Slavery in History

SLAVERY IN HISTORY,

BY

ADAM GUROWSKI.

Suum cuique.

NEW YORK:

PUBLISHED BY A.B. BURDICK.

145 NASSAU STREET.

1860.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by
ADAM GUROWSKI,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the
Southern District of New York.

To my Friend
JAMES S. WADSWORTH,
OF GENESEO.

CONTENTS.

For the first time in the annals of humanity, domestic slavery, or the system of chattelhood and traffic in man, is erected into a religious, social and political creed. This new creed has its thaumaturgus, its temples, its altars, its worship, its divines, its theology, its fanatical devotees; it has its moralists, its savants and sentimentalists, its statesmen and its publicists. The articles of this new faith are preached and confessed by senators and representatives in the highest councils of the American people, as well as in the legislatures of the respective States; they are boldly proclaimed by the press, and by platform orators and public missionaries; in a word, this new faith over-shadows the whole religious, social, intellectual, political and economical existence of a large portion of the Republic.

The less fervent disciples consider domestic slavery as an eminently practical matter, and regard those of an opposite opinion as abstruse theorizers; and history is called in and ransacked for the purpose of justifying the present by the past.

Well: history contains all the evidences—multifarious and decisive.

It is asserted that domestic slavery has always been a constructive social element: history shows that it has always been destructive. History authoritatively establishes the fact that slavery is the most corroding social disease, and one, too, which acts most fatally on the slaveholding element in a community.

Not disease, but health, is the normal condition of man's physical organism: not oppression but freedom is the normal condition of human society. The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of nature or the laws of hygiene. As an individual cannot with impunity violate hygienic law—as nature always avenges every departure from her eternal order: so nations and communities cannot safely deviate from the laws of history, still less violate them with impunity. History positively demonstrates that slavery is not one of the natural laws of the human race, any more than disorders and monstrosities are normal conditions of the human body.

History demonstrates that slavery is not coeval with, nor inherent in, human society, but is the offspring of social derangement and decay. The healthiest physical organism may, under certain conditions, develop from within, or receive by infection from without, diseases which are coeval, so to speak, with the creation, and which hover perpetually over animal life. The disease, too, may be acute or chronic, according to the conditions or predispositions of the organism. History teaches that domestic slavery may, at times, affect the healthiest social organism, and be developed, like other social disorders and crimes, so to speak, in the very womb of the nation. As the tendency of vigorous health is to prevent physical derangements and diseases, so the tendency of society in its most elevated conception is to prevent, to limit, to neutralize, if not wholly to extirpate, all social disorders. Not depravity and disease, but purity and virtue, are the normal condition of the individual: not oppression but freedom is the normal condition of society.

Some investigators and philosophers discover an identity between the progressive development of the human body and the various stages of human society—beginning with the embryonic condition of both. More than one striking analogy certainly exists between physiological and pathological laws, and the moral and social principles which ought to be observed by man both as an individual, and in the aggregate called society. Thus some of the pathologic axioms established by Rokitansky[1] (the greatest of living pathologists) are equally sustained by the history of nations.

"No formation is incapable of becoming diseased in one or more ways. Several anomalies coexisting in an organ commonly stand to each other in the relation of cause and effect. Thus, deviation in texture determines deviation in size, in form."

The following pages will demonstrate that nations and communities may become diseased in many ways; and that in proportion as their social textures deviate from the normal, do they become more and more deformed and demoralized.

"All anomalies of organization involving any anatomical change manifest themselves as deviations in the quantity or quality of organic creation, or else as a mechanical separation of continuity. They are reducible to irregular number, size, form, continuity, and contents."

Oppressions, tyrannies, domestic slavery, chattelhood, are so many mechanical separations of continuity, which in the social organic creation is liberty.

"General disease engenders the most various organs and textures according to their innate, general or individual tendencies, either spontaneously or by dint of some overpowering outward impulse, a local affection which reflects the general disease in the peculiarity of its products. The general disease becomes localized, and, so to speak, represented in the topical affection."

Violence and oppression generated various and peculiar forms of servitude, until nearly all of them ended in chattelhood, which many are wont to consider as a topical affection of certain races and nations. Declining Greece and Rome in the past, Russia under our own eyes, serve as illustrations.

"A general disease not unfrequently finds in its localization a perpetual focus of derivation, with seeming integrity of the organism in other respects."

So nations infected with slavery, nevertheless had brilliant epochs of existence; and this "seeming integrity of the organism" misleads many otherwise averse to chattelhood, and makes them indifferent to its existence.

"Where several diseases coexist in an individual, they are in part primary, in part secondary and subordinate, although homologous to the former."

So many evils are the lot of human society, but almost all of them are secondary and subordinate to oppression, violence, and slavery.

"The issue of a local disease in health consists either in the perfect re-establishment of the normal condition, or else in partial recovery; more or fewer important residua and sequellæ of the disease not incomparable with a tolerably fair state of health, remaining entailed."

The history of the slow recovery of post-Roman Europe from domestic bondage justifies the application of this pathologic axiom to the social condition of nations.

"Issue in death: 1. Through exhaustion of power and of organic matter."

The history of republican, but above all, of imperial Rome, demonstrates that its decline and death were caused through the extinction of freedom, free labor, and the free yeomanry, which in every state constitutes the power, the organic matter of a nation.

"2. Through the suspended function of organs essential to life, through palsy, etc."

When the laboring classes are enslaved, the life of a nation is speedily palsied.

"3. Through vitiation of the blood."

What blood is to the animal organism, sound social and political principles are to society. When such principles become vitiated, the nation is on the path of decline and death.

"The worst malformation is never so anomalous as not to hear the general character of animal life, etc. Even an individual organ never departs from its normal character so completely that amid even the greatest disfigurement, this character should not be cognizable."

So often the enslaver and the slaveholding community may preserve some features of the normal human character, notwithstanding the "disfigurement" produced.

"The excessive development of one part determines the imperfect and retarded development of another, and the converse."

So the oligarchic development retards the growth and advancement of the laboring classes, whether the hue be white or black: it prevents or retards the culture and civilization of individuals and communities.

"Various and manifold as are the forms of monstrosity, some of them recur with such uniformity of type as to constitute a regular series."

History shows that various as are the other social monstrosities, domestic slavery always recurred with a filial uniformity of type.

"The genesis of malformation in the human body is still veiled in much obscurity despite some progress made in science."

Social teratology, or the science of monstrosities, easily traces the origin and genesis of domestic slavery.

A conscientious study of the records of bygone nations, as well as of the events daily witnessed during a decennium, produced the following pages. They complete what I said about slavery a few years ago.[2] As then, so now, I am almost wholly unacquainted with anti-slavery literature in any of its manifestations. I diligently sought for information in the literary and political productions of pro-slavery writers. Beside legislative enactments, political discussions, and resolutions by Congress and the legislatures of the various Slave States, and the messages of their respective governors, I read every thing that came within my reach, even sermons, heaps of "De Bow's Review" and "Fletcher's Studies on Slavery."[3] Ah!...

For years the rich resources of the Astor Library have facilitated my general studies, and the information there sought and found was enhanced by the kindest liberality experienced from Dr. Coggswell and all his assistants.

And now let History unfold her records.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A Manual of Pathological Anatomy, by Carl Rokitansky, M.D. Translated from the German, by Edward Swaine, M.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

[2] "America and Europe," chap. X.

[3] Among the neutral publications on American slavery, the most remarkable and instructive is the work entitled "The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States," by John Codman Hurt.

SLAVERY IN HISTORY.

[I.]

EGYPTIANS.

AUTHORITIES:

Wilkinson, Rosellini, Lepsius, Uhlemann, Rénan, Guttschmidt, Bugsch, Birch, De Rouget, Bunsen, etc.

In the gray twilight of history, the apparition that first distinctly presents itself is Egypt—that land of wonders, standing on the shores of the "venerable mother the Nile." The Egyptians already form a fully-elaborated, organic social structure, nay, a powerful nation, with a rich material and intellectual civilization, when as yet the commonly accepted chronology begins to write only rudimental numbers.

It is indifferent (so far as the present investigation is concerned) whether this Egyptian culture ascended or descended the Nile—whether its cradle was Meroe, Elephantis, Syene, or Thebes—or whether it first sprang up and expanded around Memphis. So, the first conquerors of Egypt may have belonged to the Shemitic or to the Aryan stock—they may have entered from Asia by the Isthmus of Suez, or by the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and the Red Sea, landing first on some spot in Abyssinia or Nubia; or, perhaps, the primitive civilizers of the valley of the Nile were autochthones, who were conquered by foreign invaders. However these things may have been, Egyptian civilization and culture clearly bear the impress of indigenous development.

The founders of the Egyptian civil, social and religious polity considered agriculture as the most sacred occupation of mortals—transforming the roving savage into a civilized man. It was the divine Osiris who first taught men the art of tilling the earth, if indeed he was not its inventor. But the god forged not a fetter for the farmer, and the Egyptian plough was not desecrated by the hands of a slave.

The first rays of history reveal Egypt densely covered with farms, villages, and cities, and divided into districts (noma), townships, and communes—each having its distinct deity, and each most probably self-governing, or at least self-administering: all this in the earliest epoch, previous to the first dynasties of the Pharaohs, and anterior to the division of the population into castes.

The division of a population into castes, however destructive it may be to the growth of individuality and the highest freedom in man, is neither domestic slavery nor chattelhood. These divisions and sub-divisions originally consisted simply in training the individuals to special occupations and functions, and so educating them in special ideas; but not in making any one caste the property of any other. The gradations of caste constituted no form of chattelhood whatever.

The principal castes were the princes, or Pharaohs, the priests, the soldiers, and then the merchants, artificers, farmers and shepherds; and each of these, again, had numerous subdivisions. Together they directed and carried out all the functions, pursuits, and industries necessary in a well-organized community.

In the sanctuary of the gods, and before the supreme power of the Pharaohs and the law, the priest, the military officer or nobleman, the merchant, the artisan, the daily laborer, the agriculturist, the shepherd, even the swineherd (considered the lowest and most unclean)—all were equal. They formed, so to say, circles rather independent than encompassed by each other. All castes had equal civil rights, and the same punishments were administered to the criminal irrespective of the caste to which he might belong. In brief, in the normal social structure of the Egyptians there existed no class deprived of the social and civil rights enjoyed by all others, or looked down upon as necessarily degraded or outlawed. The separation between one caste and another, moreover, was neither absolute nor impassable.

The ownership of the soil was unequally divided; but it was principally distributed between the sovereign, the priests, and the officer-soldiers. The latter were obliged, in consideration of the land held, to perform military services to the prince—a sort of enfeoffment like that which rose out of the chaos that succeeded the destruction of the Roman world.

Peasants, agriculturists, and yeomen, formed the bulk of the indigenous Egyptian population. The husbandmen either owned their homestead or rented the lands from the king, the priesthood, or the military caste; and they cultivated the generous soil either with their own hands or by hired field-laborers; but chattels or domestic slaves were unknown.

The primary cause of social convulsions and disturbances is always to be found in some great public calamity: such was the celebrated seven years' famine during the administration of Joseph, which resulted in concentrating in the hands of the Pharaohs numerous landed estates, and these principally the farms of the poorer yeomanry. But even then, no trace is to be discovered in history that any great proportion of the agricultural population were enslaved. Their condition then became similar, economically and socially, to that of the English peasantry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and even if it finally degenerated into something like the condition of the Fellahs, still it was simply political oppression, and not chattelhood. The modern Fellahs are serfs, enjoying all natural human rights of worship, family and property; and are separated by a wide gulf from the chattelism of modern slavery. If, like these Fellahs, the ancient Egyptians were forced to bow before the arbitrary power of a sovereign, they at least were not the personal property of an owner who had the power arbitrarily to dispose of them as his interest or caprice might dictate.

The population constituting the Egyptian nation, and included in this graded structure of castes, was of varied origin and descent, or, according to a common form of statement, belonged to various races. But the process of mixing the various ethnic elements with each other, went on uninterruptedly during the almost countless centuries of the historical existence of Egypt, including the epoch of its highest political development and the brightest blossom of its culture and civilization. In the remotest period of Egyptian society, the three superior castes were of a different hue of skin from the others, and some ethnologists and historians assign them a Shemitic or Japhetic (i.e., Aryan) origin. But the optimates were not white but red, and so they both considered and called themselves. All the other castes—as artists, architects, merchants, mechanics, operatives, sailors, agriculturists and shepherds—undoubtedly belonged to the African or negro stock.

Egypt teemed with an active industrial population, which furnished countless soldiers to the army during long centuries of victory. Egyptian history embraces a long period of expansion. Many centuries lay between the times of the Rhameses and of Necho, during which the Egyptians conquered Nubia, Libya, and Syria, and reached Kolchis. These armies could not be recruited—and positively were not—from chattel slaves; for succeeding chapters will show that it was domestic slavery far more than political which tore the sinews from the arms of the nations of antiquity, and rendered defenceless their states, empires and republics. If the officers of the Egyptian armies were of a red extraction, the rank and file was undoubtedly of the negro family. Herodotus says that "the Egyptians were black and had short, crisped hair," and that "the skulls of the Egyptians were by far thicker than those of the Persians—so that they could scarcely be broken by a big stone, while a Persian skull could be broken by a pebble." Such were the elements, with so many, and such varied hues of skin, or pigments mixed, which constituted the Egyptian people—which formed a society so strong and compact that, for more than forty centuries, its influence and existence constitute one of the most significant phenomena of the antique world. These hybrid elements elaborated a civilization called by modern ethnologists Cushitic or Chamitic, in contradistinction to the Shemitic and to the Japhetic[4] (or Aryan.) The pre-eminent active elements in this civilization were the artists, merchants, and operatives. It was eminent for mathematical and astronomical science, for architecture, the mechanic arts, and a highly elaborated administration. And this Egyptian or Chamitic civilization, too, preceded by many centuries the Shemitic and Aryan cultures.

