“The immorality and irreligion of the slaves are the necessary consequences of their political and personal degradation. They are not considered by the law as human beings.… _They must become men before they can become Christians_.… Can a preacher prevail on his hearers strictly to fulfil their conjugal duties in a country where no protection is given to their conjugal rights,--in a country where the husband and wife may, at the pleasure of the master or by process of law, be in an instant separated forever?… The great body of the colonists have resolutely opposed religious instruction; and they are in the right. They know, though their misinformed friends in England do not know, that Christianity and Slavery cannot long exist together.”[13] Such is the philippic against Slavery by the first writer of the English language in our day, and one of the first in all times. As testimony to a sacred cause, it is priceless; as a contribution to literature, it cannot be forgotten. Why it was suppressed by American publishers, who gave us the earliest collection of Macaulay’s Essays ever printed in England or America, I know not. Unhappily, this suppression was too much in harmony with the received American system from that day to this, whether in publishing Humboldt’s work on Cuba, the Bishop of Oxford’s work on the American Church, or the engraving of Ary Scheffer’s “Christus Consolator,” from all of which the slave is shut out. That this blame may not fall upon the author himself, it is important to know that the American collection was made without any list supplied by him. In the modesty of his nature, he regarded his contributions to Reviews as fugitive pieces, which he abandoned to the world, without caring to gather them together. It will be for posterity to rejudge this judgment. In this statement, I rely upon personal recollection of conversations with him. More than twenty years ago--as also more recently--I was in the habit of meeting the great writer in the society of London; and I remember well how, on one of these occasions, when told that an American bookseller proposed to publish a collection of his articles, he very positively protested against it, and refused to furnish a list. Nor is it out of place to add here, that, while his wonderful conversation left on the mind an ineffaceable impression of eloquence and fulness, perhaps without parallel, it also showed a character of singular integrity.