Israelite were stolen, the man that stole him was a thief, because he stole the property of the Lord, who counted all the Israelites as his bondservants. But this only applied to the children of Israel. There is another application of the principle, which the ultra-abolitionist does not consider, as when a slave, lawfully belonging to a Jewish or a Christian master, is stolen from that master. For it is impossible to steal that which has no owner. The very crime of stealing consists in a felonious taking of the lawful property of another. And it is not the subsequent use of that property, but the felonious taking which constitutes the theft, for a man may be quite as much a thief by taking from the owner what he can not use himself, as if he intended to make a profit of it. On this plain ground of law and justice, it is worthy of very serious reflection whether the abolitionist, who secretly entices the negro slave to abscond from his lawful owner, and thus deprives the master of his legal property, is not, on principle, liable to this very charge of man-stealing; and therefore subject to the condemnation of the divine law.

The next point made by this writer is derived from the Mosaic precept which commanded that "a slave, escaping from a heathen master, and coming under the authority of the Jewish law, should should not be delivered up, but should be free in Israel." And here my antagonist thanks me for having said that "this evidently must be referred to the case of a slave who had escaped from a foreign heathen master, and can not, with any sound reason, be applied to the slaves of the Israelites themselves."

It is certainly amusing to read the conclusion which my ingenious critic draws from this statement, viz.: "That by the Jewish law no person could be held in heathen slavery, and therefore if that law was in force at the South, it would free every slave by an authority higher than that of man.'

I shall not undertake to decide whether the author of this sentence thought that his readers had lost their understanding, or that the effervescence of his zeal had deprived him of his own. But in all the nonsense that I have read upon the subject, I have never seen a more puerile absurdity. The law in question is admitted by himself, and rightly admitted, to apply to a slave who had escaped into Judea "from a foreign heathen master," so that "it can not with any sound reason, be applied to the slaves of the Israelites themselves." If,

then, it could not be applied to the slaves belonging to the Jews, how, in the name of common-sense, can it be applied to the slaves belonging to the Southerners?

His last effort, however, is to get rid of the whole testimony of the Mosaic law, by the bold declaration that "between the Hebrew bondman and the Southern slave there is no point of resemblance, so that we can not use the first to justify the second," and he quotes from the respectable Jewish Rabbi, Dr. Raphall, as follows, viz.: "The slave under the Jewish law, though a Gentile or a heathen, is a person in whom the dignity of human nature is to be respected; he has rights. Whereas the heathen view of slavery which prevailed at Rome, and which, I am sorry to say, is adopted at the South, reduces the slave to a thing, (a chattel,) and a thing can have no rights."

Now here, while I readily admit that the heathen law of slavery which prevailed at Rome, differed in some particulars from the Jewish system, yet I shall prove that the slave in the South is more nearly like the Jewish slave than like the Roman. I shall also show that, granting the Southern slave to be in some respects a chattel, the Jewish slave was also a chattel in the same respects, precisely. But I shall contend that in every other aspect of his condition, the Southern slave is considered a person: for his life is protected, his maintenance is secured, and he is the subject of lawful manumission, from which has proceeded a result which neither Judea nor Rome ever accomplished, in the new State of Liberia.

1. The Jewish law confined slavery to the races of the heathen. And in this it resembled the Roman law, by comprehending all the nations "round about" Judea, without reference to their barbarism, or savage degradation. It was sufficient that they were "strangers to the Jewish stock, and I have proved, by the express quotation from Leviticus, (ch. 25: 40, etc.,) that the rule extended to the families of strangers, resident among them, and "begotten in the land."

Such, precisely, is the Southern system, confining slavery to a heathen race, but limiting it, as the Jewish law did not, to the pos terity of Ham, the negroes, who, in their native state, are confessedly the most degraded and brutalized people known to history. In this respect, therefore, the slave-system of the South has the advantage over the law of Moses.

