Page:Webster and Hayne's Celebrated Speeches.djvu/92

88 detention of the Senate—to review, historically, this question of slavery, which, partly in consequence of its own merits, and partly, perhaps mostly, in the manner it is discussed in one and the other portion of the country, has been a source of so much alienation and unkind feeling between the different portions of the Union. We all know, sir, that slavery has existed in the world from time immemorial. There was slavery in the earliest periods of history, in the Oriental nations. There was slavery among the Jews; the theocratic government of that people made no injunction against it. There was slavery among the Greeks, and the ingenious philosophy of the Greeks found, or sought to find, a justification for it exactly upon the grounds which have been assumed for such a justification in this country; that is, a natural and original difference among the races of mankind, the inferiority of the black or colored race to the white. The Greeks justified their system of slavery upon that ground precisely. They held the African, and in some parts the Asiatic, tribes to be inferior to the white race; but they did not show, I think, by any close process of logic, that, if this were true, the more intelligent and the stronger had, therefore, a right to subjugate the weaker.

The more manly philosophy and jurisprudence of the Romans placed the justification of slavery on entirely different grounds.

The Roman jurists, from the first, and down to the fall of the empire, admitted that slavery was against the natural law, by which, as they maintained, all men, of whatsoever clime, color, or capacity, were equal; but they justified slavery, first, upon the ground and authority of the law of nations—arguing, and arguing truly, that at that day the conventional law of nations admitted that captives in war, whose lives, according to the notions of the times, were at the absolute disposal of the captors, might, in exchange for exemption from death, be made slaves for life, and that such servitude might extend to their posterity. The jurists of Rome also maintained that, by the civil law, there might be servitude—slavery, personal and hereditary; first, by the voluntary act of an individual who might sell himself into slavery; second, by his being received into a state of slavery by his creditors in satisfaction of a debt; and, thirdly, by being placed in a state of servitude or slavery for crime. At the introduction of Christianity into the world, the Roman world was full of slaves, and I suppose there is to be found no injunction against that relation between man and man in the teachings of the gospel of Jesus Christ, or of any of his apostles. The object of the instruction imparted to mankind by the Founder of Christianity was to touch the heart, purify the soul, and improve the lives of individual men. That object went directly to the first fountain of all political and all social relations of the human race—the individual heart and mind of man.

Now, sir, upon the general nature, and character, and influence of slavery, there exists a wide difference between the northern portion of this country and the southern. It is said on the one side that, if not the subject of any injunction or direct prohibition in the New Testament, slavery is a wrong; that it is founded merely in the right of the strongest; and that it is an oppression, like all unjust wars, like all those conflicts by which a mighty nation subjects a weaker nation to their will; and that slavery, in its nature, whatever may be said of it in the modifications which have taken place, is not, in fact, according to the meek spirit of the gospel. It is not kindly affectioned; it does not “seek another’s, and not its own.” It does not “let the oppressed go free.” These are sentiments that are