The origin of the denomination Chamites and Cushites has long been the subject of numerous ethnologic researches, while comparative philology, which has proved itself so potent in the solution of innumerable race-problems, has also been interrogated. The question is, by what name did the Egyptians call themselves or their land; and what meaning did they attach to such names? K-M (whence Kam, Kem, Kemi, Cham) signifies "the black land;" though, according to Champollion, it implies "the pure land;" while others give it the meaning of "the sceptre." At any rate, Cham signifies "black" in Egyptian and its ancient dialects—those of Thebes and Memphis, for instance, as also in the Coptic. Egypt proper was called by its inhabitants "the black land" on account of the appearance of its soil; it was black in contradistinction to the red land (or Descher, i.e., "desert") which surrounded the Nile valley. The Hebrews borrowed the word from the Egyptians, and transferred it from a geographic to an ethnical name—or rather, perhaps, this application was made by subsequent commentators on the Hebrew writings. Neither was the denomination Cush (Egyptian Kus, Kês-i-or, Kăs) used by the Egyptians for their own land or people. They employed it, as would appear, to denominate lands situated south of Egypt proper; for the Egyptian viceroys who administrated the government of these lands bore the title of "Si suten n Kus," or king-sons of Kush. These lands were thickly inhabited by black and brown populations. In the same way, the Hebrews (or Beni-Israel) used the denominations Cush and Cushites in a generic sense for lands and tribes situated south of them; and the term expanded with the peregrinations, forced or voluntary, of the Arabs and Jews. First it was applied to lands and tribes south of Mesopotamia (Naharaina), the birthplace of Heber (Taber) and the Beni-Israel; and when they were in Egypt, either as free or captive Hycksos, they applied the term Cush to the region of Meroe south of the Nile; and (according to Jewish writers) Sabäa, in southern Arabia, was also inhabited by sons of Cush. It would be difficult to determine to which language the word primarily belongs, but, in all probability, early Shemitic writers transmitted it to the ancient Armenians, just as they in turn transmitted it to western or Christian writers. Herodotus used it; and his Kissia is identical with that of the Hebrews and Armenians. The denomination Chute, Chuzi, Cossaia, Cussaia, of various dialects of Fore-Asia has reference to the tribes of Kuschani, Kusi, Cushites. Hence Cushites are to be found in Syria, Arabia and Africa.

In the phonetic character is found the expression M-S-R as a designation for that land. It is synonymous with the Arabic Misr, the Jewish Mizraim, Mazor, and the Syriac Mezren. Various explanations are given of this word, according to the significations it has in the various dialects. According to some it means "stronghold," while according to others, it signifies "extension;" by the Hebrews it was applied to Egypt, or, as some commentators assert, to the Egyptians.

Other appellations for the land of Egypt are found in the hieroglyphs and in phonetic groups. This is the case, for instance, with the group Nehi, signifying the sycamore, which is believed to be indigenous in Egypt.

None of these names, however, had any historical signification, so that it still remains a mystery what the native name for the primitive civilizers of the Nile valley was. As for the name Egypt, Egyptians, this was bestowed on them by the Greeks; and some attempt to deduce it from Phtha or Ptah, a divinity of the city and township of Memphis; and the denomination, Land of Ptah, is supposed to have been used in a generic sense.

The advantage of thus exploring those historical and philological labyrinths will make itself clear in succeeding chapters. Philology has explained the signification of various other ancient ethnic and national names, among others, "Hebrews," "Aryas" or "Aryans," "Pelasgi," "Greeks," "Canaanites," etc., and such explanations have frequently proved of the highest value in letting us into the secret of their origin, character, and the direction of their activity. But there is no vestige of the antique language of the Egyptians that would lead us to suppose that absolute distinctions of race, or chattelhood based thereon, formed features of the primitive life in the Nile valley.

From various paintings, inscriptions, and philological data, science has endeavored to reconstruct the ethnological conceptions entertained by the Egyptians seventeen centuries B.C. The red race occupied Egypt (chiefly lower Egypt), Arabia, and part of Babylonia; the yellow race was spread over Palestine and Syria, reaching Africa; the white race stretched north and north-west of Egypt, inhabiting a part of Libya and the islands of Rhodes, Cyprus, Crete, etc.; the black and brown race occupied Egypt, Abyssinia, Nubia, and Southern Arabia. Nah es. u or Nah si. u was the name given to all negroes or blacks who were not Egyptians, while to the whole red-colored race they applied the term ret, ret-u, signifying "germ."

The Egyptian pantheon was of course the creation of the superior priests. It made each human race the creation of a separate god; and very probably all the numerous elements in the complicated social structure of the Egyptians, that is, every caste or function, even the lowest, which was still an integral part of the whole, had each its separate deity. The creator of the black race was either a god represented symbolically by a blackbird, or the god H'or (or Horos), son of Osiris, and his avenger, who dwelt in the firmament with all the other deities.

The negro physiognomy appears on the Egyptian monuments; and this not only in the representations of common persons, but even in the case of kings, as, for instance, those of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, in the statues of Totmes III. and Amenophis III. The Egyptian king Sabakos was an Ethiopian by birth, and many other Pharaohs married black African princesses—Nah es. u. There can be no doubt of intermarriages having been common, between red and black Egyptians proper; and through such unions, legal and illegal, it was that the brownish rather than entirely black color of the Egyptian man of the people, as represented on the monuments, was produced. (A similar slow but uninterrupted transition and modification may be verified at the present day and under our own eyes—crisped hair, thick skulls,[5] still prevailing). Finally, eunuchs are represented of a yellowish hue, perhaps nearer in tint to that of the yellow than the black race.

Some psychologic ethnologists affirm that the African or pure negro is to be considered as constituting a passive race, requiring fecundation by an active one. If this be the case, then the Egyptians solved the question. The red and dominant race drew no impassable lines of demarcation by chattelhood; and the black population formed the most vital element of the social structure.

At the threshold of what our limited knowledge considers as positive history, therefore, we meet a highly developed society and nation, which for long centuries enjoyed a political existence, normal when compared with contemporaneous and surrounding nations, and domestic slavery neither lay at the basis of the structure, nor formed an integral element of Egyptian life. In the monuments, paintings, and inscriptions which remain as records and reminiscences of Egypt's palmy ages, no traces are found in the regular national and domestic economy, of agricultural or industrial labor which could have been performed by slaves or chattels. Slaves and slavery existed in Egypt, not as an intrinsic and integral part of society, but as an unhealthy excrescence—not under the sanction of right or law, but as the result of a violation of both. Egyptian slavery was an atonement for social and personal crime—an abnormal monstrosity, and not the normal and vital force of Egyptian activity. If slavery had been a normal social institution, it would have had its deity and its rites; but, as exclusively the result of a disease, it was regulated and dealt with as such.

Egyptian slaves consisted of prisoners of war made on the field of battle, or captives taken in forays made into neighboring or distant countries. In early times, also, all strangers whom accident or tempest threw on the shores of Egypt, and who had no claims to a legal hospitality, were enslaved; for, for centuries Egypt was closed against the intrusion of foreigners—certain merchants and traffickers only being specially excepted. Furthermore, conquered countries paid their tribute partly in children, who thus became slaves. All these slaves were the property of the Pharaohs, who employed them in various ways, distributed them to their officials, sold them to their subjects of all castes, or to domestic and foreign traffickers. But the exportation of slaves belongs to a later period—the epoch of Egypt's historical decay. Slaves were imported, but not exported, as there was no special economical slave-breeding for this or other purposes.

It is unnecessary to dwell on the generally known fact of the captivity and enslavement of the Jews, or to detail the researches concerning the Hycksos—first slaves, then masters and rulers, and finally again overpowered and reduced to captivity. But beside these Shemites, Hebrews—be they Hycksos or not—all other races and nations were at some time or other captives and slaves in Egypt. The Pharaohs warred with Asiatics, and especially with what is now called Caucasian races; and the monuments show that red, white, and yellow slaves taken in war were far more numerous than the blacks.

Egyptians condemned for any kind of criminal offence became slaves, or were condemned to public hard labor. As equality before the law prevailed in Egypt, a person belonging to the superior caste (red-skin) was liable thus to become a slave in his own country. Contrary, however, to the custom of almost the whole of antiquity, and even of earlier Christian times, the Egyptians never reduced debtors to personal slavery. A debtor was not personally responsible, and could not be sold into slavery by his creditor.

Slaves of every kind might be redeemed and manumitted. They then became equal to other Egyptians, as is evidenced by the marriage of Joseph with a daughter of a high-priest, and by his eminent official position. Children born from Egyptians and their slave women, whether red, yellow, black or white, were equal in all rights, and shared the inheritance with the legitimate offspring of the same father. The father transmitted his own status to his children, according to a custom general in the East, and ascending to the remotest antiquity.

Slaves worked in the mines, and were employed on every kind of hard labor, but principally, and as far as possible, on those great and almost indestructible public works and monuments that distinguished the cities of the Nile. It was the pride of the Pharaohs to be enabled to inscribe on the structure that the work was not performed by the hands of Egyptians—referring to the hard work, such as carrying blocks, raising and preparing material, digging canals, etc. All the servants about the palace, sanctuary and villa were slaves. They belonged to all races and colors, and as such are represented on the monuments. In ancient, independent Egypt, therefore, slavery was, in the strictest sense, limited to the household.

Such was Egypt, the most ancient of nations and civilizations. In her, slavery was an incidental and abnormal condition, and did not enter into the vitals of society during the long centuries that this society stood foremost among nations and civilizations. In the last stages of Egyptian history, however, domestic slavery did its terrible work, helped by conquests by foreigners, by the overthrow of its independence, by exactions, tributes, and all kinds of oppressions. Then only was it that political slavery, or what is called oriental despotism, became altogether fused with domestic slavery.

Various are the causes to which the decomposition and downfall of Egypt are ascribed. Some assert that Egyptian society and civilization, traversing all the stages of growth and development, logically ended in senility, decrepitude and death. Others find in the division into castes, one of the pre-eminent causes of the decline of Egypt. But, baneful and destructive as is the organization into castes, it is a blessing when compared with domestic slavery. The rigid organization of the castes was a counter-poison, a check imposed upon the extension of domestic slavery, preventing it from eating up the healthy agencies of society. The caste system—and above all priestly caste—was, to a great extent, a curb on the despotism of the Pharaohs. The castes for many centuries prevented the fusion of the two greatest social plagues: domestic and political slavery.

The all-powerful law of analogies—which in the course of these pages will be more luminously exhibited from the fate of other empires and civilizations—authorizes already the positive, and even axiomatic assertion, that the almost unparalleled by long historical life of the Egyptians, and the highly advanced state of their civilization, are due exclusively to the fact, that domestic slavery and chattelhood remained for a long time an abnormal outgrowth. It was not the basis of domestic and national economy, not the object fit for the special care of the legislator, and was not intertwined with the social, political and intellectual life of the Egyptians.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] The term Japhetic is rather confused and unscientific. It is used here as being more popularly intelligible.

[5] Herodotus.

[II.]

PHŒNICIANS.

AUTHORITIES:

Moevers, Rénan, Duncker, Ewald, Ezekiel, Proverbs of Solomon, etc.

Previous to any epoch settled by positive history, the Canaanites, or Phœnicians, a highly civilized nation, dwelt in the land called Palestine. They were an elderly branch of the Shemitic family; their generic name embracing the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, and Girgasites—all of whom the Greeks called Phœnicians. Canaan, in the Shemitic dialects, signifies "lowland," as was Palestine, in contradistinction to Aram, or the highlands of Mesopotamia (Naharajim, Nahirim of the Old Testament). Canaan, in Hebrew proper, is sometimes synonymous with "merchant;" and the historical development of the Phœnicians explains and justifies this signification. The Greek name Phœnicians, is supposed by some to be derived from phoinizai, "to kill," whence Phoinikes (Phœnicians), "bloody men." The Phœnicians, being very jealous of their maritime trade, killed and in every way molested the navigators from other lands who dared to follow their vessels or spy out their extensive maritime establishments, factories, or connections. For this reason the Greeks long considered the Tyrrenian seas as highly dangerous for navigators, and as filled with rocks, monsters, and anthropophagi. Other investigators, again, derive the Greek word Phœnicians from their ruddy complexion, or from their having first navigated the Red Sea.

The primitive seats of the Phœnicians lay north and south of Syria. From thence they are supposed to have emigrated to Palestine through the northern part of Syria, while another column from the south advanced from the delta on the Persian Gulf, anciently called Assyrium Stagnum, or from the islands of Tyros (Tylos) and Arados, situated in the above-named waters. Some writers suppose that an earthquake obliged them to emigrate from these shores of the Erythrean or Red Sea (Persian Gulf) of antiquity, and that their Greek name owes its origin to this circumstance.

These wanderings through regions already thickly inhabited by various tribes and nations, may have contributed to develop in these Shemites that powerful mercantile propensity to which they chiefly owe their historical immortality; then and there, too, they most probably began the traffic in slaves, to which, if they were not its originators, they certainly gave a new and powerful impulse. Thus, while the Phœnicians figure in history as the earliest navigators and merchants, they must also be written down in the light of having inaugurated, or at least, greatly extended the accursed slave-trade.

No division into castes seems ever to have existed among the Phœnicians. As a general rule, no traces of this social circumscription are to be detected among the nations of pure or even of mixed Shemitic stock which flourished in Fore-Asia—in Syria, Babylon or Assyria. The Phœnician political organism embraced 1st, the powerful ruling families; and 2dly, the subject classes—a division similar to that of the aristos and demos which prevailed in Greece, or to the patricians and plebeians of Rome. The land of Canaan was originally cultivated by freeholders and yeomen. When one tribe subdued another, or when the victors settled among the vanquished, the latter were not enslaved; they became a kind of tribute-paying colonists, with limited political privileges, but with full civil rights. They were at liberty to hold real and personal property of every kind, just as much as the ruling tribe or class. So also it was among all the Shemites, and, with but few exceptions, among all the nations of antiquity.

Slaves, at this period, were employed only at hard labor in the cities and in the household; they were as yet neither farmers, field-laborers, nor mechanics. But, as already mentioned, the Phœnicians were the great slave-traders, carriers and factors in the remotest antiquity, and this both by land and sea. At a period of more than fourteen centuries B.C., the Phœnicians covered all the shores around the Egean and Mediterranean seas with their factories, strongholds and colonial cities. Besides this, they stretched out even to the Euxine, while their colonies studded, also, the Corinthian and Ionian gulfs (on the sites of modern Patras and Lepanto), and extended on the Atlantic coast even beyond Gibraltar. The records of the earliest wanderings of these Canaanitish tribes into Africa, and even Greece, are preserved in legends as the migrations of gods, demigods and heroes.

