they discussed the sacred
topic--proclaims that Capital ought to own, and has a divine right to
own, and always more or less does own, Labor; and that, since Labor
constitutes the whole humanity of the laboring man, it clearly follows
that he himself must be owned, if his labor be owned. Would you own the
bird without its cage? Generous gospel of the rich! Blessed are the
wealthy!

It is the destiny of the middle of the nineteenth century--well may
we be forgiven, if we pronounce it with some pride--unhesitatingly
to defend the African slave-trade, and to smile at what sickly
philanthropists used to consider the unutterable woe, the unmeasured
crime, and the diabolical hard-heartedness of that traffic. We have
changed all this; and, to say the truth, it was high time to discover
that the negro-trade forms a charming chapter in the history of Europe,
and that the protracted efforts to put it down were unchristian and
unstatesmanlike. Pitt, Roscoe, Wilberforce, Burke, Washington, Franklin,
Madison, Adams, Lowndes,--puny names! short-sighted men! By the African
slave-trade, creatures that are hardly deserving the name of men, on
account of organic, intellectual, and moral incapacity, are forcibly
carried into the regions of Christian religion and civilization, there
to become civilized in spite of their unfitness for civilization. The
mariners, usually occupied in risking life or health merely for the
sake of base traffic and filthy lucre, are suddenly transformed into
ministering agents of civilization and religion. It gives a priestly
character to the captain of a slave-ship,--to him that is willing to
break the laws of his country, even daring the gallows, for the benefit
of the sable brother, and of his law-abiding conservative society. How
different from those dark times when the poet could say, _--Homo ignoto
homini lupus est!_ The missionary only endeavors to carry the Church to
Africa; the slave-trader carries Africa to the Church, to civilization,
and to the auction-table.

There are but two more returns to truth and justice necessary,--the
Inquisition and the Witch-Trials. These restored, we may safely
congratulate ourselves on having regained the ground on which our race
stood before the Reformation, that untoward event, whence all the
mischief dates that has befallen man in the shape of human rights,
liberty, and other deplorable things, as lately a grave writer--not a
Catholic, nor a Jew either--gravely assu