accomplished men were slaves or were of this unfortunate class, and remained thus through life, subject often, doubtless, to the caprices and cruelty of illiterate and brutal owners, who at any moment could put them to the torture or to a cruel death. The rule was universal among all the ancient nations, except the Hebrews, who, in some respects, or as regarded their own people, made some humane modifications. It was entirely personal—the state or government having nothing to do with the matter either as regarded the original forfeit or the cancelling of the bonds and the restoration to liberty, or rather to life, of the unfortunate captive. There was a certain social prejudice in respect to freedmen, or the children of those who had been slaves, but there does not appear to have been any legal or political disability. They had forfeited their lives—they became absolutely dead in law, mere things, chattels, or property of their owners, of which the government or state took no more account than of horses or oxen, or any other property; but the moment that their lives were restored to them, then they at once entered the ranks of citizenship with all the rights and privileges common in those days, and in those relatively barbarous times. There were some incidental features or phases of this terrible condition that are too marked to pass over without notice, as they tend to show, in a very striking manner, the wide and indeed unapproachable distance between it and that which, in our own times, has been so generally confounded with it. Servile wars were almost constantly occurring events. Opinion, even in the rudest times, has always, to a certain extent, governed the world, and the universal custom of enslaving those defeated in battle was submitted to in the first instance without a murmur. It was the fortune of war, and no one disputed the inexorable rule which doomed them to become the absolute chattels or property of the victor; but when their numbers increased to any considerable extent in any locality, the natural instinct which told them they were the equals, and very often the superiors of those who owned them, could not be restrained, and the long and terrible servile wars almost always raging within the bosom of the Roman Empire probably weakened and more than any other thing prepared it for that awful overthrow which finally overtook the Roman colossus. Another equally striking feature distinguished this condition. The slave population never increased itself in the regular and natural order. Most of them were adult males, originally, and the small number of females may sufficiently account for the constant tendency to extinction; but beyond this, the abnormal condition, the terrible and transcendent wrong of forcing beings like themselves, with the same wants and the same instincts as their masters, to lives in absolute and abject subjection to the wills of others, was necessarily incompatible with a permanent existence.