personal_;" in all that stamps the law-maker, and law-upholder with
meanness and hypocrisy, it certainly has no present rival of its "bad
eminence," and we may search in vain the history of a world's despotism
for a parallel. The civil code of Justinian never acknowledged, with
that of our democratic despotisms, the essential equality of man. The
dreamer in the gardens of Epicurus recognized neither in himself, nor in
the slave who ministered to his luxury, the immortality of the spiritual
nature. Neither Solon nor Lycurgus taught the inalienability of human
rights. The Barons of the Feudal System, whose maxim was emphatically
that of Wordsworth's robber,

"That he should take who had the power,
And he should keep who can."

while trampling on the necks of their vassals, and counting the life of
a man as of less value than that of a wild beast, never appealed to God
for the sincerity of their belief, that all men were created equal. It
was reserved for American slave-holders to present to the world the
hideous anomaly of a code of laws, beginning with the emphatic
declaration of the inalienable rights of all men to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness, and closing with a deliberate and systematic
denial of those rights, in respect to a large portion of their
countrymen; engrossing on the same parchment the antagonist laws of
liberty and tyranny. The very nature of this unnatural combination has
rendered it necessary that American slavery, in law and in practice,
should exceed every other in severity and cool atrocity. The masters of
Greece and Rome permitted their slaves to read and write and worship the
gods of paganism in peace and security, for there was nothing in the
laws, literature, or religion of the age to awaken in the soul of the
bondman a just sense of his rights as a man. But the American