Thus the Phœnicians linked in a vast commercial chain Britain, Iberia (Spain), and India; while the Guadalquiver, the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Indus, served as highways for their trading enterprise. From Byblos, Tyre, Sidon and other emporiums, they sent out caravans far and wide into Arabia and Fore-Asia. The products of their art and industry were reputed most exquisite even as early as the epoch of the Iliad, and they were vain enough to look on themselves as the pivots of the world's prosperity, and the Scriptures repeatedly mention the pride and denounce the vices of the Phœnician cities. What their merchants bought or received in barter in Asia or in Egypt, they exchanged for the rough products of Greece, Spain, Albion, Libya, and the lands on the Euxine: these consisted principally of grains, hides, copper, tin, silver, gold, and indeed all kinds of marketable objects. Their central situation for the commerce of the known and almost of the unknown world, especially favored the slave-trade. Accordingly Phœnician slaves became more and more valuable, and a continually extending market produced a constantly increasing demand. In all probability the inland caravan excursions afforded the principal supplies for their immense slave traffic; but they also bought, stole, and kidnapped from every possible place and by every conceivable stratagem—just as modern American slave-traders do. In this horrid industry they visited every shore. They carried it on among the Greeks, among the Barbarians of the Hellespont and the Pontus, among the Iberians, Italians, Moors and other Africans. Natives of Asia were sold to Greece and other European countries, while Syria and Egypt were furnished with European slaves. The great majority of these slaves belonged to what is called the Caucasian race, and negroes constituted a comparatively insignificant part. In return for these white chattels the Phœnicians bartered the products of Egypt and of Fore-Asia.

The Phœnicians, then, were the great, and, in all probability, the exclusive slave-traders of those times. The traffic had its chief centre in Byblos, Sidon and Tyre—the depots, bazaars, and storehouses of which were always glutted with human merchandise.

In times positively historical, when Phœnicia had come to be the mighty and flourishing emporium of the world's trade, foreign slaves constituted the immense majority of the population of her cities—as indeed was the case with most of the commercial cities of antiquity; but none of them were so crowded with slaves as were Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon. In consequence of this agglomeration, slavery gradually crept from the market and the household into general industry and agriculture. The slaves thus employed by the Phœnicians may be classified as follows: 1. Slaves of luxury, living in the house of the master; 2. Slaves employed in various branches of manufacture, as weavers, dyers, and artisans of all kinds—as also in the manual labors common to every maritime and commercial city; 3. Agricultural slaves.

This vast accumulation of slaves begat repeated and bloody revolts during the whole historic existence of Phœnicia. The scanty and comparatively insignificant fragments of her history which now exist are filled with accounts of such revolts, generally ending as most fearful tragedies. An uprising of this kind occurred in Tyre about ten centuries B.C.; and history records, that at that time the king, the aristocracy, all the masters, and even great numbers of non-slaveholding freemen were slaughtered. The women, however, were saved and married by the slaves; and thus many primitive oligarchic families entirely disappeared. Frequent servile revolts and insurrections of this kind resulted at length in the partial emancipation of the slaves and their conquest of certain civil rights.

In keeping with the almost boundless accumulation of wealth in those cities was the increase in the number of slaves. As a consequence, the free laborers, artisans, and farmers became impoverished and dispossessed; and, as was natural, they often joined the insurgent bondmen. The oligarchs also sent out these poor freemen wherever Phœnician ships could carry them, or wherever there was a chance of establishing factories, cities, or colonies. Such was the common origin of those primitive Phœnician settlements, which were scattered north and west on almost every shore. In most regions, even in Libya, their object was simply commercial and not at all of a conquering character. At any rate the newcomers soon intermarried and mixed with the natives.

The slaveholding rulers were now forced to sustain a hired soldiery to keep down the slaves—not for defence against an external but an internal foe. Among these hirelings were the Carryians, Lydians, Libyans, and Libyo-Phœnicians. To such motley mercenaries were they obliged to intrust the security of their homes and municipalities. At times this hireling soldiery joined the revolted slaves, and they formed but a poor defence against the Egyptians, or against Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Alexandrian conquest. To all these empires the Phœnician slaveholders were obliged to pay tribute, until finally Alexander massacred or enslaved them all—slaveholders and slaves alike.

Already some of the violent pro-slavery militants in the slave section of the United States express their purpose to invoke the aid of France in their schemes of secession and conquest, and propose that their cities and states be occupied by French garrisons. What a striking analogy with the course of the fated Phœnicians! And if eventually France should listen to their humble prayer and send defenders to these terrified slave-masters, climatic reasons would induce her to furnish such troops as are naturally fitted to bear the tropical heats of the slave-coast—the malarious regions of Louisiana and South Carolina. Such would be her Zouaves and Turcos—the Zouaves enemies of every kind of slavery, and the Turcos negroes themselves. Where then would be their defenders and their security? Every French soldier, even if neither Zouave nor Turco, would, in all probability, side at once with the oppressed against the oppressor. The prejudice of race, so prevalent in America, is not a European characteristic: it did not exist in antiquity; it does not prevail in Europe now.

It was not the existence of an oriental political despotism in Phœnicia—it was domestic slavery, which, penetrating into industry and agriculture, destroyed the richest, most enterprising, and most daring community of remote antiquity. Cicero wrote their epitaph: "Fallacissimum esse genus Phœnicum, omnia monumenta vetustatis atque omnes historia nobis prodiderunt."

When, therefore, positive history slowly rises on the limitless horizon of time, Phœnicia appears as an ominous illustration of how domestic slavery, from an external social monstrosity, tends to become a chronic but corrosive disease. And neither does the evidence of history end with her. Over and over again will it be found that slavery, after eating so deeply into the social organism as to become constitutional and chronic, has the same ultimate issue, even as a virus slowly but surely penetrates from the extremities into the vitals of the animal organism.

The intermediate stages of such diseases and the process of the symptoms are often modified in their outward manifestations to such an extent as to lead even the keen observer astray. But it is only he who can unerringly diagnosticate the nature of the disease who can ever become a great healer: he discovers the true character and source of the malady, whatever may be its external complications, and from whatever conditions and influences they may result. Some symptoms may increase, others decrease in intensity and virulence in the physiological as in the social disease—they are, however, secondary. The parallel holds good—the principle remaining unchanged: life becomes extinct for similar reasons in the animal as in the social and political body.

Thus, in the history of the Phœnicians, and therefore, in the earliest authentic epoch, a great historical and social law manifests itself in full action. This activity it retains through all the subsequent social and political catastrophes in the life of nations and empires, down even to Hayti with her immortal Toussaint. Slavery generates bloody struggles. Many of these have resulted in the slaves violently regaining their liberty, while others have destroyed the whole state—swallowing up the slaveholders in their own blood, or burying them under the ruins of their own social edifice.

[III.]

LIBYANS.

AUTHORITIES:

Diodorus Siculus, Corippus, Moevers, etc.

The primitive social and intellectual condition of the populations dwelling along the shores of Africa washed by the Mediterranean sea, can only be inferred from their respective relations with the Phœnicians and Carthaginians. Other sources of historical information as to that remote period there are none, while later times also give comparatively scanty satisfaction.

Ethnology has not yet positively determined who the aborigines of Libya were, and it is questionable if it can ever be satisfactorily settled. Egyptian inscriptions indicate a white race in the north-eastern corner of Libya, adjoining Egypt; while further to the west lived the blacks. At a period exceedingly remote, the whites mixed with these negro blacks, who probably immigrated from the centre of Africa—Soudan—and spread over the whole of Libya. These remote epochs, however, altogether refuse chronological limitation. But when chronology, even of the most rudimentary kind, becomes possible, history shows us the existence, in Libya, of a nomadic and agricultural people, who can be no other than these cross-breeds, and who had brought a part of the land to a high degree of cultivation. The Libyans may thus be considered as an autochthonous African population—a theory which is confirmed by other evidence not now necessary to give.

Among these Libyans—called by the Greeks Afri, and by the Romans, Africani—agriculture was in a highly flourishing condition at the epoch of the earliest myths and legends of Greece: all the Hellenic legends relating to the distant sea-wanderings of gods or heroes, carry them to the Libyan shores about the Regio Syrtica—Tripolis. Among these are the Argonauts and Heraklides, Perseus, Kadmos, Odysseus, and Menalaos. So the Greek myths of Atlas and the Garden of the Hesperides have their spring and source in that part of Libya. All this presupposes a very old culture. Herodotus says that the Ægis of the Greek Pallas originated in Libya, as also that Athene here received Gorgona's head for her Ægis. Even at the present day, the chiefs of some of the tribes in the southern part of ancient Libya carry the skins of leopards and other wild beasts on their shoulders in such a way that the head of the animal, Ægis-like, covers their breast. The adventurous Phœnician and Greek navigators of the earliest period accordingly found the Libyans already a highly cultivated people. This culture, too, they possessed previous to their intercourse with the Canaanites, Phœnicians, or Greeks—anterior even to the wanderings of Astarte, Anna, or Dido.

At this epoch the Libyans were possessed of written language. Their alphabet was, in certain peculiarities, of an older type than even the Phœnician—that father of so many eastern and western alphabets. Leptis and Oka are Libyan names for Libyan cities which were in existence previous to any Phœnician colonizations—though these colonizations are themselves anterior to positive history.

Goats, sheep, and other domestic animals were introduced into Greece and Italy from Libya; and from thence also came the knowledge of how to breed and rear them. The Libyans also, in all probability, first taught them the mode of keeping and rearing bees, as the Greek word for "wax," keros—Latin, cera, is by some deduced from the Berber (Libyan) ta-kir, and the Greek designation for honey, meli, mel—Latin, mel, from the Berber ta-men-t. Others, however, trace both those words to a Sanscrit root.

As an evidence of their advanced civilization, it may be mentioned that the Libyans were highly accomplished in horticulture at a time when the fields of Greece and Italy were only rudely ploughed. From Libya across the Mediterranean, the leguminous or pulse plants seem to have been introduced into Southern Europe, together with the mode of their use and culture; and some investigators consider that the Latin names for "pease" (cicer), for "lentils" (lens, lentis), and for "beans" (faba), have their origin in the Berber ikiker, ta-linit, and fabua. But to these words, also, others give a Sanscrit origin. Cucurbis "cucumber," is in Berber curumb—although, again, it is traced, but forcedly, to the Sanscrit. Whatever may be the origin of the words, it is an historical fact that the Romans acquired their whole knowledge of horticulture from the Libyans and Libyo-Phœnicians; and it may even be surmised that the Latin urtus, "hortus," had its root in the Berber urt.

Civilization among the Libyans, therefore, was anterior to any contact either with Phœnicians or Greeks, and long centuries anterior to the Carthaginian domination over the northern shores of Africa.

The Libyans were a nation of agriculturists and freeholders. No trace of slavery appears among them, and, if it existed at all, was altogether insignificant and accidental. When the Phœnicians and Canaanitish settlements increased in power and number, the Libyans became tributary colonists, and the Phœnicians instituted the slave-trade among them, whose victims were confined mostly to the nomads.

As we have before said, the poor white colonists sent from Canaan and Phœnicia to Libya intermarried with the natives; and from this union came the Libyo-Phœnicians of history. The relations which the Libyans (and subsequently the Libyo-Phœnicians, when again subjugated) held to Phœnician and Canaanitish settlers, were similar to those which free Romans afterward held to the Longobard and Frankish conquerors who settled upon and held the lands of which they were once the masters.

[IV.]

CARTHAGINIANS.

AUTHORITIES:

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Polybius, Corippus, Moevers, etc.

The Carthaginians were the great ethnic offshoots of Phœnicia in the western part of the ancient world. It would not be in place here to inquire what motives led these wanderers away from their Asiatic home, or what was the nature of the settlement which they made. They left Tyre and founded the celebrated city of Carthage, on a spot where an ancient colony from Sidon previously existed.[6] Carthage very early—indeed, we might almost say, at the start—assumed a higher character than any previous colony or city of Phœnicia. It soon became, in fact, an independent political power. It began to flourish at a time when Tyre and Sidon were on the decline, and when these once great cities had become tributary to Asiatic potentates. The Carthaginians became first the protectors, and soon afterward, the masters of all the ancient Phœnician colonies scattered over the western world. Nor did they stop here; they became a warlike and conquering empire. The political misfortunes of their mother country increased, by almost uninterrupted immigration, the number of poor free citizens in Carthage, as well as in other seacoast cities now Punic, though once Phœnician—many of them, indeed, having a numerous Libyo-Phœnician population. This surplus the Carthaginians sent off as colonists into the interior of Libya, where they founded smaller cities or settled as agriculturists among the native population, whose lands, in many instances, were assigned to the new-comers. The Carthaginian oligarchy soon began to oppress and look with contempt upon the ancient Phœnicians, Libyo-Phœnicians and Libyans. In process of time, the new colonists mixed with the ancient populations, and all were soon equally sufferers from oppressive tributes and exactions. The common hatred of these various populations against the oligarchy, which frequently led to revolt, was a powerful aid to the Numidian kings and to the Romans in their efforts to crush haughty Carthage.

The great Carthaginian oligarchs and slaveholders extended and perfected what the Phœnicians perhaps only began. They acquired in various ways vast landed estates, and oppressed and impoverished the tributary colonists and small freeholders by grievous exactions; they seized their homesteads, and finally reduced them to serfdom and slavery. Toward the decline of Carthaginian power, such estates were mostly cultivated by slaves; and these slaves—those in the country as well as those in the cities—were either Libyo-Phœnicians and Libyans, or belonged to Asiatic and European races—the unhappy individuals being either bought or taken as prisoners of war. The subdued and slave populations were as mixed as the Carthaginian armies, which, in Africa especially, contained a vast number of negroes—thus presenting an antetype of the French Turcos.

The gigantic struggle of Carthage with Rome decided the destinies of the world. Carthage fell. But the breath of the moribund slave-holding oligarchy of Carthage poisoned Rome. The tragic malediction of Dido received its fulfilment, though not in the precise manner recorded by Virgil in the Ænead.

After having conquered Carthage and Numidia, the Romans distributed among their own colonists the immense estates of the Carthaginian slaveholders, which, however, had been previously appropriated by the Numidian kings. Phœnicians, Libyo-Phœnicians, Libyans and Carthaginians, all now either became Roman colonists, or else serfs and chattels in the villas of their Roman masters. When the Vandals conquered Africa, the Romans in their turn shared the fate of all their predecessors, who had in succession been reduced to serfdom and domestic slavery, the one by the other. In the character of serfs and chattels, these various races now cultivated for their Vandal masters the lands and farms which once were their own. Thus affording an additional illustration of the eternal and omnipotent law of retribution and compensation.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] The name Carthage signifies a "new borough," or "city."

