Page:Does the Bible sanction American slavery?.djvu/84

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DOES THE BIBLE SANCTION

was a religious man, was surprised to find that the servants did not come to prayers.^[1]

Slavery, in Greece and at Rome, may in the earliest times have been a social necessity and a sound relation, as it was in the Patriarchal East. But in more civilized times it became a manifest wrong: and then theories were invented to appease the moral misgivings of the slave-owners by shewing that the wrong which conduced so much to their advantage, when viewed by the eye of reason, was the perfection of right.^[2] The philosophic Greek feigned that there were certain races of men doomed by their natural inferiority to be the slaves of the superior race; and among the races so doomed he included some which were of the same stock as himself, and certainly would have included those which have become the founders of modern civilization.^[3] The

↑ If I am told that the negroes are treated, in the matter of public worship or in other matters, as a Pariah class in the North as well as in the South, I must answer that the thing here discussed is not the consistency of the North, but the validity of a plea for slavery put forward by the South. I may add that the degradation inflicted by slavery in the South must naturally cling to the negro, except in the eyes of very high-minded men, in the North. Further, I would ask, are those who maltreat the negro in the North the enemies or the friends of slavery? And if they are the enemies of slavery, is their conduct the consequence of their principles or a departure from them?
↑ See Maine’s Ancient Law, p. 162.
↑ A gentleman who was among my audience at Manchester, and has done me the honour to send me some criticisms on the lecture, complains that I did not notice the inferiority of the negro race, which seems to him to be “a matter of fact” greatly affecting the question. The inferiority of the negro cannot be more manifest to him, than his inferiority and the consequent propriety of making him a slave would have been to Aristotle, the father of natural science. What race would not be “inferior” while it was kept in a state of degradation?

[1] If I am told that the negroes are treated, in the matter of public worship or in other matters, as a Pariah class in the North as well as in the South, I must answer that the thing here discussed is not the consistency of the North, but the validity of a plea for slavery put forward by the South. I may add that the degradation inflicted by slavery in the South must naturally cling to the negro, except in the eyes of very high-minded men, in the North. Further, I would ask, are those who maltreat the negro in the North the enemies or the friends of slavery? And if they are the enemies of slavery, is their conduct the consequence of their principles or a departure from them?

[2] See Maine’s Ancient Law, p. 162.

[3] A gentleman who was among my audience at Manchester, and has done me the honour to send me some criticisms on the lecture, complains that I did not notice the inferiority of the negro race, which seems to him to be “a matter of fact” greatly affecting the question. The inferiority of the negro cannot be more manifest to him, than his inferiority and the consequent propriety of making him a slave would have been to Aristotle, the father of natural science. What race would not be “inferior” while it was kept in a state of degradation?

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