2. The Jewish institution was like the Roman law, in regarding

the slaves as chattel property, because, in the words of Cruden, already quoted, “they were either bought or taken in the wars, and their masters kept them, exchanged them, sold them, or disposed of them as their own goods." That they were liable to be beaten at the master's pleasure, short of maiming or death, is perfectly proved in Exod. 21: 20-1, and the only difference between the Jewish and the Roman law in this respect was, that prior to the reign of the Emperor Antonine, the Roman master was allowed to kill his slave. The Jewish master, on the contrary, was punished if the slave died under his correction, but suffered no penalty unless the death occurred within " a day or two" after the blows had been given; for if the slave died on the third day, the loss of his labor and of the "money" which he had cost, was held to be a sufficient infliction.

Such, substantially, is the chattel property of slavery in the South. The slaves may be kept, bought and sold, or punished at the master's pleasure, provided death does not ensue. In one respect, however, the Jewish law had an advantage by enacting, that if the master struck out the eye or the tooth of his slave, he should let him go free. But this is quite balanced by the superior guardianship of life according to the Southern law, which does not measure the responsibility of the master by the fact that the slave survived his punishment for "a day or two," but holds him liable for causing the death of his slave, after any interval.

3. But although the slave was chattel property, alike by the Jewish, the Roman, and the Southern law, in which point there is no real difference between them, yet I insist upon the unquestionable fact, that in all of them "the dignity of human nature was respected," whatever may be said or thought by any man to the contrary. Because, in all of them, the slave was acknowledged to be a man, to be maintained and supported, with his family, to have access to religi ous privileges, and to be set free by manumission, if the master were willing. These are privileges which belong to PERSONS, not things. And therefore the notion that because slaves are chattel property, they are regarded as nothing else but chattels, is a manifest error. The truth is, that they partake of both these characters. AS CHATTELS, they can be bought and sold. As PERSONS, they must be maintained and supported, in sickness and in old age, as well as in their helpless infancy. By the Jewish and the Southern law their lives are protected. By all the laws of Judea, Rome, and the South, they

are entitled to a share in religious privileges, and they may be manu mitted, or set free, if the master thought them worthy.

4. With respect to the marriages of slaves, the law of the South is silent. So was the ancient law of Rome. But so, likewise, is the law of Moses. There is, however, one remarkable passage, already quoted in the Bible View, which bears, on this subject, a very plain testimony: "If thou buy a Hebrew servant, six years shall he serve, and in the seventh year he shall go out free, for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself. If he were married, then his wife shall go with him. If his master have given him a wife, and she have borne him sons or daughters, the wife and the children shall be her master's, and he shall go out by himself." (Exod. 21:2—4.) This is a plain proof that, in the case of slaves, marriage was not allowed to interfere with the master's right of property. The husband had no remedy allowed, except to become himself a slave for life, if he wished to remain with his wife and children.

There is no doubt that this feature in the Southern institution is liable to much occasional hardship, and it is greatly to be desired that it might be regulated, as I presume it will be, in time, by a better system. But meanwhile we have no right to censure it as inexcusable, so long as the same difficulty presents itself in the Mosaic system. Nor ought we to doubt that the Christian slaveholders and clergy of the South do all that they can to bring the marriages of the slaves under the rule of religious obligation; and that the negro race there are elevated in their marriage state immeasurably above the polygamy and licentiousness which prevail in their parent land of Africa.

5. The last topic which I shall notice here, respects the exclusion of slaves from giving testimony before a court of justice, which has been the subject of an immense amount of objurgation from the eloquent adversaries of the Southern system. Of course it is allowed that the same rule is found in the Roman law, and in the law of every other land in which slavery existed, which comprehended, until lately, the whole civilized world. But as the Mosaic system lays down no special rule upon the subject, I shall have recourse to the historian Josephus, to whom one of my antagonists displayed so much partiality, on a different topic, that he tried to make him contradict the statements of Bishop Newton, though happily in vain. Here, then, is the passage, taken from the same translation, vol. 1,

p. 264: "Let not a single witness be credited, but three, or two at the least, and those such whose testimony is confirmed by their good lives. But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex. Nor let servants be admitted to give testimony, on account of the ignobility of their soul; since it is probable that they may not speak truth, either out of the hope of gain, or fear of punishment."

Thus we have, again, another instance of agreement with the Jewish law of slavery. And on the whole survey the reader can readily perceive how much confidence may be placed in the reckless assertion of my adversaries, that "between the Hebrew bondman and the Southern slave, THERE IS NO POINT OF RESEMBLANCE."