No special law in Poland decreed the serfdom of the rural population, nor in Russia their transformation into chattels. Nowhere, indeed, in the whole history of man has the conception of justice and law been so degraded as to legislate freemen, or those partially free, out of their sacred and inherent rights, beforehand. The most bloody records of humanity have not preserved any such act of legislation, and even the name of a Nero or a Heliogabalus are free from such a stain. It was left to the modern worshippers of the blood-reeking slave-demon to enact such laws; it was left to the highest judicial tribunal of the United States to brand into the brow of justice, there to remain for eternities, the infernal Dred Scott decision.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] The name of slave in the Slavi language, is derived either from slava, "renown," or from slowo, "the verb." It is supposed that the Slavi called themselves thus as having the gift of speech, of the verb, in contradistinction to those speaking an unintelligible language, whom they called niemy, "mute," wherefrom nemets, "a German."
These pages do not touch on slavery among the Spaniards. Under the Roman republic and empire, Spain shared the lot of the other provinces, as Gaul, etc.; and what has been said in relation to slavery in the Roman world applies to her also. The results of the German invasions, and the establishment of the Goths in Spain, were similar in their bearings to what we have already seen as taking place in Gaul and Italy. Scarcely had the two races begun to fuse on the soil of Spain, and the relations between the conqueror and the conquered to be modified and softened, when the invasions by the Moors (whose domination lasted for nearly seven centuries), threw the Spaniards into internal wars. Their protracted efforts to expel the invaders fostered the preponderance of the men of the sword; and there is every likelihood that the unavoidable sequellæ of war contributed to preserve longer in Spain than in any of the other nationalities that arose out of the ruins of the Roman empire, certain of the features of domestic slavery, of bondage, and the feudal tenure. The final expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian peninsula was almost immediately followed by the discovery of the continent of America, and by the formation here of a great Spanish empire, and the introduction thereinto of Africans as domestic slaves. To master the various relations of property and villeinage, of bondage and chattelhood in Spain and in the Spanish Main, requires special studies, for which, indeed, we have as yet no sufficient material. At least I had none such within my reach—none that was, to my mind, conclusive and satisfactory. The Spanish republics nobly satisfied the hopes of humanity by abolishing all kinds of bondage and all distinctions of race. The Peruvian republic paid to the owners three hundred dollars per head for each slave, of every age and both sexes, and then liberated them. It may be emphatically asserted, that the protracted political confusion prevailing in the Spanish American States, has its sources not in the act of emancipatory justice, but that it is the result of altogether different causes. These, however, do not come within the compass of the present investigation.
The many analogies between domestic slavery as practised by various nations and races of the past, and as it now exists in our Slave States, have been often enough pointed out. These analogies prove beyond doubt that slavery always corrupts the slave-holder and the whole community—be the ethnic peculiarities of the enslaved race what they may.
History shows slavery to have been always most luxuriant in those nations where society was most disorganized, just as noxious animals and plants multiply in putrefaction and rottenness. Facts reveal to us how far the disorder has already penetrated Southern life; and it would progress even more rapidly were it not for the purifying and healing influences (feeble though they now be) coming from the North.
The civilized Christian world follows with ever-increasing interest the stages of the political struggle in the American Union—sympathizing deeply with those who, though they cannot hope to effect an immediate cure, yet seek to arrest the growth of the fatal disorder.[21]