[V.]

HEBREWS, OR BENI-ISRAEL.

AUTHORITIES:

The Scriptures, Ewald, Rénan, Duncker, Gessenius, Grotefend, etc.

The pro-slavery party, pacific as well as militant, has long sought to fall back on the Mosaic records for the justification of the "sacred" and "patriarchal" institution. The historic records throw a bright light on the gray dawn of Hebraic life—giving us an insight into the primitive forms of society, not only of the Hebrews, but of the other, and especially the Shemitic inhabitants of Syria and of Fore-Asia. And, truly enough, servants and slaves are found around the tent of the patriarch.

It has already been mentioned that in times long prior to any definite chronology, the regions constituting Syria, Palestine and Arabia were inhabited by various tribes—some of whom were offshoots from one stem and some from another. Of these tribes, some had already formed themselves into well-developed societies, while others, if they were not absolutely roving nomads, yet often changed their dwellings according to the exigencies of pastoral life. Palestine, the final home of the Hebrew, was, in all probability, the earliest as well as the chief highway of antiquity—especially for the Shemitic and Chamitic races, just as the Caucasus and its slopes are supposed to have been the highway for Aryan or Indo-European emigrants, and for Finnic, Altaïc, and Mongolian or yellow races. This character it had before the time when Terah, Abraham's father, drove his herds from the table-lands of Mesopotamia (Naharaina); and it preserved it under Phœnician as well as under Hebrew dominion. Repeatedly did Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians, as well as Persians, and finally Alexander and his generals, march through Palestine in their invading and conquering expeditions. The important part which Palestine played in the early commercial history of the world, also, has already been pointed out while treating of the Phœnicians.

The origin first of domestic servitude, and then of absolute chattelhood, among the primitive pastoral tribes, may be traced to two distinct sources, both of them springing from abnormal conditions and events. One source was the constant feuds and wars of the tribes; the other, individual indolence and shiftlessness. The household of a patriarch, originally composed of a family and then of a clan, soon had its share of restless as well as indolent dependents. Such hangers-on were neither as frugal nor as industrious as the patriarch's family, and so enjoyed but small consideration; generally, moreover, they were most likely strangers who, through necessity or gratitude, adhered to the house and considered themselves an integral part of it. But the patriarch had the most absolute power over all the members of the family—over his wife, his sons and daughters, and all their progeny and relations. He could banish them from the family and hearth; he could sell them away to others; he had power of life and death over them all; and such powers, of course, extended over dependents and servants. In fact, the patriarch was the supreme and only-existing law. His will, and absolute obedience thereto, was the only guarantee of order inside of the tent, and outside of it also in their relations with the tents and clans of other patriarchs. The more exclusive and distinct such a family or clan was, the more independent it was in all its relations with similar social crystallizations; and the more closely did the dependents adhere to it for support and protection.

Such was undoubtedly the origin of the domestic servitude which appears in the Scriptures with the apparition of Abraham as a distinct historical individuality. But such servants and dependents being a part of the family, were not commonly sold nor made an article of merchandise, and were not, strictly speaking, chattels, as were prisoners made in feuds or wars.[7] Besides, in the formation of the primitive patriarchal household, the domestic, pastoral and agricultural labors were performed by the family—children, grandchildren, etc.; just as it is in the present day in every simple household—for a simple family formed the germ of the tribe and of the retainers around the tent of the patriarch. As the family increased, so did the herds, and so also did the duties to be performed. Meanwhile the members of the expanding family continued to attend to the household services—just as is now the case in similar circumstances—without their becoming slaves or chattels for all that. The primitive Aryan language (of which hereafter) clearly confirms what both reason and analogy assert as being an inherent fact in the constitution of every family, whatever may be the peculiarities of skin or skull, or their other ethnic characteristics. Moreover, even according to those opposed to the absolute unity of the whole human race, the Shemites descend from the same common progenitor as the Aryas (of whom are we), and this affinity strengthens what was said above concerning the similarity of their domestic life.

With the increase of the tribes and families, neighboring or scattered, increased the degeneracy of the dependents, until finally these miserable persons, grown to be an excrescence on the primitive Hebrew family life, and unable to take care of themselves, willingly accepted slavery—at times indeed craved it. The same phenomenon, under different modifications, and occasioned by various causes, again and again reappears in divers nations and empires, just as the same bodily maladies have constantly reproduced themselves throughout the countless centuries of human existence. And indeed the morale of Noah's curse can only be, that servitude, being generated by corruption of manhood, was, in its very nature, a diseased and degraded condition.

Abraham belonged to a class common to the Arabs, Hebrews, and all the Shemitic races—shieks or chiefs of warlike tribes, who were in the habit of making war against each other, carrying off prisoners, and even kidnapping on occasion. It was these victims chiefly that were the objects of traffic; and this very trait is true of the Arab tribes down to the present day.

The Hebrews, liberated from captivity in Egypt—that is, from political slavery, which must never be confounded with chattelhood—fought against their kinsmen, the Shemitic Canaanites, with a view to make themselves a home in a country already thickly settled, and in comparatively advanced culture and civilization. The Hebrews, poor, energetic, and hardened by the privations of a long captivity, bore the same relation to the nations of Canaan which they invaded, as the half-naked, half-starved barbarians of a long subsequent epoch bore to the Roman world, against which they rushed with the force of doom. The invading Israelites, according to the commands of Jahveh (Jehovah), carried on wars of extermination against the Phœnicians, Philistines, Ammonites, Amorites, Moabites, and other inhabitants of south-western Syria. Many of these original occupants and cultivators of the land of Canaan fled even to Africa, from the exterminating fury of the Jews, led by Moses, Aaron, and Joshua. Meanwhile the Jews took possession of the conquered and abandoned lands, which were divided between the tribes; and the great body of the Hebrews settled on them as agriculturists and free yeomen. In process of time, under the direction and inspiration of Jahveh, the supreme Lord of Israel, the body of commandments, regulations and ceremonials, called the Mosaic law, was framed.

The law of Moses has two prominent divisions—first, imperative commands, and second, dispensations. In respect of all absolute duties to God, as well as domestic and social duties, the law lays down its commands even to the minutest details, and rigidly condemns their violator. But, on the other hand, taking into account human frailty, and the temptations to which it is exposed, as also the exigencies and customs of life, the law is also full of dispensations. This twofold character of the Mosaic law affords its antagonists a broad field for assaults on its apparent contradictions. The law condemns idolatry, yet Aaron, the first high-priest, casts a golden calf for the people to worship, while Moses raises a brazen serpent before their eyes as a material symbol for their faith. The law commands monogamy, but permits and regulates concubinage. It prohibits licentiousness, fornication, and rape, but overlooks them in certain instances, as, for example, after a successful battle or the storming of a city, because such crimes are unavoidable when the demoniac passions are brought powerfully into play. Many other illustrations of this twofold character of the Mosaic law might be pointed out.

But minute and precise though the Mosaic record is in its religious and social commands and obligations, it nowhere commands the Hebrews, as a religious or social duty, to enslave the Canaanitish idolaters among whom they lived. Enslavement and chattelhood are nowhere laid down as special duties, nor is slavery regarded as forming the corner-stone of the Jewish social, civil, and religious structure. Slavery is not the subject of the covenant with God or of the covenant with man; neither did the possession of slaves confer any political, religious, or social rights. All this was left for the deduction of modern theology and politics.

The Mosaic law deals with slavery as with an existing evil, and regulates it as an abnormal institution. The lawgiver recalls to the memory of the Jews that they were themselves captives and bondsmen—an historic fact to which, as we have already seen, the ancestry of many of the slaveholders in the United States, at the present day, furnish a parallel.

But perhaps Biblical commentators have not drawn with sufficient severity the distinction in meaning between the Hebrew word for "servant," "attendant," etc., and that for an "absolute chattel." Chattelhood, in the modern legal and practical application of the term, was undoubtedly a rare condition in the time of the patriarchs, and even in the primitive theocratic epochs of Beni-Israel. The Hebrew language has four words to express the primitive domestic relations of the race, and neither of them will admit the meaning of positive chattelhood. Probably the oldest is the word a'buddah, which occurs in the book of Job, whose dialect is considered by modern philologists to be far older than the Mosaic scriptures; the same word is also found once only in Genesis (Gessenius Dict.). It is a collective noun, and signifies "attendants," "laborers," and, according to some exegetes, it also signifies an "estate." Such may perhaps be its meaning in the book of Job, as it occurs after the enumeration of various movables, such as flocks and herds, and may thus, in distinction, convey the idea of real property. The logical sequence in such enumerations was undoubtedly the same then as it is now—movables first in order, then landed property. Another Hebrew word for the primitive domestic servant is na'ar, but its application seems to have been rather limited; it is mostly employed to designate a "lad-servant" or "apprentice." The word most generally used, however, and the one most variously translated and explained by lexicographers is e'bed: it variously signifies "subject," "servant," "serf," "slave," "attendant," "officer," etc. Its application to a "serf" or "slave" has perhaps rather a moral or ideal than a positive legal or social sense. Thus, when in Genesis it is said that "Moses removed the swarms of flies from Pharaoh, from his servants (e'bed), and from his people," the word e'bed undoubtedly signifies "ministers," "courtiers," "officers," and "servants of the court," and not actual serfs or slaves. Common sense would surely indicate that chattels could not have been mentioned immediately after the great Pharaoh, and before his people; and still less likely is it that the oriental despotism which reduced all to political slaves was unknown in the Egypt of the early Pharaohs. Finally, the word abduh alone may signify a "slave" in the strict sense of the term; it is used by Ezra, and belongs to a period of national degradation, when both slavery and idolatry flourished in Israel.

Slavery, however, never became an integral element of Hebrew life, nor, during their centuries of glory, did its pestilence-breath endanger the national vitality. The Mosaic record, covering a period of nearly one thousand years, never mentions any slave revolt, such as so often shook the neighboring and contemporaneous Phœnicians.

For domestic slaves, the Hebrews procured foreigners, through traffic or by war; and such slaves were of the same race as the slaves of the Phœnicians and other neighboring nations. In the history of the Beni-Israel, there are long episodes containing accounts of wars, principally with tribes belonging to the same Shemitic family from which the Hebrews themselves sprang, and many of the slaves made in these wars must have belonged to the nearest cities and kingdoms. If these had been so numerous as to be employed in large bodies in agricultural labor, undoubtedly there would have been revolts during the absence of their masters on military expeditions, or even during times of peace. The absence of any such event in the history of the Hebrews, proves that domestic slavery was for many long centuries recognized only as an abnormal institution, and its growth circumscribed by jubilees and limitary statutes.

The regulations prescribing the status of slaves, and their general condition, are within, the reach of every one. Their spirit is mild and beneficent for the bond-man; the duration of his slavery is limited—his treatment is humane, and the condition not ordinarily hereditary. In the times of the early patriarchs, a servant could become the chief of the family—thus proving that some commentators have made a strange confusion in the interpretation of the above-mentioned Hebrew word (e'bed), when they construe it as applying to such a system as modern American slavery. A servant who was eligible to become the chief of a family could not be a chattel, but must necessarily have been a member of the clan, with independent powers and rights, and at least the proprietorship of himself.

Among the Hebrews, also, a man could voluntarily sell himself into slavery; thus the debtor paid his debts with his own body, or with that of his wife or child. This custom was almost universal in early antiquity, as well as among the Romans and the barbarous Germans. But the Mosaic law appointed a regular epoch for the emancipation of all slaves, and therefore of debtors among the rest; and the operation of this law it was which made hereditary slavery of such comparatively rare occurrence.

Slaves, therefore, even when bought from the Gentiles, and therefore considered unclean by the Hebrews, or when prisoners taken in war, were not cut off from the general law of protection. They enjoyed human rights, and some of the civil privileges of the Jewish born. No absolute distinctions of men can be traced in the Mosaic law without perverting its whole moral tendency. When a slave received any severe wound from his master, he was from thence declared free, and the Jewish law punishes with death the sale of a freeman into slavery—(a fact, by the way, in striking contrast with the great social movement of the militant pro-slavery party, whose policy it is to enslave both emancipated and free-born). A slave concubine could not be sold to strangers—still less her children by her master. But if he wished to be rid of her, the master was obliged to find her a husband or another master among his relatives or friends. In the old colonial times in America, the law inflicted a penalty on white servants and bondsmen for mixing with black chattels—but what penalty threatened the white masters for the same offence? The fact is, the slave-breeders of the slave regions continually invoke the Bible to justify their doings, and continually violate Scriptural regulations.

The Mosaic law commands: "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: he shall dwell with thee, even among you, in the place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him." Some modern commentators attempt to contract this humane and universal command, by arguing that it only applied to Jewish born servants or slaves; but sound criticism utterly annihilates the assumption. On the contrary, the phrase "in one of thy gates," is a positive proof that the command had in view fugitives of every tribe and kingdom. All Gentiles, slaves as well as freemen, were considered by the Jews "unclean," and there might have been some difficulty in admitting such runaways into their houses. But whatever was the creed or nationality of the escaped, he found safety "in the gates," and from thence could not be "delivered unto his master." Difference of religion and not of race constituted the paramount distinction between the Jew and the Gentile; if the command, therefore, were exclusively applicable to the Jewish slave, even then its spirit is violated by the American fugitive slave act, to uphold which, the Mosaic law is blasphemed—for the enslaved race of Christian America are of the same faith and baptism as their owners.

With the increase of luxury and corruption under the Hebrew kings, kidnapping and the traffic in men and women seem to have largely increased. The slaves stolen in piratical expeditions among neighboring tribes were exported to a distance, while others were imported from thence into Judea. But against this practice the prophets—those inspired successors of the lawgiver of Sinai—thundered terribly. The Edomites and other Phœnicians—who seem to have been pre-eminently the slave-traders of their time—importing slaves from Gaza, which was then a great thoroughfare and commercial metropolis, and exporting them to other points, were declared to be the most accursed of nations. So now, the modern Edomites of this continent, who have again revived the slave-traffic between Africa and this country, together with all who aid, abet, patronize or excuse them, come under the curse so often denounced against their ancient prototypes.

