order to get the benefit of selling the criminal. Not only murder, theft, and adultery are punished by selling the criminal for a slave, but every trifling crime is punished in the same manner." (Moore.)

"The king of Sain, on the least pretense, sells his subjects for European goods. He is so tyrannically severe, that he makes a whole village responsible for the fault of one inhabitant, and, on the least pretense, sells them all for slaves." (Sayer.)

These witnesses were mostly engaged in the slave-trade themselves. Others might be easily added, were it necessary. Barbarism, ignorance, and even inhumanity are made more barbarous, ignorant, and inhuman, by the slavery which exists in this country, which sends its pestilence over to Africa, to degrade it below common heathenism; and all this by Christian men! (See Clarkson's History of the Slave-trade, pp. 504–506.)

10. The principles on which the slave-trade has been destroyed by Great Britain and the United States will finally overthrow slavery itself. The slave-trade is barely the leading means of supplying slavery with its victims. The other means of supply is the domestic slave-growing and the domestic slave-trade of the country. The great moral principles which affect any one of these branches of supply must affect the other, as well as the practical system of slaveholding itself. What overturns the one must overturn the other; and success in one is the earnest of success in the other. If the slave-trade be contrary to humanity and justice, so must slavery be contrary to humanity and justice. The one is barely the means; the other is the end to be accomplished by the means; and if the African trade is inhuman and unjust, as a sinful means to secure a sinful end, the domestic trade of purchase, sale, transportation, and slave-growing, which is only one other great means to secure the same sinful end-the holding in bondage our

fellow-men-must be also sinful. It is of little account, whether the slave in America was enslaved as soon as born where he labors, or is a native African. The home-made slave and the foreign slave are owned by the same master, labor in the same field, are deprived of the same rights, visited with the same wrongs, and the entailment on their posterity the same.

The abolition of the slave-trade was one of the most glorious events that ever transpired. It was a contest, but it was one, not of brute force, but of reason. It was a contest between those who felt deeply for the happiness. and elevation of their fellow-men, and those who, through vicious custom and the impulse of avarice, had trampled under foot the sacred rights of nature, and attempted to deface the Divine image from their minds. In the discussions accompanying and following the abolition of the African trade, the most generous moral sympathies have been called into exercise, and have gone far to preserve national virtue, and to preserve from barbarism the nations which engaged in the suppression of the trade. This discussion is useful in the discrimination of moral character, ranking the wise and good on the side of freedom, and leaving the mistaken and vicious on the side of slavery, or in a sinful neutrality. It is a marvelous occurrence, that two nations, the most powerful on earth-England and America-the mother and the child-should, in the same month of the same year, have abolished the African trade. Emancipation, in part, followed in America. Under the British flag freedom has occupied the place of bondage. Other nations are following the good example; and America is in rapid progress to complete the work, commenced in the abolition of the foreign trade, and continued in the advance of freedom. Well might the devout Clarkson conclude his admirable history of the abolition of the African slave-trade with this golden sentence: "Reader, thou art

now acquainted with the history of this contest. Rejoice in the manner of its termination! and, if thou feelest grateful for the event, retire within thy closet, and pour out thy thanksgiving to the Almighty, for this his unspeakable act of mercy to thy oppressed fellow-creatures."

CHAPTER III.

THE ENSLAVEMENT OF CHILDREN.

As the enslavement of children, as soon as they are born, is become now the substitute of the African slave-trade, and, therefore, the support of slavery, which feeds and supplies its victims, it will deserve particular attention. We will, therefore, devote a short chapter exclusively to its consideration. The following are the arguments and considerations which we bring against it:

1. No one can ever be born a slave.

Liberty is the natural right of every human being, as soon as he breathes the air; and no human law can justly deprive him of that right, which he derives from the law of nature. "All men are created free and equal.”

In this light it is considered in the Roman or civil law, as appears from the following quotation from the Institutes of Justinian: "Liberty is a natural faculty, which belongs to every man, unless he is deprived of it by force or by law. Slavery is a constitution of the law of nations, by which any one is subjected to the dominion of another, CONTRARY TO NATURE. According to this, liberty is the natural faculty, privilege, or right of every person; and every one possesses it, till he is deprived of it by force or law. While slavery is contrary to nature, it is a constitution, or institution, of the law of nations. Hence, every child of man is free, till he is made a slave. He is never born a slave. If one were born a slave, then all must be born slaves, because all are born alike; nor do we hear of any manumissions from a state of nature, that persons should be free, which must be the case, were men born

Libertas quidem est naturalis facultas ejus, quod cuique facere libet, nisi siquid vi aut jure prohibetur. Servitus autem est constitutio juris gentium, qua quis dominio alieno contra naturam subjicitur." (Institutiones Justiniani, lib. i, tit. 3.)

slaves; nor do we find that any become slaves by nature: they are made so by force or by law; and without such force of violence or law, they are never found to be slaves.

We hear, indeed, of some who were born servants in the house, in the days of the patriarchs. But servants were not slaves; and, indeed, the servants of the patriarchs were mostly their subjects or dependents.

2. The enslavement of children, especially, is a direct violation of the law of nature; and this law of nature, as well as other natural laws, is the law, or constitution, of God himself. Blackstone-book i, p. 426-after showing that men can not justly be made slaves by captivity or the sale of one's self, proves that they can not be born slaves, because, "this being built on the two former rights, must fall together with them. If neither captivity nor the sale of one's self can, by the law of nature and reason, reduce the parent to slavery, much less can they reduce the offspring."

3. All men, from their birth, are naturally, necessarily, and in all circumstances, the rightful owners of themselves, and are, therefore, incapable of becoming the goods and chattels of another, except by theft, violence, or unjust laws; for, since all men are naturally free, no one can deprive them of that freedom, but by the complicated crime of theft and robbery. A man may, by his crimes, forfeit his right to freedom, or he may sell his freedom for life, as it respects labor; but he can not transfer to another his right to perform the duties of religion, nor the relative duties which he owes to men; and as no man can transfer to another his own right to private, relative duties, he certainly can not transfer the natural rights of another to a third person; therefore, no man, without being guilty of theft or robbery, can take away the freedom of the Africans; much less can he take away the freedom of their children and their children's children; for, when human