The slaveholding rulers were now forced to sustain a hired soldiery to keep down the slaves--not for defence against an external but an internal foe. Among these hirelings were the Carryians, Lydians, Libyans, and Libyo-Phoenicians. To such motley mercenaries were they obliged to intrust the security of their homes and municipalities. At times this hireling soldiery joined the revolted slaves, and they formed but a poor defence against the Egyptians, or against Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Alexandrian conquest. To all these empires the Phoenician slaveholders were obliged to pay tribute, until finally Alexander massacred or enslaved them all--slaveholders and slaves alike. Already some of the violent pro-slavery militants in the slave section of the United States express their purpose to invoke the aid of France in their schemes of secession and conquest, and propose that their cities and states be occupied by French garrisons. What a striking analogy with the course of the fated Phoenicians! And if eventually France should listen to their humble prayer and send defenders to these terrified slave-masters, climatic reasons would induce her to furnish such troops as are naturally fitted to bear the tropical heats of the slave-coast--the malarious regions of Louisiana and South Carolina. Such would be her Zouaves and Turcos--the Zouaves enemies of every kind of slavery, and the Turcos negroes themselves. Where then would be their defenders and their security? Every French soldier, even if neither Zouave nor Turco, would, in all probability, side at once with the oppressed against the oppressor. The prejudice of race, so prevalent in America, is not a European characteristic: it did not exist in antiquity; it does not prevail in Europe now. It was not the existence of an oriental political despotism in Phoenicia--it was _domestic slavery_, which, penetrating into industry and agriculture, destroyed the richest, most enterprising, and most daring community of remote antiquity. Cicero wrote their epitaph: "_Fallacissimum esse genus Phoenicum, omnia monumenta vetustatis atque omnes historia nobis prodiderunt._" When, therefore, positive history slowly rises on the limitless horizon of time, Phoenicia appears as an ominous illustration of how domestic slavery, from an external social monstrosity, tends to become a chronic but corrosive disease. And neither does the evidence of history end with her. Over and over again will it be found that slavery, after eating so deeply into the social organism as to become constitutional and chronic, has the same ultimate issue, even as a virus slowly but surely penetrates from the extremities into the vitals of the animal organism.