Under the kings, also, domestic slavery became more extensive, and its influence more fatal. It did not yet, however, succeed in devouring the vitals of the nation, or wholly destroying the small homesteads and the free yeomanry, as it afterward did in Greece, and over almost the entire ancient world under republican and imperial Rome. The epoch of the kings is one of moral degradation and effeminacy on the one hand, and of disasters and captivities to the Jews themselves, on the other. Sensuality and general depravity flourished rank and wild under the malignant influence of domestic slavery. Slavery relaxed the ties of family and society among the Jews, as history shows it to have done in every place and in all ages of its existence—for slavery, sensuality and general depravity mutually engender and sustain each other. But in their deepest and most helpless degradation, the Jews never sold the offspring of their own personal lechery into slavery: this advance on the turpitude of Hebraic slavery—this outrage on the humanity of the faith we inherit from the Jews—was first justified and systematized by the slave states of the great Republic of the West! In ancient as in Christian times, there were doubtless parents who abandoned their legitimate or illegitimate offspring to public mercy, to accident, or to servitude; but all legislators have condemned such inhumanity, and tried, if possible, to regulate and soften it. So, deliberate selling of one's children may anciently have occurred in solitary instances; but it was always and everywhere condemned as the sum of all infamies.

Many of the tutelary regulations for the slaves laid down in the law, fell, it is true, into disuse, even as other parts of the law were violated by the wayward and stiff-necked Israelites. On the advent to power of the good Josiah, however, the violated commandments and regulations of Moses, including those concerning the slaves, were rigidly enforced, and a general reformation inaugurated.

The increase of wealth, the various modifications and changes generated in the organism of society by its growth, as also by wars, captivities, changes of government, etc., brought forth a new subordinate condition in the domestic and civil life of the Hebrews—it was that of the client, and belongs to the latter epoch of the kings. Theologians of doubtful learning, and still more dubious honesty, argue that such clients were slaves; but, in truth, the clients among the Hebrews were no more the slaves of their patrons than the same class were among the Romans or Gauls. The Hebrew client was a subordinate, but independent; he was under the protection of his patron, but both were bound by mutual obligations and prescribed conditions; and the property and estate of the patron were often under the guardianship of the client. Many expressions in the Scriptures, also, bearing on the mission of the future Messianic servant of Jahveh, mean properly a client, and not a slave or a chattel.

The old kingdom of Judea was overthrown in wars with Assyria and Babylon; and the Jews were carried away as captives. These repeated captivities chiefly befell the most wealthy and influential part of the population. Such captives generally became political slaves, that is, were deprived of political, though not of religious or civil rights, and were not made domestic slaves or chattels. They became the property of the king or of the state; but were not individually subject to be scattered or sold; in fact, they became colonists, and lands were assigned them in some part of the empire. Thus Tiglath-Palassar colonized certain regions north of Nineveh with Hebrews; and Sargon (or Sargina) transplanted others to Media. In the Babylonian captivities their condition was precisely similar: thus, when Cyrus liberated forty-two thousand three hundred and sixty Jews from captivity in Babylon, there were among them only seven thousand three hundred and eighty-seven slaves, or about one-sixth of the whole number.

Domestic slavery, as we have seen, made considerable havoc among the Beni-Israel, and its life was continually recruited by wars and the consequent ruin and impoverishment of the people, as well as by other causes already pointed out. But down to the last breath of the political and national existence of the Jews—to the day of the destruction of Jerusalem and the hour of final dispersion—slavery never succeeded in wholly destroying the humble homesteads of the free rural population—as it did in other nations and empires of antiquity: for example, it never extirpated the free agricultural yeomanry in Palestine as it afterward did in the Roman world, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates. The free population was mostly devoted to agriculture, and possessed homesteads; and these small free homesteads were regarded almost as sacred—even kings could only by violence seize upon the poor man's farm.

Little Palestine, to the East, swarmed like a beehive with people, notwithstanding captivities, calamities, and exterminating wars. At the time of David, the kingdom of Palestine was about the size of the present kingdom of Portugal, and had a population of about three million eight hundred thousand. Under Solomon, his son, fifty-three thousand six hundred foreign-born slaves worked at the construction of the temple, most of whom, probably, were the property of the king or of the state—not private chattels. If we allow that the number of Jewish-born slaves of both sexes and of all ages was even four times as large (which is not at all likely, considering the source and means of supply of slaves), it will give only two hundred and sixty-eight thousand slaves of every type, in Judea, or one-fourteenth part of the population.[8]

How corrupt soever the law and its regulations became, both, nevertheless, remained a check upon domestic slavery. Long previous to the terrible Flavian epoch, the Hebrews were thickly scattered over the eastern and western world, not as exported slaves, but as wanderers and adventurers: there may, indeed, have been slaves among them, but such slaves formed the minority. Strangers, indeed, they were, but free according to then existing municipal limitations. It was the surplus of a free population that thus wandered abroad in search of better fortunes—a phenomenon which is reproduced in the present day by the immigration to America of the surplus population of various European states. So large was this emigration that, in the time of Cicero, the Jews, Italians and Greeks formed the principal nationalities that took part in the tumults of the Roman forum, and on one occasion they hooted Cicero while on the rostrum. The great and striking fact of the preservation of the people of Beni-Israel, and its increase at an epoch when the populations of other countries were slowly dying out, is to be attributed solely to the curb which the law imposed on domestic slavery, and which it partially maintained even in the times of the greatest national decay.

On our knowledge of the internal organism and economy of the Hebrews, may be based certain deductions as to the domestic economy of other contemporaneous nations, especially those of Syria and certain parts of west Asia. Lydia, and above all, Babylon and Assyria are historically known only in the last stages of their existence, when political and domestic slavery had almost completely fused themselves together. For earlier times, the sources of investigation are limited, if not altogether wanting, and analogy alone can guide research. It is, however, probable that only the Mosaic law remained to combat and regulate serfdom and slavery with moral and legal weapons. The Hebrews did not possess, and did not transmit to history, any of the products of a brilliant civilization or of a refined culture such as reaches us in echoes from the antique oriental empires. But the Hebrews were, at the same time, endowed with certain spiritual impulses, aspirations and ideas, far grander than those of any of the surrounding nations. Material civilization and culture cannot be considered as the highest manifestation of man's spirit. History presents examples of the development of the noblest human impulses to a degree out of all proportion with the so-called "civilization" of the nation.

The authority of the Scriptures is invoked as absolute sanction for the enslavement of one branch of the human family; and the theological right to enslave the African is based on the well-known words of Noah: "Cursed be Canaan: a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." The general import of these words, however, even in the strictest construction, has rather a reference to their degradation as a caste—exemplified in the case of the swineherds among the Egyptians, or the Çudras (Soudras) among the Hindus—either of which, however, were chattels deprived of human and family rights.

Modern criticism, guided chiefly by the light of comparative philology and ethnology, has established beyond any doubt the genuine meaning of the patriarchal names of Scripture. Down to Abraham, or at the utmost to Terah his father, all those names bear an ethnical or geographical signification. Abraham, however, is an historical person, and with him positive Jewish history opens.

Moses and the other writers of the book of Genesis were educated among the highly learned and scientific Egyptians; and in Palestine they came in contact with a highly advanced civilization among the Canaanites or Phœnicians, Arabians, and Nabatheans, who were then in the full tide of life and action. From these kindred Shemitic peoples the Hebrews learned the use of written characters; and many of the scientific discoveries of these epochs are dimly preserved in the Mosaic record, as also the general outlines of the ethnic knowledge of the age. Moses and the other writers did but record the various geographic and ethnic names which came to their ears, and for this no inspiration was necessary. Modern scientific criticism, guided by the inductions of reason—that grandest product of the hand of God—now infuses living spirit into what was for ages a dead and incomprehensible letter. This can be easily elucidated by a few examples. The word Ham, or Erez-Cham, has no root or meaning in Hebrew or any other Shemitic dialect; it was doubtless borrowed from the Egyptians, and to Egypt must we go for the solution of its signification. Other Biblical names, as, for example, Eber, Pheleg or Peleg, Reu or Rehu, Serug and Nahor, represent distinct Shemitic tribes, or, as the record tropically styles them, kingdoms and states, of Mesopotamia (Naharaina). Eber, or more properly, Heber (whence our "Hebrews"), signifies "the stranger" or "a person from the other side," that is, one who came from a foreign region. Aram also implies an immigrant from the other side of the Euphrates. So, likewise Misraim (the Misr or M-R of the Egyptians), Cush, Phut and Lud, constituted distinct tribes and nations in widely distant regions, and perhaps even belonged to different races, according to accepted schemes of ethnology. Lud answers to the Libyan Lewatah, the Leguatan of the Byzantine writers, and the classical Garaman. Phut and Lud belong to Africa; they are brothers of Mizraim, or its nearest ethnic relations in the remotest antiquity, or perhaps closely allied but independent tribes—as the Scriptures generally record tribes and states politically and geographically independent. Phut and Lud are also mentioned as the allied troops of the Egyptians, or of the Syrians. Finally Lud (Ludim) descends from Mizraim; so it may be that they were a branch of the Egyptian stem, just as the Irish are an offshoot of the Gallo-Celtic stock, or the Anglo-Saxons of the Teutonic trunk.

The curse of Noah was hurled against Canaan. The philological and ethnic signification of this name has already been explained. The Canaanites, although themselves but an elder branch of the Shemitic family, were the enemies of Beni-Israel, who conquered them and drove them from their land and homes. There is thus a manifest logic in the writer of this part of Genesis condemning them to eternal servitude—for it was written after the subjugation of the Canaanites. Indeed, the same policy of enslavement was pursued by almost all the ancient conquering nations in the flush of their victorious battles; and so, in later times, did the Longobards of Italy, the Goths and Franks in Gaul and Spain, the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, and the Normans in England and Ireland.

There seems to be no scientific doubt that the cursed Canaanites were of the same family and stock as the Hebrews. After the most searching and conscientious investigations in ethnology and philology, it is impossible to regard the Canaanites or Phœnicians as other than Shemites; and with this also coincide the Scriptures—their land of Canaan is not in Africa. Who the Cushites of antiquity were, has likewise been already pointed out. And if, as some have attempted to prove, the ancient Egyptians were not of the African race (according to our modern designation), then they were the Chamites, Cushites, etc., of Scripture. How, through them, the curse can be shown to reach the genuine African, requires an effort of casuistry repulsive both to logic and fact—nay, to the baldest common sense. Not the dimmest shadow of authority can be tortured from the Scriptures for the enslavement of the black or negro race. With somewhat sounder logic has this curse of Canaan been applied, even in Christian times, and among European nations, to classes kept in bondage by masters belonging to the same race. Slavery, indeed, has been the common fate, in successive epochs, of all human races and families; and the oppressor has never been wanting in a pious plea. The so-called nobility of the mediæval Christian ages considered the burghers and subdued laborers as being of impure and degraded blood, and all over Europe they were held to be the descendants of Ham. (Some old aristocratic European families even now consider all who are not nobles to be of the degraded caste). According to this construction of the Noachic curse, the foul taint even now circulates not in the vein of the African slave, but in the veins of the tyrants who oppress him. Neither the Egyptians, Phœnicians, Hebrews, nor, indeed, any nation of antiquity, considered any special race or tribe as absolutely predestined to eternal bondage. This abominable conception is a putrid growth from mental, social and moral decay. Even Moses had a black woman for his wife (not his concubine), and, nevertheless, was admitted to converse with Jehovah.

The present historical investigation aims not at the vindication of the African: science and history do this triumphantly for all honest and intelligent minds. These pages have but in view to exhibit the terrific havoc and devastation which domestic slavery brings on all races, nations and civilizations, and to point out the complete analogy of slavery as it existed in the past with that which still blasts our country and our age. The leprosy of early Egypt, Syria and Judea, was the same as that which existed long centuries afterward in western Europe; and so also is it with the social leprosy of the ages. And as, in special conditions, a disease may assume a more deadly intensity, so also do social maladies at times show themselves with increased virulence. In antiquity, domestic slavery seized hold of all races and all social and civil conditions: it was not exclusively fastened on any special race. It may be for this reason that it ate but slowly into the marrow of the antique civilizations. Now modern sophistry attempts to give a divine and moral sanction to chattel slavery, and bases its justice on the absolute and predestined inferiority of the black race. But the natural work of slavery in destroying manhood, morals and intellect, progresses with terrible rapidity in this country, and is here receiving its most mournful illustration.

But what is the testimony of the highest scientific generalization on this question, of the natural inferiority of the African? All the authoritative names in comparative anatomy and physiology—Owen, Flourens, Bachman, Muller, Haenle, Pritchard, Wagner, Vogt and Draper, among them—together with men of the mental calibre and scientific attainments of William and Alexander von Humboldt—men of every variety of scientific theory, and discussing the question from every possible stand-point—universally deny the existence of any absolute inferiority of the negro race, or even any essential difference or line of demarcation between the races at all! The physiological and craniological differences which are so easily observed, do not amount to a difference of species; and cerebral physiology makes no essential distinction between the brain of a white man—even an Anglo-Saxon—and that of a negro.

Still more groundless are the current assertions concerning the mental inferiority of the African race. If such an inferiority really exists at the present day, it is, at the utmost, but transient and conditional in its nature. It can only be such an inferiority as for countless centuries characterized the northern races in contrast to the southern. While the former roved and fought as savages in the wilds and forests, the latter were elaborating grand and harmonious civilizations. It is difficult to imagine what would have been the condition of the Germans—aye, even of the Anglo-Saxons—what kind of civilization they would have inaugurated—without their Christian, Roman and Gallo-Celtic inoculation. If it be urged that certain African tribes are less susceptible of culture, or less endowed with intellectual qualities and capacities than certain white tribes or their offshoots—is it not also the case that the offspring from the same parents may have widely varying powers, tendencies and capacities; and that diverse tribes and nations springing from the same ethnic source, have played very different parts in the drama of universal history?

In the remotest antiquity, the great Gallo-Celtic stem actively influenced the destinies of Europe, and a part of Asia; yet it is only eighty years since the historian Pinckerton, speaking of Ireland and the Irish—those purest Celtic remains, said: "It is indeed a matter of supreme indifference at what time the savages of a continent peopled a neighboring island" (Ireland). This remark it would be difficult to justify—although there are even now many Englishmen who consider the genuine Irish an inferior race, and one, too, incapable of any high development.

