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 establishing its power on the ruins of the Roman empire, the great swarms of Roman slaves began to disappear; but the middle age witnessed rather a change in the channels of the slave-trade, than a diminution of its evils. The pirate, and the kidnapper, and the conqueror, still continued their pursuits. The Saxon race carried the most repulsive forms of slavery to England, where not half the population could assert a right to freedom, and where the price of a man was but four times the price of an ox. The importation of foreign slaves was freely tolerated; in defiance of severe penalties, the Saxons sold their own kindred into slavery on the Continent; nor could the traffic be checked, till religion, pleading the cause of humanity, made its appeal to conscience. Even after the Conquest, slaves were exported from England to Ireland, till the reign of Henry II., when a national synod of the Irish,—to remove the pretext for an invasion,—decreed the emancipation of all English slaves in the island.

"The German nations made the shores of the Baltic the scenes of the same desolating traffic; and the Dnieper formed the highway on which Russian merchants conveyed to Constantinople the slaves that had been purchased in the markets of Russia. The wretched often submitted to bondage, as the bitter but only refuge from absolute want. But it was the long wars between the German and Slavonic tribes, which imparted to the slave-trade its greatest activity, and filled France and the neighboring states with such numbers of victims that they gave the name of the Slavonic nation to servitude itself; and every country