association expressly organized for that purpose, or an ecclesiastical body have no right to interfere, or in reference to which they have no right to express an opinion. There are respects, indeed, in which the subject pertains to legislative bodies, and in those respects others cannot interfere with their peculiar prerogatives. The bad laws which they have made, they only can unmake. The actual legislation which may be at any time demanded to remove the evil, or to correct abuses growing out of the laws, pertains only to them. Others can no more usurp the place of the legislator, in respect to this, than they can in respect to any thing else. But the points on which slavery touches on the legislative body are few and unimportant, compared with its other relations to society. Men are not made slaves by legislative acts, but by individual rapacity and wrong. Legislatures do not own slaves, unless it be in a corporate capacity, and rarely then. The slave is the property of an individual, and his relations are to him. That individual is a man, not a legislator; and it is right to reason with him as a man, as a neighbour, as a member of the church, as a father and a brother, or as a minister of the gospel. In each and all of these respects, it is right to bring the subject before his conscience, and to reason and remonstrate with him, as himself responsible to God. And it is the right of any one to do it who is a man, whether in his individual or associate capacity for the slaveholder holds a man in bondage, and claims him as his property. Between these two individuals, therefore, no legislator has a right to interpose a barrier, and to say that this subject pertains to us, and that no individual or association has a right to intermeddle with it. It does not define slavery, therefore, to say that it is a relation which has been instituted by a legislature for the good of the community, requiring one class of people to engage in the service of another. (6.) Slavery is not a condition like that of the serfs of Russia, or like the villeins' of the feudal system. It has something in common with those relations, and in some aspects may not be more oppressive or degrading, but still it is to be accurately distinguished from them. In the relation of the villein' of the feudal system there was an obligation of service to the lord; the time, and talent, and skill of the vassal were his; the villein had none of the rights of a freeman, implied in the power of making laws, eligibility to office, or the administration of justice; and there was the possibility of being transferred with the soil from one master to another. The same is substantially true of the condition of the serf. But the villein' was attached to the glebe, as the serf now is. He was a fixture on the estate, and he could not be removed. There was no power of alienating him without alienating the land, his family, his neighbours, and whatever comforts he had been used to. There was no power of separating husband and wife, and parents and children. He was not bought and sold as an individual, and he was not regarded in the light of property. He was, in some respects, recognised as a man, and even in his lowest condition had the germs of certain rights, which have grown into the condition of the now middle and respectable classes in Europe. "The villein has become the independent farmer." "The feudal system has in a great measure been outgrown in all the European states. The third estate, formerly hardly recognised as having an existence, is become the controlling power in most of those ancient communities."* But there is no such germ of slavery. There is nothing freedom and of elevation in which, being cultivated and expanded, will grow into freedom. There was nothing in slavery, as understood by the Romans, and there is nothing in it as it exists in this country, which has such a principle of liberty, advancement, and elevation, that the slave, by any natural progress, can ever emerge into liberty, or ever take such a place that there shall be recognised in him the rights of a man; and though there is in the system, in many respects, a strong resemblance to the * See Biblical Repertory, 1836, pp. 291, 300. condition of a feudal 'villein,' or a Russian serf, yet these conditions are never confounded. All men know that slavery is a different thing. Its peculiarity is not described by a reference to the condition of society in the dark ages, or under the dominion of the Autocrat of the North. (7.) Slavery is not the kind of property which a man has in his wife or child. There may be something in common in these relations, but, except in arguments in defence of slavery, they are never confounded. In the condition of a wife and child there is indeed a want of a right of suffrage and of eligibility to office; and, in the case of the child, of a right to the avails of his labour, as in that of a slave. But (1.) the relation of parent and child is a natural relation, that of master and slave is not; (2.) the relation of husband and wife is voluntary, that of master and slave is not; (3.) in these relations wives and children are treated in all respects as human beings, slaves are not; (4.) in these relations there is no right of property in any such sense as that in which the word property is commonly used:-there is no right of sale; there is no right to sunder the relation for the mere sake of gain. It is true that some of these things have occurred in certain times and places, and that the power of purchase or sale has been understood to be connected with the relation of husband and wife, and that even parents have claimed this power over their children. But this has always been understood as an abuse of power, and as not fairly implied in the relation. The common sense of mankind has revolted at it; and whatever usurped power there may have been at any time, the instinctive feeling of mankind is that the 'property' which a man has in his wife or child is essentially different from that which the master has in his slave. If none of these things constitute slavery, the question * Comp. Bib. Repertory, 1836, p. 293. 1 then arises, what is it? What is the essential element of the system? What distinguishes this from all other relations? These questions can now be answered by the single reply, that it is PROPERTY IN A HUMAN BEING. The master owns the slave. He has bought him, and he has a right to use him, or to sell him. He can command his services against his own will; he can avail himself of the fruit of his toil and skill; he can sell him or otherwise alienate him as he pleases. He regards him as his own property in the same sense as he regards any thing else as his property. He is not an apprentice, a companion, an equal, or a voluntary servant; he is a part of his estate, and subject substantially to the same laws as those which regulate property in any thing else. He is his property in the sense that either by himself, or by one from whom he has inherited him, the slave has been taken by force and appropriated to the use of another mansubstantially in the same way in which property was first acquired by cultivating a piece of land selected from the great common of the world, or fruit gathered from that which was before common; or he has become his property in the sense that an equivalent has been paid for him, or from the fact that the children of slaves become property in the same way as the offspring of cattle do. He is his property in the sense that the slave himself has no right to the employment of his time and limbs. and skill for his own advantage, and no right to the avails of his own labour. He is his property in the sense that the master claims the right to himself of all that the slave can produce by his physical strength, or by any tact or skill which he may have in any department of labour. He is his property in the sense that he may part with his services to any one on such terms as he, and not the slave, shall choose; that he may sell him for any price in money, or barter him for any commodity, to any person that he chooses; and that he may make a testa mentary disposition of him as he may of his house, his land, his books, his cane, or his horse. This was the doctrine of the Roman law. "The master had the entire right of property in the slave, and could do just as he pleased with his person and life, his powers and his earnings." Digesta I. 19, 32. Quod attinet ad jus civile, servi pro nullis habentur ; non tamen et jure naturali, quia, quod ad jus naturale attinet, omnes homines aequales sunt. IV. 5, 3. Quia servile caput (civil condition of a slave) nullum jus habet, ideo nec minui potest.* The same was true in Greece. "In Greece the slave was considered ἔμψυχον ὄργανον or a κτήμα, a mere instrument endowed with life, a possession."+ It is true that this kind of property differs in some respects from other kinds-as property in a horse differs in some respects from property in a tree or a mine. Property is to be regarded, in some aspects, according to the nature of the thing which is held, and will be treated in some respects according to its nature. The ownership which a man has in a marble quarry, or in a silver mine, or in a field or forest, is different in some respects from that which he has in a horse or a dog; that which he has in the latter, is in some respects different from that which he can have in a man. It will secure a different kind of treatment, and there are still common laws, though these are held as property, which a man is not at liberty to disregard. It is observed, correctly in the main, by the author of the article in the Biblical Repertory already referred to (p. 293), that a man "has no more right to use a brute as a log of wood, in virtue of the right of property, than he has to use a man as a brute. There are general principles of rectitude obligatory on all men, which require them to treat all the creatures of God, ac * See Prof. G. H. Becker, in Bibliotheca Sacra, ii. p. 571. |