und incompatible with the peaceful prevalence of
a constitutional system of government, its character was emphatically
summed up in a few words by a great man, who called it "the sum of
all villanies." Time has not improved its character, but has made the
institution worse, by extending the effect of its operations. The
political character which American slavery has had ever since the
formation of the Constitution has not only stood in the way of every
emancipation project, but it has made slaveholders, and men who have
sought political preferment through working on the prejudices of
slaveholders, supporters of the institution on grounds that have had no
existence in other countries; and the contest in which this country is
now involved is the natural effect of the more rapid growth of the Free
States in everything that leads to political power in modern times. Had
the Slave States in 1860 been found relatively as strong as they were in
1840, the Secession movement could not have occurred; for most of the
men who lead in it would have preferred to rule the United States, and
would have cared little for the defeat of any political party, confident
as they would have been in their capacity to control all American
parties. As slavery is the foundation of political power in this
country, its friends cannot abandon their ideas without abdicating their
position. Hence the fierceness with which they have put forth, and
advocated with all their strength, opinions that never were held by any
other class of man-owners, and which would have been scouted in Barbary
even in those days when religious animosity added additional venom to
the feelings of the Mussulmans toward their Christian captives, and when
Spain and Italy were Africa's Africa. The slave population of the United
Slates are forbidden to hope. They form a doomed race, the physical
peculiarities of which are forever to keep them out of the list of
the elect. They are slaves, they and their ancestors always have been
slaves, and they and their descendants always must be slaves. Such is
the Southern theory, and the practice under it does that theory no
violence. In Russia the condition of the enslaved has never been so
bad as this, nor anything like it. Between the slave and the serf the
difference has been almost as great as that between the serf and the
free citizen.

Nothing certain is known as to the origin of Russian serfage. Able men
have found the institution exist