The moral and mental growth of those Africans who were formerly slaves in the British West Indies, shows the possibility of negro culture under the influence of freedom. The official reports of the various governors of these islands, show that, since emancipation, there has been a rapid and steady growth of their prosperity; and the absolute veracity which characterizes these reports of English agents to their government cannot for a moment be doubted. In some of the islands, such as Nassau and others, the products and revenues have increased a hundred-fold, while the cost of administration (for keeping protective fleets and repressive soldiery, needed now no more) has greatly diminished. They also certify to a great increase in the imports from England—their mother country in the noblest sense of the word. Even the export of sugar is nearly equal to what it was under the forced labor of slavery, while its intrinsic production has vastly increased—the domestic consumption far surpassing what it was in the palmiest days of the planters. These are facts which only hypocrisy can pervert, or perversion conceal.

With reference also to the question of the "viability" and longevity of hybrids, mulattoes, etc., science protests against the fallacy which the new pro-slavery apostles advocate. Facts confirm the deductions of genuine science, and explode the fallacies of its counterfeit. The Dominican Republic is almost entirely composed of a mulatto population, which is now in its second or third generation, if not older. Neither are these mulattoes dying out, but they are increasing by and within themselves. No human white stallions are imported there from slave-breeding regions to correct or keep up the breed.

If, however, there should still linger a presumption of the superiority of the white over the black man, it must speedily vanish when the arguments of the militant upholders of slavery—whether they be in senatorial togas, in priestly robes, or in printer's ink—are subjected to the analysis of impartial philosophy or common logic. A spurious and depraved civilization is far more dangerous and degrading to society, and more truly evidences positive mental inferiority, than does the absence of civilization or the primitive savage condition. And this is the more true when the subjects of such a spurious civilization have within reach the elements of a genuine moral and social culture, but at the same time spurn and depreciate them all. Such persons, whatever may be their conventional position or ethnic descent, whatever the color of their skin, the form of their skull, or the nature of their hair, are singly and collectively inferior to the uncultivated and oppressed and hence degraded negro; while in respect of justice, manhood, and all that is ennobling, they make no approach to the millions of industrious and intelligent farmers and free yeomanry, artisans, and mechanics of the free states, still less with the higher manifestations of these qualities in great and generous minds.

Neither in the Mosaic record, therefore, nor the native sense of morality, still less in science, can any support be found for the fallacies propounded by the apostles of American slavery. Science, just and elevated in its intrinsic nature, deduces conclusions and establishes laws with sublime impartiality, extenuating naught, and setting down naught in malice. The normal character of every science, always and forever, is emancipatory. Science emancipates the mind from prejudices, falsehoods, and superstitions, and from the tyranny exercised over man by the elements and forces of nature, as well as from the far more malignant forces of social oppression. It is doubtless this divine character of true science which makes it so repulsive to the apostles of human degradation.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The old colonial customs and legal regulations in America, fully confirm the above statements. White servants, with or without indenture, were kept in bondage by their masters, as were other chattels, and sometimes, though rarely, these servants were even sold. Without, therefore, going back to any European origin, it may be peremptorily asserted that it is comparatively a short time since the sires of many haughty militant slavery defenders were bondsmen on American soil.

[8] Flavius Josephus says, that under the Herods, Judea contained double the population established by the census of David. Perhaps this account is exaggerated; but, at any rate, it shows a great and positive increase.

[VI.]

NABATHEANS.

AUTHORITIES:

Lassen, Quatremère, Laborde, Oppert, Chwolsohn, Perceval, etc.

In the gray morning of time, behind the obscurity hovering over the origin of Assyria, and preceding even the first great epoch of Babylon, dawns the fully-developed Nabathean civilization. In proportion as scientific investigation imagines it has reached a positive epoch in the ethnology and history of our race, a new cloud ever rises behind it, which is but of this service—unerringly to indicate the limits of the space already investigated. Thus legends, traditions, and tracings sink helpless and hopeless into mythus, and the investigator is lost in the "dark backward and abysm of time." The Eastern legends hanging over Fore-Asia (or the lands between the Himalayas and Assyria), present traditions of epochs and civilizations which had traversed the periods of youth, maturity, and decline, before Brahmins, Assyrians, or Hebrews even dawned on the historical horizon.

The Nabatheans are supposed to have been Shemites or pure Chaldeans.[9] They dwelt in ancient Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and also in what afterward constituted a part of Syria and Assyria; and their branches or colonies extended to Arabia and to eastern Mesopotamia. They were probably the primitive white dwellers in these regions, and the founders of Babylon and of her first—almost pre-historic—epoch of glory, down to the time when they were conquered by the Assyrians or by Aryanized Nabatheans and Chaldeans.

According to ancient eastern writers, they invented and taught to their neighbors the art of tilling the soil, and from this circumstance they are said to have derived their name. At all events they were the primitive cultivators of these lands, and agriculture seems to have been their principal pursuit and mode of livelihood. This highly-flourishing Nabathean civilization underlaid the Assyrian and second Babylonian civilizations, and powerfully influenced the primitive Hebrew writers. Arphaxad, mentioned in Genesis, signifies in Chaldaic, stronghold, city, civilization, and this, too, at the earliest so-called patriarchal epoch. To the Nabatheans belongs the great work of irrigating Euphratia, by which these heretofore barren and uncultivated plains were made, for more than forty centuries, the most fertile region of the ancient world. It is asserted, too, by the oldest authorities, that their language was highly developed at a time when the other Shemitic tribes and nations only lisped their rude tongue, or attempted to spell the symbols invented, in all probability, by the Nabatheans. Some attribute to them the invention of the arrow-headed characters, while others suppose that the Assyrians (of whom hereafter), first devised them, or at all events, first applied this Tartar invention for the use and preservation of the Nabathean language. Fragments from the writings of Kouthai—a Nabathean, who lived long before the destruction of Nineveh—show that most of the sciences, such as mathematics, astronomy, chronology, etc., were cultivated by them to a high degree, and that they were great lovers of music and other fine arts.

Their historical records are far richer and more complete than any other existing records which relate to those distant and as yet all but incomprehensible epochs and events. In these relics many details of the early life of that time are embodied, principally relating, however, to agriculture, and from which, doubtless, the Greek writers, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Strabo, derived their knowledge of the superiority and paramount importance of Nabathean agricultural science, on which, as already remarked, their whole civilization was based. Nowhere, however, in these venerable Nabathean fragments is slavery or the slave ever mentioned, and still less as constituting the basis of domestic husbandry and field labor; but freemen and freeholders only are alluded to as cultivating the land and reaping the rewards of their toil; thus furnishing an additional and most forcible proof that human slavery is not coeval with the existence of society.

Indeed, it may be stated as a general rule, clearly confirmed by history, that agriculture never can flourish under slave labor, nor even under villanage. It never did so in antiquity and it never has done so in modern times. In proportion as Egypt, Syria and Assyria fell a prey to political servitude and her twin-sister, or rather generator, domestic slavery, did their agriculture deteriorate and decay. In proportion as the nations of modern Europe have emerged from slavery and serfdom, has agriculture become a civilizing agency, progressive, rational and scientific. England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium and Flanders, are living witnesses thereof; and, on the other side, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Danubian Principalities—all possessed of the most fertile soils—scarce emerge from social, political and rural barbarity. The Moors and the Moriscoes were not slaves when they cultivated Andalusia in a manner never equalled. And what a wide difference between the agriculture of the free and slave sections of the United States! and that too, though the region of slave culture enjoys advantages both in climate and soil. The halting and uncertain advances made in the slave country, are but dimly breaking rays from the free, enlightened northern states.

Thus do the oldest and the newest teach one lesson and tend to one result.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] In contradistinction to Aryanized Shemites or Chaldeans, known as Assyrians and Babylonians of the second epoch, and modern Kurdes.

Ethnology and comparative philology everywhere discover similar bifurcations almost at the sources of ethnic life. These bifurcations are explained by natural growth and by the fusion of various tribes and nations. Thus Baktrya, Persia and Media present us with Aryas and Indo-Scythes or Aryanized Tartars. So, too, all primitive races divide and subdivide in the same manner within themselves. The Shemites divided into Chaldeans and Canaanites, and then into Arabs, Hebrews, etc. The Aryas divided first into two groups—the eastern, from which, in turn, sprang the Zend and Sanscrit-speaking Aryas or Iranians and Hindus—and the western group, ancestors of the various European races. Of these latter, one branch immigrated into Greece and Italy, there giving rise again to Ionians and Dorians, Italiots and Latins, and the Greek and Latin languages; while another formed the Gaels or Gadheals and Kimri, the Gadhealic and the Brizonec being the principal dialects. Then we have their offshoots—as Belgæ, Kimbro-Belgæ, Finnic-Belgæ, etc. So also the Slavic stem, split into Serb, Wendish, etc.

[VII.]

ASSYRIANS AND BABYLONIANS.

AUTHORITIES:

Rawlinson, Duncker, Oppert, M. von Niebuhr, etc.

The mighty empire of the Assyrians, which constitutes one of the first links in the chain of positive history, has hitherto been best known by the great catastrophes which finally closed its existence. The Hebrew Scriptures testify to the wealth, the luxury, and the military power of the Assyrians; but neither these nor the fragments in other ancient historical writers, dispel the obscurity enveloping the interior organism of that great antique people. Neither do the outlines of Babylonian history given by Herodotus afford much insight into the details of her social structure.

In that fore-world which history has not yet penetrated, the region between the Mediterranean sea and the head-waters and affluents of the Euphrates and the Tigris, formed the theatre of a tumultuous confusion of races, nations and civilizations, which has no parallel in the known history of mankind. Social and ethnic structures of the most heterogeneous kind covered those regions, with their various creeds, theocracies, municipalities monarchies and despotisms of every degree.

When, about fifteen centuries B.C., history unveils the empire of the Assyrians or Ninevites, their dominion extended in a direct line from the head-waters of the Euphrates and Tigris to the mouths of those rivers; on the north-east, also, they ruled over Media (thus touching the Caspian), and from thence their dominion stretched across Armenia, southern Caucasus and Georgia, westward to the mouth of the river Halys (the modern Kizil-Ermak), in the Black Sea, and embraced also Palestine, Phœnicia and Kilikia. As the dynasty of Ninus once ruled over Lydia, it is probable that the Ninevite empire at one time extended over at least a part of Asia Minor, as far as the Egean Sea.

This great Assyrian empire rose on the ruins of Babylon, which was once her master, and which was also far superior to her in antiquity.

History has preserved the names of some of the races and tribes which may here at one time have dwelt side by side, but which were subsequently conquered and ruled by the more powerful nation. History, we say, has preserved some, and comparative philology is constantly disentangling others from the chaos of antique Mesopotamian ethnology.[10]

The Assyrian and Babylonian empires stand recorded in the history of humanity as having been the cradles of Eastern despotism and political slavery. How this terrible tyranny arose in Assyria there are no means of ascertaining. Doubtless there were a number of conspiring causes, just as many rills unite to form a powerful stream. In the history of Rome, fortunately we shall be able clearly to seize the genesis of her despotism, and exhibit the germ as well as the wreck of her social structure. Reasoning from all historic analogy, however, it may safely be asserted that Assyrian despotism was generated by war, while political bondage nursed and fostered domestic chattelhood. Evil ever reproducing its own substance and shadow!

The social and domestic economy of the Assyrians must, in its general features, have been similar to that of the Nabatheans and Hebrews. In the course of time, domestic slavery may, to some extent, have been developed in both empires; but even in the last stages of their independent existence, it could not have reached that terrible point it attained after the loss of their autonomy. Assyria and Babylon fell by the blows of nations who were themselves subdued and politically enslaved. To the last, however, neither their lands nor cities were ever devastated or desolated. Their civilization remained in a flourishing condition to the last, and historically it stands as original. But original civilizations are never germinated under the influence of domestic chattelhood. The plains of the Euphrates must have been the hive of a rural population whence the imperial armies were supplied, and these supplies could not have been in the form of chattels. In ancient cities, manufactures and industry were often carried on by slaves; but when domestic slavery established itself in the rural regions, the national forces soon became palsied.

The tribes and countries conquered by Assyria and Babylon were simply made tributary to their wealth and power. Prisoners of war were, in all likelihood, disposed of in the same manner as they were in Egypt, and as was the custom all over the ancient world, and indeed, for several centuries in Christendom—employed in the public works, in the cutting of those canals whose traces are still visible, or in raising walls, palaces and public edifices, all of which are now covered mountain high with the dust of ages. Thus Sargon (or Sargina), for example, employed prisoners of war in constructing the vast palaces of Khorsabad.

Assyrian and Babylonian history records repeated transportations of whole populations from one part of the empire to another. The condition of such captives on becoming colonists has already been explained in the section upon the "Hebrews." It would seem that the kings of Assyria and Babylon first inaugurated this mode of wholesale transportation, captivity and colonization. Thus Tiglath-Palassar deported the inhabitants of Damascus to Kur in Georgia; and Assardan sent off, en masse, Babylonians, Arkeans, Susianians, Elamites, Persians and Daheans (Tartars), some north and others south. All such transplantments begot destruction, desolation and the breaking up of homesteads; and thus fostered domestic slavery, facilitated its expansion, and increased its fatal influence over both the conquered and the conquerors. And finally, they prepared the soil for that poisonously luxuriant growth of slavery by which Mesopotamians and Syrians became the general bondmen of classical antiquity.

After the destruction of the Assyrian capital (Nineveh) by the revolted nations, Babylon became the centre of a new empire. The rule of Nabukudrussur (a Chaldean from Babylon), extended from the mountains of Armenia to the Arabian shores of the Red Sea, and to the Persian Gulf. This again is a record of perpetual war, and was, in all respects, a continuation of the Ninevitian period of desolation and captivity. Prisoners of war again filled the capital, and worked at the walls and palaces of Babylon. The rich valleys were no longer cultivated by free laborers, but were in the hands of large slaveholders, and tilled by their gangs of slaves.

