nor any of the descendants of Shem in it_. If we do, then either these
are not God's words, or God's words have not come true.

But it is a fact that not all of Ham's entire descendants, nor even of
Canaan's descendants (on whom _alone_, and not _at all on Ham_, nor on
his three other sons, Noah's curse fell), are now, _nor ever have
been_, as a whole, in a state of bondage. The Canaanites were not
slaves, but free and powerful tribes, when the Hebrews entered their
territory. The Carthaginians, it is generally admitted, were descended
from Canaan. They certainly were free and powerful when, in frequent
wars, they contended, often with success, against the formidable
Romans. If the curse of Noah was intended for all the descendants of
Ham, it signally failed in the case of the first military hero
mentioned in the Bible, who was the founder of a world-renowned city
and empire. I refer to Nimrod, who was a son of Cush, the oldest son
of Ham. Of this Nimrod the record is, "He began to be a mighty one in
the earth: he was a mighty hunter before the Lord: and the beginning
of his Kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the
land of Shinar. Out of that land went forth Asshur and builded
Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, and Resen, between Nineveh
and Calah; the same is a great city." This is Bible authority,
informing us that the grandson of Ham (Nimrod, the son of Cush) was a
mighty man--_the great man_ of the world, in his day--the founder of
the Babylonian empire, and the ancestor of the founder of the city of
Nineveh, one of the grandest cities of the ancient world. We are not
led to conclude, from these wonderful achievements by the posterity of
Cush (who was the progenitor of the Negroes), that this line of Ham's
descendants was so _weak in intellect_ as to be unable to set up and
maintain a government.[637]

FOOTNOTES

[636] The Unity of the Human Races, pp. 14-17.

[637] Curse of Canaan, pp. 5-7. By Rev. C.H. Edgar.

* * * * *

CHAPTER III.

NEGRO CIVILIZATION.

DR. WISEMAN has also shown that both Aristotle and Herodotus describe
the Egyptians--to whom Homer, Lycurgus, Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato
resorted for wisdom--as having the black skin, the crooked legs, the
distorted feet and the woolly hair of the Negro, from which we do not
wish, or feel it necessary to infer that the Egyptians were Negroes,
but _first_ that the ideas of degradation and _