Page:Notices of Negro slavery as connected with Pennsylvania.djvu/8

372 kind paternal head; they labored in common with his own offspring, they tended his flocks with his own sons and daughters, they were protected by special ordinances of the Jewish law, and at the expiration of fifty years, there was a manumission of all slaves, and every one was entitled to land and money from their masters: and, in addition to this, there was that most important of all differences, viz., that Hebrew slavery was not hereditary Even this mild kind of bondage extended no further than to those who were actually purchased by the master; their offspring were free, and instead of the heart-sickening certainty of the American slave, that the oppression under which he suffers will be perpetuated, perhaps in an aggravated form, to his latest posterity, the Jewish bondsman saw in prospective for his offspring liberty, and perhaps honor and happiness. Among the Romans, if a slave exhibited talents and became distinguished for his mental powers, he generally obtained his freedom; and many of the most illustrious poets, statesmen, and warriors of Rome were freedmen. To compare then the kind and paternal government of the Hebrew slave, his certain prospect of obtaining an honorable freedom, or the hope of the Roman servant, who felt within his breast the energies and ambition of a powerful mind, to that dull, heartless, and oppressive reality, which sits like an incubus upon the breast of an American slave, that never to him shall the light of freedom dawn, or the present abjectness of his condition be changed for his