Babylon fell, destroyed by war, combined with political and domestic slaveries, and she transmitted both diseases to her destroyers.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] The philological analysis of the arrow-headed characters and inscriptions discovered in the ruins of Nineveh (Khorsabad) and of Babylon, and on various other spots of the ancient Persian empire, give us some idea of the various ethnic elements which composed the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. Probability, founded on comparative philology, attributes the invention of the arrow-headed characters to a Tartar (Scythic) people or race. Transmitted, in all likelihood, from people to people; increased, fused in usage and application by various languages and dialects, these cuneiform characters—as used for Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian inscriptions—are now ethnically and philologically classified into two main divisions—the Anaryan and the Aryan. The Aryan comprises the Old Persian; the Anaryan of the Ninevite relics is the result of thirteen ethnic and philologic combinations, and was used by the five following peoples, all known to history. 1. Medo-Scythians; 2. Casdo-Scythians; 3. Susians; 4. Ancient Armenians; 5. Assyrians. The following are the thirteen combinations: 1. Pure hieroglyphs; 2. Hieratic signs—neither yet arrow-headed; 3. Old Scythic or Tartar arrow-heads; 4. New Tartar (new under Assyria); 5. Old Susian; 6. New Susian; 7. Old Armenian; 8. New Armenian; 9. Old Assyrian; 10. New Assyrian; 11. Old Babylonian; 12. New Babylonian; 13. Demotic Babylonian.—Oppert.

[VIII.]

MEDES AND PERSIANS.

AUTHORITIES:

Zend Avesta, Vendidad, Herodotus, Lassen, Pictet, Duncker, etc.

The Medes and Persians, or Zend-speaking Iranians, those destroyers of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, were a mighty branch of the great family of Aryas. The Iranians left the common home of the Aryas at a period so distant as to render useless every effort toward giving it possible or even probable chronology. They settled in regions called by them "Lands of Iran," which, up to the present day, constitute Persia. Some investigators assert that Iran-Persia was previously occupied by Tartars; but the earliest traditions preserved in the Zend, or ancient speech of Zarathustra, do not mention any struggles for supremacy between the races as having taken place.

The Zend Avesta, the oldest traditional record of the people of Iran, presents a picture of the primitive migrations and the social condition of the Iranians. It exhibits them as divided into three classes—priests, soldiers and farmers; though, as yet, there was no such thing as the circumscription of caste. It would seem that the fusion with the Tartars—the supposed aborigines of Iran—was complete, as the Zend Avesta makes no mention of any subjugated people or lower class. The warriors and the agriculturists stood on a perfect social equality. The book of tradition nowhere mentions serfdom, slavery, or property in man. This would seem to authorize the conclusion that among the early Iranians, property in man was unknown. Certainly, at all events, if even the forms of slavery were present, they were in such abeyance as to escape the attention of Zarathustra (Zoroaster), the great moralist and lawgiver of his people, who lived long after the epoch of the early wanderings, and when the Iranic nation formed a well-organized society on Iran's soil. Zarathustra considers agriculture as morally and socially the noblest human occupation; but he speaks of the generous labor of freemen, not the forced drudgery of slaves.

The Vendidad contains frequent allusions to the general occupations of life, and is especially minute regarding the details of husbandry—its wants, modes, products and implements. The farmer is to have at least a team of draught cattle, a harness and a whip; a plough, a hand-mill, and so forth; but there is no mention whatever of a slave as an agricultural requisite. The homestead of an Iranian consists of a habitation, a storehouse, a cellar, stables for horses, camels and cattle; but the records have no allusion to a cabin for the slaves. The Vendidad also describes how dogs—almost sacred to the Iranians—are to be posted to watch over the village and the herds; but nowhere says that they were to be used for watching and hunting slaves. Various operatives and artisans are enumerated, but none of them as bond-servants or as working under compulsion.

The farmers, peasants and operatives of Media and Persia—so admired even by Xenophon and Plato—thus built up a vigorous state and society. After long centuries of existence, however, its strength was undermined by foreign conquests, by luxury, and by political and domestic slavery. A similar phenomenon will present itself again and again in the course of this investigation. When the Medes overthrew the Assyrian empire, they became infected with the dissolute customs of their former masters. The houses of the wealthier were filled with domestic slaves; though, as yet, slavery did not come in contact with agriculture or the industrial pursuits, and so spread like a blight over the land.

Domestic slavery, in the limited sense of household servitude, was doubtless ultimately introduced into Persia; but never was Persian held as chattel on his ancestral soil. Nor yet did despotism, or political slavery, exist in the governmental structure of the Iranians, who, led by Kyros (Cyrus), conquered the whole western Asiatic world. Kyros was only the first among his peers, and was all-powerful only as a leader and commander. He had not yet the despotic power of Xerxes and other and later scions of the Achæmenides; and to the last, even to the conquests by Alexander, the Iranic social structure was comparatively free from domestic slavery. Nor were the Persians and other Iranian tribes ever the absolute political slaves of their own kings.

The Persian conquerors of the Asiatic world found domestic slavery more or less developed wherever they penetrated. Positive information, however, is extremely scanty regarding the special social and political organization of the Persians after Kyros and under Dareios. The rule of the Achæmenides extended over about eighty millions of men, belonging to various races. The conquerors, in all cases, respected the civil and social organization and administration peculiar to the subjugated tribes or nations. In numerous instances, the sovereigns of conquered states became Persian satraps over lands they once ruled in their own right. As satraps they were possessed of oppressive authority, had the power of life and death, of forcing exactions and levying taxes. But, as the Persian kings were, to the last, strict observers of Zarathustra's precepts, agriculture always continued to be the most favored pursuit. The satraps were rewarded with strict reference to the degree in which agriculture flourished and the population grew and prospered in their respective satrapies.

During the long rule of the descendants of Dareios, comparative peace prevailed in the interior of the great empire, which swept from the Nile almost to the Indus. So that domestic slavery did not find its usual supplies from prisoners of war, or by the destruction of small properties and consequent domestic impoverishment—those terrible sequels of wars from which Fore-Asia had suffered almost uninterruptedly for many previous centuries.

For these and other reasons, domestic slavery under the Persian rule, although sheltered by political servitude, had but small growth and made but slow progress. It certainly did not desolate the lands with the blight and barrenness that afterward depopulated them under Roman rule.

The tribute paid by the subdued nations to the Persian kings and their court, included slaves—boys and girls—but in a limited number. The slave-traffic existed as of old; but, in all probability, the supply of the human merchandise was less plentiful. From political slaves, but not domestic chattels, it was that the armies were recruited which crossed the Hellespont and invaded Greece.

But, viewing the matter in the gross and scope of historical development, political slavery and the blighting effects of the oppressive despotism to which the Persians were long subjected, may be looked upon as the soil out of which grew the morbid and monstrous system of domestic slavery, just as external influences frequently develop and foster the germs of a chronic and fatal bodily disease.

[IX.]

ARYAS—HINDUS.

AUTHORITIES:

Lassen, Wilson, Weber, Max Müller, Pictet, Kuhn, etc.

The central region of Baktria was in all probability the cradle of the Aryas, the common progenitors of all the races and nations which now cover Europe. In times anterior to the great pre-historic division and separation of the Aryan races, they probably occupied the whole of the vast region stretching from the Hindu-Kush, the Belourtagh, to the river Oxus and the Caspian Sea. This, too, at a period of which it can only be said that time existed.

The antique Aryas led a pastoral life. The original signification of the words in the European languages denoting family and social relations, as well as the names of domestic and other animals, of grains and plants, of implements of husbandry and handicraft and the like, is elucidated by roots found in Sanscrit, which is supposed to have been the original language of the Aryas, or, at any rate, the one which most completely preserved the primitive impress of the Aryan character.

"Father" (in Sanscrit, pitri), signifies "the protecting one, or the protector;" "mother" (Sanscrit, matri), "she who regulates or sets in order;" "daughter" (duhitri), "the milking one;" "son" (sunu), "the begotten;" "sister" (vastri), "she who takes care,"—subauditur, of household matters—also, "the bearer of a new family;" "brother" (brhatri), "the helper, or carrier;" "youth" (yavan) "the defender." So also, "horse" (açva), signifies "swift, rapid;"[11] the name for the "bovine" genus, bull and cow (Sc., go, gaus), "to sound inarticulately," likewise (ukshan) "fecundating," besides other names with other significations; the "ovine" genus, or sheep kind (avi), implies "the loved, protected," etc.; the "dog" ('cvan, kvan), means "the yelper, barker;" but he has also other names denoting his qualities, as sucaka, "spy, informer," krtagna, the "recognizing," or "grateful one," etc.; "goose," (hansa, from Sc. has), "to laugh." So the roots for the general names of grains and fruits are to be found in the Sanscrit; thus, ad, "to eat;" adas, "nourishment;" gr, "to devour," whence garitra, "grain," "rice," etc. It may be noticed that derivatives from these and other roots became applied, in branch languages, to various special kinds of grain; thus, "oats," both in form and signification, is easily traced to a Sanscrit root. So, too, the names of many metals, trees, plants and wild animals, have their roots and descriptive meaning in the Aryan or Sanscrit language; and comparative philology gives us the method of seizing the affiliations of form and of meaning.

Words of the character pointed one and their primitive significations—constituting the foundation of man's family and social existence—followed the various ethnic branches issuing from the Aryan and expanding over the ancient world. But no root, no name, no signification is to be found for a "servant" bearing the meaning of "slave" or "chattel," or expressive of a deprivation of the rights of manhood or of human dignity. The primitive Aryan mode of life was naturally patriarchal or clan-like, and the above-mentioned words show that household and rural functions were performed by the members of the family. What has been already said in another division (see "Hebrews"), applies even more forcibly to the Aryas. The Sanscrit word ibha, signified "family," "household," "servants," but never slaves or chattels. Both its sound and sense are still perfectly preserved in the Irish ibh, which signifies "country," or "clan;" not enslaved men! The names of weapons, and other words relating to warfare, which may be traced back to the Aryan speech, prove that the Aryas warred with other tribes—perhaps with the Tartars; and all such foreign enemies were comprehended under the collective Sanscrit denomination of barbara, varvara, or "barbarians." But even here, where we should most look for it, no hint or trace of slavery can be found.

The attempt, historically, to endow certain human families or races with special fitness or capacity for freedom or slavery—or with a fatality toward the one or the other, or toward certain fixed social and political conditions—as well as the effort to divide the human family into distinct physiological or psychological races—all manifests a narrow appreciation of the course of human events; it evidences a very limited knowledge of positive history, and perhaps a still more limited philosophical comprehension of its spirit. If, however, such classifications had any scientific basis, assuredly the Aryas and the nations issuing from them had no natural, special propensity either to be slaves or slave-makers.

It win be hereafter pointed out, that among the various branches of the Aryas, or what are called Indo-Europeans, slavery was not a feature of their primitive life, but was the result of a long subsequent epoch of moral decay and degradation. It was at a comparatively late period of their history and under precisely the same conditions, that the Romans and Greeks began to enslave their own fellows. So was it with the Gaels or Celts, and so also with the Slavi. The Poles were free from serfdom till the thirteenth Christian century; the Russians only introduced it toward the close of the sixteenth—and in both cases after dissension, war, and desolation. The Teutons alone (Anglo-Saxons included), seen in the light of primitive history, had slavery in their household and in their national organism, and the slaves, too, of their own race and kin.

The Aryas descended the slopes of Hindu-Kush and the Himalayas, entering the region of the Five or of the Seven Rivers (Punjab), wandered along the river Jamuna, on the line between Attock and Delhi, successively spread over the whole region between the Indus and the Ganges—and here begins their historical existence as a people. In the course of this long march they conquered or drove before them—seemingly without any great trouble, at least in the first encounters, the aboriginal occupants of the Trans-Himalayan countries; and this, too, before they reached what may be called the threshold of history. Discords and wars early broke out among them, principally caused by the continual pressure of northern immigrants upon the possessors of the fertile countries in the south—caused, too, by the struggles for supremacy between families or dynasties, when the tents of the patriarchs had expanded into populous tribes, and almost into nations; and also by the struggles of classes created in the effort to subjugate the aboriginal inhabitants, especially those in the southern parts of India. All these wars took place at a very early epoch, and elude positive chronological division. Their history, as well as that of the primitive Aryan or Hindu mode of life, and their earliest spiritual conceptions, are pictured in the Vedas, which form the background of the whole Indian world.

The gray and venerable Vedaic age is now divided by critics into four periods: the Chhandas period, the Mantra period, the Brahmana period, and the Sutra period.

The Chhandas period exhibits the purest patriarchal and peaceful condition of the family. There were then no priests and no division of classes; the father offered up simple sacrifices to heaven, and the simple hymns and songs of the family resounded over the offering. If the household contained any captive of the aboriginal race, such a one, by renouncing his ancient customs and creed, and accepting the language, the faith and the law of the conqueror, retained life and comparative liberty. And, moreover, all ethnological investigations confirm the belief that the aborigines of India were of the negro, or what is commonly called African family. On this American continent the kidnapped and enslaved African has accepted both the creed and the language of his oppressor—but for him there is neither liberty nor law.

Not to enslave, but only to subdue—preserving, at least partially, the rights of the conquered—was the policy of the Aryas in their encounter with barbarians. And in the domestic wars of tribes and dynasties which yet dimly echo through the second or Mantra period, no traces of the enslavement of their conquered enemies are to be found. In general, the first two periods not only do not show any shadow of slavery in the domestic and social relations, but even the division into classes or castes does not yet make its appearance. During the third or Brahmana period, the Vedas give an account of the terrible and bloody struggle which ended in the social and religious victory of the Brahmas, or Brahmins, over the Kshatriyas, who had previously formed the ruling families.

The Brahmins now reorganized the religious and political structure of the Hindus. They divided society into four classes or castes: (it is to be noted here, however, that some modern exegetists assert that the true meaning of the Sanscrit word Varna, for "caste," is not yet clearly apprehended). These four castes were: 1. The Brahmins; 2. The Kshatriyas; 3. The Vaisyas; 4. The Soudras, or Çudras. The first three correspond to the classification already mentioned as existing among the Iranians. The Çudras were the lowest and most degraded caste; still they were not enslaved, not the property of any other caste, not even of the Brahmins—those spiritual and political chiefs of the Hindus. The labors of agriculture ennobled even the hands of the Brahmin, and could not be performed by slaves nor under the compulsory terrors of a master or driver.

