e theocratic
government of that people issued 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, and the inferiority of the black or colored race to the white.
The Greeks justified their system of slavery upon that idea, precisely.
They held the African and some of 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 descend to their posterity. The jurists of
Rome also maintained, that, by the civil law, there might be servitude
or slavery, personal and hereditary; first, by the voluntary act of an
individual, who might sell himself into slavery; secondly, by his being
reduced into a state of slavery by his creditors, in satisfaction of his
debts; and, thirdly, by being placed in a state of servitude or slavery
for crime. At the introduction of Christianity, 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 the political and social relations
of the human race, as well as of all true religious feeling, the
indi