Such a power, from very nature, must be despotism at home “tempered only by assassination,” with the cotton-field for its Siberia,--while abroad it must be aggressive, dangerous, and revolting, in itself a _Magnum Latrocinium_, whose fellowship can have nothing but “the filthiness of evil,” and whose very existence will be an intolerable nuisance. When Dante, in the vindictive judgment hurled against his own Florence, called it _bordello_, he did not use a term too strong for the mighty house of ill-fame which the Christian powers are now asked for the first time to license. Such must be the character of the new power. But, though only a recent wrong, and pleading no prescription, the illimitable audacity of its nature can hesitate at nothing; nor is there anything offensive or detestable it will not absorb into itself. It will be an Ishmael, with hand against every man. It will be a brood of Harpies, defiling all it cannot steal. It will be the one-eyed Cyclop of nations, seeing only through Slavery, spurning all as fools who do not see likewise, and bellowing forth in savage egotism,-- “Know, then, we Cyclops are _a race above_ Those air-bred people and their goat-nursed Jove; And learn our power proceeds with thee and thine Not as he wills, _but as ourselves incline_.”[138] Or it will be the Læstrygonian cannibal, with Slavery a perpetual maw, and terrible to the civilized world as that distant power to the companions of Ulysses, when, according to Homer, “One for his food the raging glutton slew.”[139] Or, worse still, it will be the soulless monster of Frankenstein, the wretched creation of human science without God,--endowed with life and nothing else, forever raging madly, the scandal to humanity, powerful only for evil, whose destruction will be essential to the peace of the world.