Page:Does the Bible sanction American slavery?.djvu/53

Rh the whole year round, and even he only just knows enough of them to call them by name. So that there cannot possibly be any kind relations between master and slave, nor any mental training and elevation of the slave by intercourse with his master, such as the defenders of slavery would have us suppose to exist, and such as really existed under the Patriarchs and among the Hebrews in the time of Moses. If we want a parallel to the relations of master and slave on the American plantations, we must seek it not among the people of Jehovah, but in the gangs of Athenian slaves who worked the mines of Laurium, or in the “field-hands” who tilled the great estates of Roman nobles, and who dwelt like the negroes in slave quarters and worked in droves under the lash. The Roman writers on agriculture indeed might afford manuals for the American planters. Cato, who was a perfect model of the slave-owning agriculturist, advises his reader to “sell off his old oxen, his discarded cows and sheep, wool, hides, old wagons, old tools, old and sickly slaves.”

The sentiments of the master and bondman, and their education, in the age and country for which Moses made laws, would be much the same. No high-bred contempt therefore would be felt by the master for the slave: there would be none of the pride which breathes through the language held by the American slave-owners as to the expediency of dooming the lower class to slavery that the upper class may have leisure for higher cultivation. Nor had the slightest taint of degradation yet attached to labour, which was