The common European notion (and the American, borrowed from it), regards the American “slave” as a chattel—a thing sold like a horse or dog, and equally the absolute property of his master. Lord Brougham and others have denounced this barbarism, as they have called it, with great bitterness, and the former has declared that it is immoral, abhorrent, and even illegal “for man to hold property in man”—a declaration that might be true enough, perhaps, if negroes were black-white men, as supposed, but which, in view of the actual facts involved, is simply absurd. They suppose that negroes in America are held by the same tenure that the Romans and other nations of antiquity held their slaves. But there is no resemblance whatever, and, in truth, it would be difficult to find anywhere in history conditions so absolutely and so widely different. All the so-called heathen nations had slaves, or rather they had captives taken in war, whose lives were forfeited, and who thus became the property of their conquerors. The rule or custom seems to have been universal, and it was only after the introduction of Christianity that it became obsolete. A Roman army invaded Gaul or Germany—a great battle or series of battles occurred—those captured on the field became the property of the victors, while the nation or country became a Roman province, and ever after paid tribute to the Roman civil officers. Gaul, Britain, most of Germany, indeed, nearly all the then known world, were thus overrun by the Roman armies, and the vast multitudes that were defeated in battle were carried off to Italy to cultivate the lands of the Roman nobility. There was no question of freedom or slavery, or of rights of any kind involved—the man risked his life, and if defeated, this life was forfeited to the victor. The latter might or might not slay him the next morning, or the next week, or the next year, or twenty years after, just as he pleased. He might send him to work on his lands in Italy, keep him as a domestic in his household, compel him to enter the arena and combat as a gladiator for the popular amusement, or direct him to be crucified or given to feed his fishes, or he might sell him to others, who, of course, had the same control over him; or, finally, by one supreme act of generosity, he might give him back his forfeited life, when, as a freedman—not freeman—he entered the ranks of ordinary citizenship and was lost in the mighty mass of Romans that made up the population of the great city. Freedom or slavery, or what, in modern times, is called such, had nothing to do with the matter. It was a question of life and death rather than of freedom and slavery. The life, the actual physical existence was forfeited—the man had no right to live, and only did live by the sufferance of the captor or master, and therefore all subordinate considerations were lost in this one great, all-dominating fact. Many wise, learned, and