that they would not be obliged to return to them. When Southern
slaveholders shall cease to scour the land for fugitive servants, and to
hunt them with guns and dogs, and to imprison, and scourge, and kill
them;--when, in a word, they shall subject to the bearing of such a law
as that referred to their system of servitude, then we shall begin to
think that they are sincere in likening it to the systems which existed
among the Jews. The law, enacted in Virginia in 1705, authorizing any
two justices of the peace "by proclamation to _outlaw_ runaways, who
might thereafter be killed and destroyed by any person whatsoever, by
such ways and means as he might think fit, without accusation or
impeachment of any crime for so doing," besides that it justifies what I
have just said about hunting fugitive servants, shows, 1st. That the
American Anti-Slavery Society is of too recent an origin to be the
occasion, as slaveholders and their apologists would have us believe, of
all the cruel laws enacted at the South. 2d. That Southern slaveholders
would be very unwilling to have their system come under the operation of
such a law as that which allowed the Jewish servant to change his
master. 3d. That they are monsters, indeed, into which men may be turned
by their possession of absolute power.

You, perhaps, suppose, (and I frankly admit to you, that there is some
room for the supposition,) that the servants referred to in the 15th and
16th verses of the 23d chapter of Deuteronomy, were such as had escaped
from foreign countries to the country of the Jews. But, would this view
of the matter help you? By taking it, would you not expose yourself to
be most pertinently and embarrassingly asked, for what purpose these
servants fled to a strange and most odious people?--and would not your
candid reply necessarily be, that it was to escape from the galling
chains of slavery, to a far-famed milder type of servitude?--from
Gentile oppression, to a land in which human rights were protected by
Divine laws? But, as I have previously intimated, I have not the
strongest confidence in the anti-slavery argument, so frequently drawn
from this passage of the Bible. I am not sure that a Jewish servant is
referred to: nor that on the supposition of his being a foreigner, the
servant came under any form of servitude when entering the land of the
Jews. Before leaving the topic, however, let me remark, that the
passage, under any construction of it, makes ag