claim
to place under the protection of the Apostles, has nothing in common
with that of which the Apostles had cognizance. The thing, however, is
certain. Slavery, in the United States, is founded on color, it is
_negro_ slavery. Now, this is a fact wholly new in the history of
mankind, a monstrous fact, which profoundly modifies the nature of
slavery. Before Las Casas, that virtuous creator of the slave trade, the
name of which comprises to him alone a whole commentary on the maxim "Do
evil that good may come," before Las Casas, no one had thought of
connecting slavery with race. Now, the slavery connected with race is
that of all others most difficult to uproot, for it bears an indelible
sign of inequality, a sign which the law did not create, and which it
cannot destroy.

Such was not the slavery that offered itself to the eyes of the Prophets
and Apostles; a normal servitude, of right, based upon a native and
indestructible inferiority was not then in question, but an accidental
servitude among equals, to which the chances of war had given birth, and
which emancipation suppressed entire. Quite different is the slavery
which depends on race, and which, it may be said, supposes a
malediction; do what one will, this latter will subsist, it will, in a
manner, survive itself; it will find, besides, in the idea of a
providential dispensation, the natural excuse for its excesses. This
slavery the Bible condemns in the most explicit manner. If its champions
dare suppose two species, the book of Genesis shows them all mankind
springing from one man, and the Gospel recounts to them the redemption
wrought in behalf of all the descendants of Adam; if they argue from the
curse pronounced against Canaan, the Old Testament presents to them the
detailed enumeration of the Canaanites, a vast family, in which the
whites figure as well as the blacks.

In short, there is a deadly struggle between the Gospel and slavery
under all its forms, and particularly under the odious form which the
African slave trade has given it in modern times. The Gospel has been,
is, and will be, at the head of every earnest movement directed against
slavery. It is important that it should be so; it is the only means of
avoiding the acts of violence, the revolts, the extreme calamities from
which the whites and the blacks would equally suffer. The Gospel is
admirable, inasmuch as by the side of the duties of masters, it
proclaims those of slaves; as in the