"Sir John Hawkins has the unenviable distinction of being the first English captain of a slave-ship, about the year 1552."[13] His venture proved a great success. Good Queen Bess reproached him for his mistreatment of human beings. He answered that it was far better for the African thus to become a slave in a christian community, than to live the rest of his life in his native home of idolatry; and this was so convincing that "in the subsequent expeditions of this most heartless man-stealer, she was a partner and protector."[14] Until the end of the seventeenth century the masses regarded the negro as being rather wild beast than man, showing no more scruples in catching and making a drudge of him than later generations did in lassoing wild horses and working them under curb-bit, spur, and whip. And the more understanding ones, who recognized that the negro belonged to humanity, re-enforced Aristotle[15] and Pliny[16] with much that they found both in the Old and New Testaments.[17] The many who preached liberty or the true religion posed as humanitarians, pharisaically comparing themselves with the best characters of Greece and Rome. The citizens of those great republics, they said, in spite of their advanced democracy, tore men and women of their own race and blood away from home and country and forced them with the scourge to toil in chains, while we do that only with savages and heathens, who cannot be civilized or christianized in any other way. We eschew slavery in the abstract. We tolerate it only in the concrete, which is the slavery of those destined for it by God and nature. Slave-catcher, slaveholder, and the public seriously and conscientiously held this creed. You must now add to the list of influences planting and stimulating slavery in America the protection it got in the constitution under which the federal government started in 1789. As Mr. Blaine says: "The compromises on the slavery question, inserted in the constitution, were among the essential conditions upon which the federal government was organized. If the African slave-trade had not been permitted to continue for twenty years, if it had not been conceded that three-fifths of the slaves should be counted in the apportionment of representatives in congress, if it had not been agreed that fugitives from service should be returned to their owners, the thirteen States would not have been able in 1787 'to form a more perfect union.'"[18] Think over it until you can fully take in the prodigious favor to slavery which this countenance of it by the American bible of bibles naturally created in the north and south.