CONTENTS.
| PAGE | |
| Introduction | vii |
| [I.] | |
| Egyptians | [1] |
| [II.] | |
| Phœnicians | [17] |
| [III.] | |
| Libyans | [27] |
| [IV.] | |
| Carthaginians | [31] |
| [V.] | |
| Hebrews, or Beni-Israel | [35] |
| [VI.] | |
| Nabatheans | [63] |
| [VII.] | |
| Assyrians and Babylonians | [69] |
| [VIII.] | |
| Medes and Persians | [75] |
| [IX.] | |
| Aryas—Hindus | [81] |
| [X.] | |
| Chinese | [89] |
| [XI.] | |
| Greeks | [97] |
| [XII.] | |
| Romans—Republicans | [125] |
| [XIII.] | |
| Romans—Political Slaves | [149] |
| [XIV.] | |
| Christianity: its Churches and Creeds | [165] |
| [XV.] | |
| Gauls | [173] |
| [XVI.] | |
| Germans | [183] |
| [XVII.] | |
| Longobards—Italians | [199] |
| [XVIII.] | |
| Franks—French | [207] |
| [XIX.] | |
| Britons, Anglo-Saxons, English | [223] |
| [XX.] | |
| Slavi, Slavonians, Slaves, Russians | [233] |
| [XXI.] | |
| Conclusion | [251] |
For the first time in the annals of humanity, domestic slavery, or the system of chattelhood and traffic in man, is erected into a religious, social and political creed. This new creed has its thaumaturgus, its temples, its altars, its worship, its divines, its theology, its fanatical devotees; it has its moralists, its savants and sentimentalists, its statesmen and its publicists. The articles of this new faith are preached and confessed by senators and representatives in the highest councils of the American people, as well as in the legislatures of the respective States; they are boldly proclaimed by the press, and by platform orators and public missionaries; in a word, this new faith over-shadows the whole religious, social, intellectual, political and economical existence of a large portion of the Republic.
The less fervent disciples consider domestic slavery as an eminently practical matter, and regard those of an opposite opinion as abstruse theorizers; and history is called in and ransacked for the purpose of justifying the present by the past.
Well: history contains all the evidences—multifarious and decisive.
It is asserted that domestic slavery has always been a constructive social element: history shows that it has always been destructive. History authoritatively establishes the fact that slavery is the most corroding social disease, and one, too, which acts most fatally on the slaveholding element in a community.
Not disease, but health, is the normal condition of man's physical organism: not oppression but freedom is the normal condition of human society. The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of nature or the laws of hygiene. As an individual cannot with impunity violate hygienic law—as nature always avenges every departure from her eternal order: so nations and communities cannot safely deviate from the laws of history, still less violate them with impunity. History positively demonstrates that slavery is not one of the natural laws of the human race, any more than disorders and monstrosities are normal conditions of the human body.
History demonstrates that slavery is not coeval with, nor inherent in, human society, but is the offspring of social derangement and decay. The healthiest physical organism may, under certain conditions, develop from within, or receive by infection from without, diseases which are coeval, so to speak, with the creation, and which hover perpetually over animal life. The disease, too, may be acute or chronic, according to the conditions or predispositions of the organism. History teaches that domestic slavery may, at times, affect the healthiest social organism, and be developed, like other social disorders and crimes, so to speak, in the very womb of the nation. As the tendency of vigorous health is to prevent physical derangements and diseases, so the tendency of society in its most elevated conception is to prevent, to limit, to neutralize, if not wholly to extirpate, all social disorders. Not depravity and disease, but purity and virtue, are the normal condition of the individual: not oppression but freedom is the normal condition of society.
Some investigators and philosophers discover an identity between the progressive development of the human body and the various stages of human society—beginning with the embryonic condition of both. More than one striking analogy certainly exists between physiological and pathological laws, and the moral and social principles which ought to be observed by man both as an individual, and in the aggregate called society. Thus some of the pathologic axioms established by Rokitansky[1] (the greatest of living pathologists) are equally sustained by the history of nations.