ted, decisive and practical reasons condemned slavery for

ever.

However, the sentence was not executed on account of the hesitation of the government and the resistance of the colonies. Slavery was not abolished in the colonies of France until after the revolution of February, by the decree of March 4, 1848, which M. Schoelcher had the honor of proposing.

The result of the emancipation in the French colonies was the liberation of the slaves in the Danish colonies, proclaimed July 3, 1848. Sweden had set the example of liberation as early as 1846.

The economic results of emancipation in the colonies of England and in those of France have proven most satisfactory, and under the new plan of labor, these four conditions of economic progress are fast being realized: the perfection of processes, abundance of hands, facility for credit, and the widening of the market.

As far as the moral order is concerned, all the results of the English experiment may be summed up in the words of Lord Stanley, in 1842, which were substantially as follows: "There has been progress in industrious habits, improvement in the social and religious system, and development in individuals of those qualities of heart and mind, which are more necessary to happiness than the material goods of life. The colored people are happy and contented, they devote themselves to labor, they have bettered their way of living, increased their well-being, and, while crime has diminished, moral habits have become better. The number of marriages has increased under the influence of the ministers of religion, education has become more wide spread. In short, the result of the great experiment of emancipation tried upon the whole of the population of the West Indies has surpassed the most ardent hopes."

In the French colonies, 40,000 marriages, 20,000 legitimate children, 30,000 acknowledged children; the population resuming a regular course and increase, the Churches filled, the schools attended; at Gaudalupe and Martinique, 20,000 adults attend night schools; at Rinion, 23 societies of mutual

aid, and among the freedmen, crimes against the person diminished, justice and the clergy improved, peace maintained with garrisons less strong than in 1848: such are the gifts presented to French colonial society, by the emancipation of its slaves.

It would be too long to show in detail, year by year, the economic and moral results of emancipation, since they became complicated by the reason of the effect of political events and attempts at commercial liberty in France. Let it suffice to affirm that civilization has gained much, that wealth has lost little, that its losses have been repaid, and more than repaid, at least in all the colonies in which the new reign has been accepted in good faith. Finally, that the call of a million men to liberty in distant lands, did not cause the tenth part of the trouble occasioned in the more civilized nations of Europe, by the least important political question.

European nations quickly understood that the slave trade would never be completely abolished, unless slavery itself was suppressed. Unfortunately the United States of America did not understand this as quickly. The illustrious founders of the Union, fearing a dissolution of it at the very moment of its formation, and hoping that to suppress the evil it would be sufficient to dry up its source, limited themselves to inserting in the constitution that the slave trade should be prohibited, beginning with the year 1808.

As far as slavery was concerned, they had the weakness not even to mention its name, leaving to each state the task of ridding itself of the institution of slavery, which, at that period, was very little developed. In Washington's time there were scarcely 700,000 slaves within the whole extent of the United States. Washington freed his own slaves by will, and we know from his correspondence with Lafayette that he busied himself with plans of emancipation. Many of the Northern states successively freed their slaves, but the progress of the cultivation of cotton, the cession of Louisiana, the purchase of Florida and the conquest of Texas had not been foreseen. Sixty years after Washington's time, the American Republic had advanced with giant steps, slavery had grown with it, and the Southern

states contained 4,000,000 colored slaves. A fact so enormous, so abnormal, produced in the bosom of the Union a profound perturbation. Not only did honor and moralit suffer therefrom, but a terrible division took place between the North, which controlled the commerce, the shipping and the tariff of the Union, and the South, which, previous to the American civil war, controlled politics, the Congress and the laws of the Union.

This division culminated in the War of the Rebellion, and the abolition of slavery in the United States.

Slavery having disappeared from North America, its foundations were necessarily shaken in South America. The republics separated from Spain have abolished it. Holland delivered its American colonies from slavery, by a law of August 8, 1862, and a law, December, 1871, paved the way for its suppression in Brazil.

This rapid review is confined to Christian countries. In Mohammedan and Pagan countries, Slavery exists almost everywhere; here more patriarchal, there more barbarous; maintained in the bosom of Africa by perpetual wars and a pitiless traffic. A Mohammedan sovereign, the Bey of Tunis, however, abolished slavery in his states, even before France, in 1847; but the scourge of slavery will evidently never disappear from pagan nations, except from contact with, and the example of, Christian nations.

We may hope that the nineteenth century will see servitude disappear; this would be its principal glory. The condition precedent to the disappearance of slavery, is the persevering accord of all opinions, of all creeds, of all nations, that it should be abolished, and this accord is now an accomplished fact.

I

CHAPTER VI.

SLAVERY IN AMERICA.

"Ne'er more shall the sons of Columbia be slaves,

While the earth bears a plant or the sea rolls her waves."

T may be laid down as a fundamental proposition that African slavery in the colonies never existed, nor was originally established by law, but, that it rested wholly upon custom. The dictum so often quoted that slavery being a breach of natural right, can be valid only by positive law is not true. It is rather true that slavery where it existed being the creature of custom, required positive law to abolish or control it. In Great Britain in 1772 custom had made slavery so odious, that the Sommersett case, justly held that positive law was necessary for the establishment of slavery there in any form; but the exact contrary of this rule, of course held good in commonwealths where custom made slavery not odious but legal. In these cases the laws which were passed in regard to slavery were only declaratory of a custom already established, and cannot be said to have established slavery. The whole slavery struggle is therefore the history of a custom at first universal in the colonies, than peacefully circumscribed by the rise of a moral feeling opposed to it, but suddenly so fortified in its remaining territory by the rise of an enormous material interest as to make the final struggle one of force.

When English colonization in North America began, Indian and African slavery was already firmly established in the neighboring Spanish colonies; and from there, particularly from the West Indies, African slavery was naturally and unconciously introduced into the English colonies, the Barbadoes being the stepping stone for most of them. Nevertheless the first authentic case of introduction was from an entirely different source that of Virginia, in 1619. This is the only colony in

which a first case can be found. Everywhere else we find slavery when first casually mentioned, an institution so long established as to have lost its novelty. In each of them there are three points to be noted: the first mention of slavery, its first regulation by law, and the establishment by custom or positive law, of the civil law rule* of making children take the condition of the mother, instead of the father. The latter rule, making children take the condition of the father, was the natural rule for English colonists, and would have made African slavery more tolerable, and would have established a constant agent for its ultimate extinction, since a union of a slave father and a free mother has been comparatively rare. The former rule, that the children should take the condition of the mother, which was everywhere adopted by custom from the beginning, not only relieved the system from check, but even gave it an added horror, of which the variations in color among the Colored Race are mute but indelible certificates.

In summarizing the introduction of slavery with the original thirteen States, we will begin at Mason's and Dixon's line, going first southward, thence northward, and will afterward consider its introduction, or attempt to introduce it into the Territories.

In Virginia the acts passed, were at first, for the mere regulation of servants, the legal distinction being between servants for a term of years (white emigrants under indentures) and servants for life--slaves. December 14, 1662, the civil law rule Partus sequitur ventrem, was adopted by statute. October 3, 1670, servants, not Christians, imported by shipping, were declared slaves for their lives. Slavery was thus fully legalized in the colony.

In Maryland, slaves are first mentioned, "slaves only excepted," in the proposed law of 1638. In 1663 the civil law rulə was fully adopted by a provision that "Africans, or rather slaves," then in the province or thereafter imported, should serve through life, and their children also.

Partus sequitur ventrem instead of Partus sequitur patrem.