As the word Çudras is not Sanscrit, it is supposed that it was the ethnic name of the subdued aborigines of which the fourth caste was composed. The offspring of a Brahmin and a Çudra was considered of pure blood. The Brahminic law authorized the enslavement of persons belonging to all the interior castes, for debt. Slaves may also have been made in the wars with the southward retreating aborigines and others; and slaves may occasionally have been sold in the markets, but their number must have been very insignificant. Laws for the servitude of the Çudras—if such existed even—must very soon have fallen into disuse; for when Alexander brought Greece and Europe into contact with India, the astonished Greeks found scarcely any slavery then existing. Several of the Greek authors even assert that a positive law prohibited any kind of enslavement.

Budha, the great precursor of the Christ, was moved to tears, affected to inspiration, by the suffering and oppression which resulted from the division of society into castes, and by the misery of the poor, who were oppressed by the rich land-owner; but among the social and moral plagues, Budha and his disciples enumerate not human slavery. As far as the history of antiquity is known, Budha was the first whose religious teaching broke through the narrow conception of nationality, and taught universal emancipation and the brotherhood of all tribes and nations of men.

The oppression of the poor and of the landless, which then existed in India, exists there still. It was strengthened by the terrible Mahomedan and Mongol conquests, and by the iron rule of the British East India Company. But the imposition by the Mahomedans and Mongols of an oriental despotism over the Hindus did not implant domestic chattelhood, nor did the English tax-gatherers ever cause Hindu humanity to be exposed for sale in the markets or bazaars.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] The Sanscrit has about one hundred and forty appellations for the "horse" (mare and colt included); and comparative philology demonstrates their primitive roots to be preserved in almost all European languages.

[X.]

CHINESE.

AUTHORITIES:

The Biots, Kaeuffer, Gutzlaff, etc.

China belongs to the present and to the remotest past of the Asiatic world. The historical existence of China and her civilization are at least coeval with that of Egypt and of Assyria, perhaps older than that of the Aryas.

Some geological investigators affirm that the table-land inclosed between the northern slopes of the Himalayas, the Kuenlun, the desert of Gobi—which is said to be older than the formation of the Himalayas—the Heavenly or Blue mountains, and the Altaï, was the first land which rose from the waters, and that therefore it was the first, and perhaps the only place in the north, where man appeared. This admitted, the probability is, that from that first human family issued a race bearing to-day various appellations, as the Yellow, the Altaïc, Turanian, Scythic, Finnic, Mongolian and Tartar—which is the last general denomination adopted by science, at least for the branches occupying central Asia, and reaching to the frontiers of Europe and the descendants of the Aryas. The first immigrants to China from the Kuenlun probably followed the current of the Yellow river; and it seems that the aborigines retired before the invaders, or perhaps the new yellow settlers mixed with the primitive occupants. In the southern parts of China, in the mountains of the interior, are still found tribes of dark-colored men resembling the negroes or the Pacific islanders, and using notched characters similar to those used by the Malays.

Agriculture seems to have been the sacred occupation of these yellow-hued settlers along the banks of the Yellow river—as it was in the valley of the Nile, of the Euphrates, and on the plains of Iran. Everywhere the origin of agriculture is lost in the night of time, and Quain or Cain—that is, the kernel, the young, the generating, etc., the husbandman of the Scriptures—is many thousand years older than Abraham, the wandering and slave-holding patriarch. The oldest Chinese records show agriculture to have been the special occupation of the father of a family, of the chief of a clan, and then of the emperor of the entire nation. With his own hands he directs the plough—therefore the plough could not have been desecrated by the hands of a slave. And it was not. In the family, in the domestic as well as in the national life, slavery first dimly appears only about the thirteenth century B.C.

In the remotest time, labor was, as it is now, the basis, the cement and the soul of the Chinese social and political life and growth—and by labor I mean, intellectual and manual labor in its most varied departments and developments. No classes, no castes, existed in the old primitive times; and perhaps, during many thousand years, no dynasties. The best and ablest person was selected as the chief and ruler: all the offices or functions were obtained by intellectual faculty and by superiority of knowledge, but not inherited; and the same system prevailed throughout all the occupations and pursuits of life. No labor whatever was degraded or degrading; it was carried on by men free and equal, and in principle recognized as such.

In China, as everywhere else, slavery appeared as a disease in the social body. It was generated by war and crime. Prisoners of war and condemned criminals became, so to say, slaves of the state, which used them for public labors or hired them out to private individuals. The highest officers of state, persons over seventy years old, and children, could not be condemned to slavery, excepting children exposed or abandoned by their parents. Slaves hired by private individuals were only used as helps or servants in households and families. But most of the servants were always freemen—they are so now; and slaves never were used in agriculture or in the different handicrafts. The land being generally considered as the property of the state, or of the emperor, the sovereign divided, distributed it, under certain conditions and servitudes, for tribute in money or kind, etc. But slaves are not mentioned among the various objects enumerated as constituting the tribute. The increase of population generated poverty, and paupers sold and still sell themselves or their children into slavery. Repeated domestic or internecine wars, recorded at a very distant historical epoch, were among the prominent agencies in increasing poverty. Impoverished persons and those deprived of their homes either sold themselves or became serfs attached to the soil, but not chattels. As serfs their legal condition and denomination is preserved in the books written about the twelfth century B.C., by Ma-tuan-lin—they are named usurped families or usurpees. Even after the conquest by the Mantschou Tartars, chattelhood did not get hold of the political structure, nor did it absorb the agricultural and industrial domestic economy of the Chinese. With the exception of the reigning family, no social position or function is privileged as hereditary; and in the same way, accidental slavery was not transmitted to the children of the enslaved. Their condition was and is controlled and regulated by law, which watches over the property of the state. Among the numerous domestic wars there are never recorded any revolts of slaves—an evidence of their very limited number.

Over-population generated and generates the most terrible and varied oppressions and miseries; but all of them lose their sting when compared with chattelhood. Over-population and misery generated the so-called coolie-system, which in principle is based on voluntary indenture. The reckless cruelties and the numerous infamies characterizing the manner in which the coolie trade is carried on, is evidence of the utter moral degradation and depravity of the white civilized Christian traders, and the inefficiency of their respective governments.

The Chinese civilization is commonly looked down upon from the heights of narrow-minded presumption and ignorance. About three thousand years B.C., public schools existed in China, and a full scientific and material culture prevailed there. Chinese records (among them the Books of the Sehu Kings), going back, perhaps, as far as two thousand five hundred years B.C.—contain the most correct and detailed statistical accounts of tribute, and give most reliable geographical notions of China, and of the subdued and neighboring countries—notions superior in exactitude to all similar records transmitted from classical antiquity. The Chinese lived in houses, in orderly communities, were humanized, polished, familiar with the sciences, industries, and all kinds of refinements, at a time, and during countless centuries, when the races of northern Europe—prominently the Slavi, the Germans, the Anglo-Saxons included—did not, in all probability, even understand how to construct huts, and, as savages, roved about in the wilderness.

In a work written by Prince Tscheu-Kong, about one thousand one hundred years B.C., are given the most minute details of the then existing organization of the empire. The administrative mechanism of that distant epoch finds no equal in the whole history of governments or of nations. Several thousand years ago the empire was administered by six supreme state departments, each with perfectly defined attributes, each subdivided into special branches, with directors and all orders of lower officials and functionaries. Chinese civilization passed its periods of youth and maturity many thousand years ago; and its senility has not yet reached total decrepitude. It crumbles not to pieces even now in its comparatively disjointed and disorganized condition.

No one can consider China in any way a model social organism; but its duration is marvellous and unequalled in the history of the race. The absence of hereditary privilege and of chattelhood as social or religious institutions, accounts, among other reasons, for this unique phenomenon. With all its drawbacks and defects, this long-lived civilization, with its schools, its general intelligence, its thousands-of-years old routine, compares, in many respects, favorably with that in the Southern States calling itself Christian, which, having partly inherited the great European development, and receiving influences from the free sections of the Union, has, nevertheless, for the last thirty or forty years, turned on its own crooked tracks, and, now prohibits, under severe penalty, schools for the children of its field laborers, whom it keeps in bondage. It sighs also for a further extension of oligarchic privileges, and for the enslavement of all human labor: re-enslaves the free or expels them; legalizes and sanctifies the sum of all social villanies: whose last word is the Lynch law, and the reckless, lawless persecution of free speech and even of free thought; while assassination becomes more and more frequent.

In the most ancient Asiatic world, the primitive societies generally had analogous beginnings, whatever may have been the regions and climates cradling them, whatever the difference of time, epochs, or race-characteristics. Analogous events and conditions evoked similar developments in the primitive men. The manifestations of man's intellectual and physical activity were everywhere spontaneous: a transmission of the various rudiments of civilization cannot logically be admitted.

Osiris, Cain, Yao, were urged by like necessities, when they inaugurated agriculture in Egypt, in Euphratia, or along the valleys of the Yellow river. On the Nile, on the Euphrates, on the Ganges, on the Hoang-ho, man—red or black, white or yellow—observed nature, utilized even the inundations, regulated and embanked the beds of rivers, cut canals and trenches to irrigate the parched soil. Everywhere—and certainly without imitating each other—but urged by surrounding circumstances, man worked, toiled, constructed habitations with the materials at hand—stone in Egypt; bricks, plaster, wood, etc., in Babylonia and China; raised cities in rich and fertile plains, erected edifices, and invented characters and signs to fix and to transmit to others ideas, notions and facts. Whatever may have been the special nature and form of these characters, whether hieroglyphics or phonetics, etc., undoubtedly they were original and not transmitted creations. These inventions arose at places separated by distances then almost impassable, by the same necessities and thoughts, by observation and imitation of nature, and by many other inner and outer promptings and circumstances. The rudiments of mathematics, astronomy, and other sciences, were created by this contact of man's mind with nature; and it is difficult, if not impossible, to admit that Egyptians or Chaldeans were the instructors of the Aryas or of the Chinese, or vice versa.

Of late an attempt has been made to justify American chattelhood by the fact that at the birth of Christ, half of the population of the Roman empire—about sixty millions—groaned under domestic slavery. This estimate may be below the true mark; but the humanity whose emancipation or redemption was to be accomplished, was not limited to the Roman world. For, from Iran and the Indus to the Kuenlun ridges, dwelt a population five or six times greater than that which populated the Roman empire, and that, too, almost unvisited by that terrible social plague which is now represented as being a divine blessing. Whatever may have been the other multiform social calamities which befell them—wars, massacres, destructions, impoverishments, and desolations—are, after all, but transient visitations; while American chattelhood, as devised by its apostles, eternally degrades both master and chattel.

[XI.]

GREEKS.

AUTHORITIES:

Polybius, Grote, O. Muller, Beckh, Curtius, Clinton, Finlay, etc.

At the foot of the Julian Alps, above the head of the Adriatic, the branch of the Aryas which peopled Greece separated from their brethren who wandered into Italy. Keeping to the coast of Adria, the seceders reached the mountainous gorges of Epirus and the plains of Thessaly. From the southern slopes of the Cambunian mountains and of Olympus, they, in course of time, spread over Greece and Peloponnesus. Such at least are the results of the most recent researches concerning the pioneers whose labors prepared that region for the part it afterward played in history. They cleared the forests, drained the marshes, cut canals to let out the stagnant waters in mountain-basins so common in Greece; they regulated the currents of rivers and streams, made the soil arable, and the region fit for man and for further culture. These primitive cultivators of the valleys of Greece, and builders of the Cyclopean structures, called themselves, or were called by others, Pelasgi (that is, those issuing from black soil, etc.), and are regarded as the earliest occupants of Hellenic soil. They were the first settlers, and most probably offshoots of the same original stem whose successive branches mingled with the Pelasgi, or crowded them out and took their place in history as Achives, Hellenes, and Ionians—the last being considered been ancient as well as by modern writers as having been the autochthones of Attica and of other neighboring regions. To these Pelasgi and other primitive occupants, to their laborious pursuits and occupations, to their simple social structure, as well as to the essentially primitive social life of the Greeks, Herodotus refers—asserting that at the outset slavery was unknown in Greece, and especially in Attica.

The Pelasgian epoch was succeeded by what is commonly called the legendary or heroic age. In this Homeric epoch free yeomen or agriculturists own and till the soil; all the handicrafts and professions are free. Carpenters, smiths, leather-dressers, etc., were all freemen, and so also were the bards and "the leeches" (a highly esteemed class in primitive Greece). But wealth already began to accumulate, and the farms of the more fortunate were tilled by poor hired freemen called Thetes.

The geographical conformation of Greece furnished, as it still does, a natural incitement to war and piracy. Both formed prominent characteristics of the heroic times. Phœnician vessels visited the shores, and Phœnician settlements and factories were built at various points. These traffickers, perhaps, taught the Greeks that the feeble may be profitably enslaved by the strong, or at any rate they were the customers of the Greek pirate.

The general Greek word for slave explains the origin of slavery. Dmoos and dmoe, slave, go back to dmao or damao, to subdue, to subjugate, and so bear witness of war and violence either between individuals, or between clans, tribes, and districts, and then of incursions into distant lands. Slavery became an object of luxury, but not of social and economical necessity. It was confined to the dwelling of the chiefs and the sovereign; but did not invade the whole community. Leaders of freebooting expeditions seized every kind of booty, taking as many prisoners as they could on sea and on land. If the expedition or foray failed, the chief and his followers became, in their turn, prisoners and slaves. The prisoners were employed for domestic use within the precincts of the dwelling, as servants, shepherds, etc., or were sold or exchanged for others. The Phœnicians sold Asiatics or Libyans to Greeks and to Pontian barbarians, and received in exchange the prey made by Greeks in Greece or in Pontus. The Phœnicians occasionally kidnapped women and boys and sold them to Asiatics, Africans, and Celt-Iberians. Then, as everywhere throughout remotest and classical antiquity, many of the enslaved had previously belonged to the higher and even the highest conditions in their respective tribes, nations, or communities. So Eumæus, the swineherd of Ulysses immortalized by Homer, was the son of a chief of some island or district, who, having been kidnapped by Phœnicians, was sold to Laertes. In mediæval times, likewise, the prisoner taken on the battle-field and kept for ransom, if not for service, often was superior in birth and station to his keeper. No such social classifications, however, are intrinsic or normal, but only conditional, relative, and conventional, even when inherited. Logically they have the same signification and value in a well-graduated society, with its castles, palaces, charters and other privileges, as on plantations or among roving nomads and savage tribes. And thus, among the Southern slaves, descending from prisoners of war or from kidnapped Africans, there may be several of a purer aristocratic lineage than many of their drivers, even if the latter were F.F.V.