquest, slaves were exported from England to Ireland, till, in 1102, a national synod of the Irish, to remove the pretext for an invasion, decreed the emancipation of all their English slaves.

The German nations made the shores of the Baltic the scenes of the same traffic; and the Dnieper formed the highway on which Russian merchants conveyed slaves from the markets of Russia to Constantinople. The

wretched often submitted to bondage as the only refuge from want. But it was the long wars between German and Slavonic tribes which imparted to the slave-trade so great activity that in every country of Western Europe the whole class of bondmen took and still retain the name of Slaves.

In Sicily, natives of Asia and Africa were exposed for sale. From extreme poverty the Arab father would pawn even his children to the Italian merchant. Rome itself long remained a mart where Christian slaves were exposed for sale, to supply the market of Mahometans. The Venetians purchased alike infidels and Christians, and sold them again to the Arabs in Sicily and Spain. Christian and Jewish avarice supplied the slave-market of the Saracens. The trade, though censured by the church and prohibited by the laws of Venice, was not effectually checked till the mere presence in a Venetian ship was made the sufficient evidence of freedom.

In the twelfth century, Pope Alexander III. had written that, "nature having made no slaves, all men have an equal right to liberty." Yet, as among Mahometans the captive Christian had no alternative but apostasy or servitude, the captive infidel was treated in Christendom with corresponding intolerance. In the camp of the leader whose pious arms redeemed the sepulchre of Christ from the mixed nations of Asia and Libya, the price of a warhorse was three slaves. The Turks, whose law forbade the enslaving of Mussulmans, continued to sell Christian. and other captives; and Smith, the third President of Virginia, relates that he was himself a runaway from Turkish bondage.

All this might have had no influence on the destinies of America but for the long and doubtful struggles between Christians and Moors in the west of Europe, where,

for more than seven centuries, the two religions were arrayed against each other, and bondage was the reciprocal doom of the captive. France and Italy were filled with Saracen slaves; the number of them sold into Christian bondage exceeded the number of all the Christians ever sold by the pirates of Barbary. The clergy felt no sympathy for the unbeliever. The final victory of the Span-. iards over the Moors of Granada, an event contemporary with the discovery of America, was signalized by a great emigration of the Moors to the coasts of Northern Africa, where each mercantile city became a nest of pirates, and every Christian the wonted booty of the corsair: an indiscriminate and retaliating bigotry gave to all Africans. the denomination of Moors, and without scruple reduced them to bondage.

The clergy had broken up the Christian slave-markets at Bristol and at Hamburg, at Lyons and at Rome. In language addressed half to the courts of law and half to the people, Louis X., by the advice of the jurists of France, in July, 1315, published the ordinance that, by the law of nature, every man ought to be born free; that serfs were held in bondage only by a suspension of their early and natural rights; that liberty should be restored to them throughout the kingdom so far as the royal power extended; and every master of slaves was invited to follow his example by bringing them all back to their original state of freedom. Some years later, John de Wycliffe asserted the unchristian character of slavery. At the epoch of the discovery of America the moral opinion of the civilized world had abolished the trade in Christian slaves, and was demanding the emancipation of the serfs; but the infidel was not yet included within the pale of humanity.

Yet negro slavery is not an invention of the white man.

As Greeks enslaved Greeks, as Anglo-Saxons dealt in Anglo-Saxons, so the earliest accounts of the land of the black men bear witness that negro masters held men of their own race as slaves, and sold them to others. This the oldest Greek historian commemorates. Negro slaves were seen in classic Greece, and were known at Rome and in the Roman Empire. About the year 990, Moorish merchants from the Barbary coast reached the cities of Nigritia, and established an uninterrupted exchange of Saracen and European luxuries for the gold and slaves of Central Africa.

Not long after the conquests of the Portuguese in Barbary, their navy frequented the ports of Western Africa; and the first ships, which, in 1441, sailed so far south as Cape Blanco, returned not with negroes, but with Moors. These were treated as strangers, from whom information respecting their native country was to be derived. Antony Gonzalez, who had brought them to Portugal, was commanded to restore them to their ancient homes. He did so; and the Moors gave him as their ransom not gold only, but "black Moors" with curled hair. Negro slaves immediately became an object of commerce. The historian of the maritime discoveries of Spain even claims that she anticipated the Portuguese. The merchants of Seville imported gold dust and slaves from the western coast of Africa; so that negro slavery was established in Andalusia, and "abounded in the city of Seville," before the first voyage of Columbus.

The adventurers of those days by sea, joining the creed of bigots with the designs of pirates and heroes, esteemed as their rightful plunder the wealth of the countries which they might discover, and the inhabitants, if Christians, as their subjects; if infidels, as their slaves. There was hardly a convenient harbor on the Atlantic frontier