The passage last quoted--to which several others from the new testament, almost as strong, can be added--demonstrates that christianity did not disapprove of slavery. Further, as I have already suggested, the slavery not rebuked by Jesus and his apostles was mainly that of kin in blood and race, of those who had been in a measure free themselves or descendants of the free. The slaves of the south were far remote in blood, and their native condition so bad that American slavery was for them elevation and great improvement. The new testament, the declaration of independence, and the federal constitution--surely three very respectable authorities, in America at least--stand together in solid phalanx. They clearly demonstrate that the charge that southern slavery was heinously wrong in itself, and that the masters were wicked man-stealers and kidnappers, made for a long while in every corner of the north, was mere opprobrium and abuse. Both sections ought to learn that there was nothing in negro slavery to shock the moral sense, but that on the contrary it was in its general effect of the utmost beneficence to the slave. Both ought to learn also that the white-hot zeal with which the institution was fought was due mainly to these things: 1. Free labor had long been in an uncompromising hand-to-hand struggle with slave labor. Years before this commenced the employing class had subconsciously divined it was far more profitable to hire the laborer only when his work was needed, and then let him go until he was needed again. The worker with the advance of democracy had become more and more hostile to a system coercing his labor and denying him all political and civil rights. The co-operation of employer and laborer had expelled slavery of white men from Europe. The feeling towards slavery had become one of decided opposition. 2. In America the opposition to slavery was powerfully re-enforced, first, by the new cause the latter gave in competing with free labor for the unsettled public domain, and then in its operation to nationalize the south into a separate federation. With this combined the growing conception among the northern people of the negro as a man who had reached the stage of development characterizing the typical white. This huge mistake, hugged to their bosoms and championed with unflagging zeal by the ablest and most influential root-and-branch abolitionists, had a prodigious propagandic effect. It identified the cause of the negro slave, whom evolution had not yet made ready for liberty, with that of the oppressed European who had been long ready for it; and consequently that cause was continuously advocated with the passion which the French revolution had started against human inequality. The root-and-branch abolitionists at last excited a pseudo-moral paroxysm among thousands at the north and kept it increasing for a long while.