The Anti-Slavery Examiner, OmnibusAmerican Anti-Slavery Society
Religion
The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus
American Anti-Slavery Society
Antislavery movements -- United States -- Periodicals; Slavery -- United States -- Periodicals
In the paragraph, which relates to the fourth and tenth commandments,
there is another specimen of your loose reasoning. You say, that the
language, "In it (the Sabbath) thou shalt do no work, thou, nor thy son,
nor thy daughter, nor thy man servant, nor thy maid servant,"
"recognises the authority of the master over the servant." I grant, that
it does: but does it at all show, that these servants were slaves? Does
it recognise any more authority than the master should exercise over his
voluntary servants? Should not the head of a family restrain all his
servants, as well the voluntary as the involuntary, from unnecessary
labor on the Sabbath? You also say, that the tenth commandment
"recognizes servants as the _property_ of their masters." But how does
it appear from the language of this commandment, that the man servant
and maid servant are property any more than the wife is? We will
proceed, however, to the third section of your book.
Your acquaintance with history has enabled you to show some of the
characteristics and fruits of Greek and Roman slavery. You state the
facts, that the subjects of this slavery were "absolutely the property
of their masters"--that they "were used like dogs"--that "they were
forbidden to learn any liberal art or perform any act worthy of their
masters"--that "once a day they received a certain number of stripes for
fear they should forget they were slaves"--that, at one time, "sixty
thousand of them in Sicily and Italy were chained and confined to work
in dungeons"--that "in Rome there was a continual market for slaves,"
and that "the slaves were commonly exposed for sale naked"--that, when
old, they were turned away," and that too by a master, highly esteemed
for his superior virtues, to starve to death"--that they were thrown
into ponds to be food for fish--that they were in the city of Athens
near twenty times as numerous as free persons--that there were in the
Roman Empire sixty millions of slaves to twenty millions of freemen mind
that many of the Romans had five thousand, some ten thousand, and others
twenty thousand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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