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condensed in this sententious judgment. Language is feeble to express all the enormity of this institution, which is now vaunted as in itself a form of civilization, "ennobling" at least to the master, if not to the slave. Look at it in whatever light you will, and it is always the scab, the canker, the "bare-bones," and the shame of the country; wrong, not merely in the abstract, as is often admitted by its apologists, but wrong in the concrete also, and possessing no single element of right. Look at it in the light of principles, and it is nothing less than a huge insurrection against the eternal law of God, involving in its pretensions the denial of all human rights, and also the denial of that Divine Law in which God himself is manifest, thus being practically the grossest lie and the grossest Atheism. Founded in violence, sustained only by violence, such a wrong must by a sure law of compensation blast the master as well as the slave; blast the lands on which they live; blast the community of which they area part; blast the Government which does not forbid the outrage; and the longer it exists and the more completely it prevails, must its blasting influences penetrate the whole social system. Barbarous in origin; barbarous in its law; barbarous in all its pretensions; barbarous in the instruments it employs; barbarous in consequences; barbarous in spirit; barbarous wherever it shows itself, Slavery must breed Barbarians, while it develops everywhere, alike in the individual and in the society to which he belongs, the essential elements of Barbarism. In this character it is now conspicuous before the world.
In undertaking now to expose the Barbarism of Slavery, the whole broad field is open before me. There is nothing in its character, its manifold wrong, its wretched results, and especially in its influence on the class who claim to be "ennobled" by it, that will not fall naturally under consideration.
I know well the difficulty of this discussion involved in the humihating Truth with which I begin. Senators on former occasions, revealing their sensibility, have even protested against any comparison between what were called the "two civilizations, meaning the two social systems produced respectively by Freedom and by Slavery. The sensibility and the protest are not unnatural, though mistaken. "Two civilizations!" Sir, in this nineteenth century of Christian light, there can be but one Civilization, and this is where Freedom prevails. Between Slav-
