This universal custom prevailed—all men, even the wisest and best, in their profound ignorance of their own nature, believed slavery to be right, just as many good men in our own times believe that the European condition, which dooms the millions to subjection to the few, is right; but it was so utterly in conflict with natural instinct that the servile population tended constantly to extinction, and therefore, as observed, it soon died out when the spirit of Christianity modified the customs of war, and the conquered became prisoners to be exchanged, instead of slaves subject to the caprices and cruelties of creatures like themselves. Some superficial writers, ignorant of the underlying facts, have supposed that Greece and Rome were great and prosperous because they had slaves, a process of reasoning quite equal to saying that a man enjoyed good health because he had a fever-sore on one of his legs! These nations and all other nations have been prosperous and powerful in precise proportion to the number of free men, and weak and contemptible in exact proportion to the multiplicity of slaves—a truth as evident at this day as in any other, and rendered more palpable in our own history and condition than ever before. Greece and Rome were great and powerful, in contrast with the great Oriental empires—Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian, etc.—because there was a large free population in the former, while in the latter they were all slaves, or the slaves of slaves. Of course no such condition could exist in our times, and the most ignorant and abject portion of the European population could not be placed or kept in such position a single hour. The Oriental populations still practice it, to a certain extent, perhaps. The Turks, when they invaded the lower empire and captured Constantinople, made slaves of their prisoners, and long trains of unhappy beings, wealthy matrons and delicately nurtured young girls, chained by the wrists to their own servants, or to rude soldiers and uncouth peasants, were marched off to become the abject and miserable slaves of still more gross and brutal masters. The sale of Circassian girls for Turkish harems is altogether a different affair, and however revolting to our notions and habits, has nothing in common with the condition historically known to us as slavery. The essential fact in this condition, as will be seen, was the forfeited life; all other facts hinged on that, and the idea of property or chattelism was incidental—a mere result. When the man’s life was forfeited, when he was deemed to be dead in law, when his captor could do as he pleased with him, crucify, torture, or destroy him altogether, then it necessarily followed that he was a chattel, or a thing that he would be apt to make as profitable as possible, and this self-interest was the sole protection of the miserable creature. It therefore was, doubtless, a great interest—some of the Roman nobles owning many