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ening influence has not all but destroyed the very framework of your society." But for Christians there is a higher point of view. God has a controversy with us, as a nation, for aiding and abetting this sin, and he is commanding us with a voice that shakes both earth and heaven, "to break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free."

3. But, in the contemplation of this vast interest we are more than Americans-we are men; and we owe it to humanity to seek the full emancipation of all the oppressed, and their industrial, social, and moral elevation. This is preeminently the work of the gospel in this land and in our time. Not the degradation of the old pagan world as spread before the early Christians, not the barbarism of the Northern hordes, as brought to the doors of the church of the fifth century; not the ignorance, superstition, and immorality of Europe, as these lay before the Reformers; not the wants and woes of heathendom inciting to modern missions, presented such a call of duty, such a field of endeavor, such a promise of success, as this race upon our soil now coming out of bondage. We must build them up into society from the foundation. "Slavery is, above everything, the negation of the family. Man is endowed with an astonishing capacity for suffering. He knows how to live under ground, or on the water; an Indian in the forests, a Chinaman in his boat, a Laplander in his darkness; but on condition of being able to say my wife, my child, my mother, my boat, my cabin, my tools. The slave is without family. He is

not sure of keeping his wife, or of knowing his father; his canoe is not his own; and when he lays his hand on his breast, he cannot say, This skin is mine. Now, without these rights, the man is not a man, nature is violated in his person. Follow slavery under all latitudes, in all regions, whatever the institutions, nations, or creeds, everywhere you find the same origin, the same progress, the same law, the same result, as monotonous and horrible as the life of the slaves. The history of slavery knows no change. It is in all places, it has been at every epoch, an obstacle to the systematic peopling of the earth, an obstacle to the propagation of the gospel, an obstacle to the quiet elevation of the inferior races, an obstacle to the progressive civilization of the superior races. The moralist calls it a crime-the historian and economist a scourge.* *

There is, then, no peace, no safety, no hope for us as a people, with slavery in the land. Not freedom only, but our very Christianity would go down before its blighting power. I speak not to politicians and partisans, but to Christian men and women, to those who love the gospel, who love men for whom Christ died, who love their country as the heritage and home of a Christian freedom and civilization. To you, I say, is given the future of this land, and the future of an unhappy race, to save the one by instructing and elevating the other. To you it is given to redeem Christianity from reproach, and to make it the renovating and conservative power in our convulsed and imperiled nation.

*Cochin: Results of Emancipation.

APPENDIX.

X

APPENDIX A.

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THE FOLLOWING IS THE CHAPTER FROM SALVADOR, ENTITLED, DOMESTICITY; OR, SERVANTS IMPROPERLY CALLED SLAVES."

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Ir cannot be questioned that the new era, the grand period which opened in France in the days of the Constituent Assembly, rendered general the cause of rational liberty to which England had already accorded a local homage; it cannot, I say, be questioned that this age has the honor of having really destroyed slavery. Without doubt former times had propagated the principle; but the philosophical era has established the fact, and it has already advanced farther on this question, in forty years, than in the seventeen hundred and ninety-nine years of the preceding period.

This remark has important bearings upon the laws and statutes of which I am to treat.

To give the means of subsistence to individuals who from one fiftieth year to another, or from one jubilee to another, might have alienated their property, and in order to bind closely servants to families and families to servants, Moses made special laws upon domesticity; he established a contract of engagement or a lease of service of two kinds, the septenary and the jubilary.

Now, in respect to these statutes, the received French translations of the Pentateuch furnish one of the gravest proofs of the abuse which words or homonyms may undergo in the transition

from one language to another. Without any regard to the nature of the fact, servants, the Hebrew domestics, have been entirely transformed into slaves.

Perhaps, also, as I have already remarked, there has been a pious intention to let it be believed that in the law of Moses slavery was maintained, and that it is owing exclusively to the law of Jesus Christ that the earth is now rid of it.

When a Hebrew, driven by necessity, consented to serve a family-" sold himself as a slave," say the translations,—the law required the following conditions in his favor: 1st, as the price of his lease of engagement (or, if you please, as the price of purchase of the so-called slave), he received in advance a sum proportionate to the nature of the work for which he was fitted; 2d, after six years, his contract of hiring, his lease of service, expired by right ; 3d, during this time he was supported, suitably maintained, and subjected to a moderate labor; 4th, finally, at the expiration of his lease, he received either in money or in subsistence, sufficient to defray his expenses and the cost of returning to his paternal home.

"If thou obtain for a servant a Hebrew," said the law, "he shall serve thee six years, and in the seventh year he shall go free, without owing thee anything; on the contrary, . . . when thou shalt send him away free from thee, it shall not be with empty hands but thou shalt give him something of thy flock, of thy threshing-floor, of thy wine-press, of all that in which the Lord shall have blessed thee. During the days of his service thou shalt abstain from ruling over him rigorously, from using him as it is the custom in other places (in Egypt for example) to use slaves: he shall be to thee as the (free) hired servant and as the foreign workman."*

If the servant was happy with his master, and loved him, or if for reasons which will be shown hereafter, he formally desired to

* Deut. xv. 12. Lev. xxv. 39, 41.

remain with him, then the transition was effected from the septenary lease of which the duration was fixed, to the jubilee lease, which was longer or shorter in proportion to the time which yet remained before the fiftieth official year or succeeding jubilee. In this case the custom was to lead the servant before the judges to take action according to his wish. The end of his ear was pierced; this was the sign which declared that he would serve for ever; in other words, that he had renounced his lease of six years, and that his engagement carried him to the great year, when he returned of right to his possession in his father's house.*

This manner of regarding servants explains at once the strange and enormous abuse of language into which translators have fallen when they have stated, among other things, that a Hebrew could sell his daughter as a slave.

According to the law and the later regulations, before a father could put a daughter under age to service, he must be reduced to the greatest state of distress, he must have sold all, even to his last garment. He could not engage a daughter who had reached the age of puberty, because then paternal authority had come to an end, and it only remained to exercise a surveillance until the time of marriage. The first money which the father acquired must be used to redeemed the hired daughter-to avail himself of the right of breaking the engagement.

Finally, and this was the grand feature of the law, the man who took as a servant a girl in her minority, contracted a tacit obligation to marry her when she should be marriageable, or to marry her to one of his sons; so that the virtue of a young and perhaps beautiful girl, should not be exposed to the powerful seductions of a master.

"When a man shall have engaged his daughter as a servant, it is said, she shall not go forth from the house of her master as other servants go forth; if she displeases this master and he does

*Deut. xv. 17. Lev. xxv. 4.

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