assertions without proof; and therefore, even at the risk of being sometimes tedious, we shall continue to bring forward facts and details, as we proceed, in elucidation of our positions. Now, without going into theological questions (which nothing shall induce us to do), let us request a certain class of French philosophers, who are at present labouring to solve the “social question,” to ask themselves how it happened that, before Christianity was heard of, the theory and practice of human slavery had got such a firm hold of the whole pagan world, that not even the slaves themselves ever dreamt of calling the institution into question. In the middle ages we have had Jacqueries, corresponding with the slave-insurrections under pagan Rome; but it is notorious that, in those Jacqueries, the principle of fraternity and equality was invoked by the disaffected. In the 16th century the Anabaptists of Munster rose against aristocracy and privilege, and, for a season, put down their lords and masters with as high a hand as Eunus and Athenio put down theirs in ancient Sicily. But mark the difference: the Anabaptists sought an order of things in which all should work, and none be drudges or slaves; the followers of Eunus and Parthenio sought quite a different thing,--they sought only to exchange places with their masters, and they had no objection at all to human slavery, provided they were not slaves themselves. What is true of John of Leyden and his followers might be applied to our own Fifth-Monarchy men in Cromwell’s time, and to the French revolutionists of 1793 and 1795 under Babœuf. If they sought to pull down those above them, it was upon the principle and the understanding that neither themselves nor anybody else should take the places of the dethroned oppressors. Something similar might be predicated of certain Socialist sects in modern France and Germany. If they are for making a clean sweep of the aristocracy, it is not that they may take their places. If they are against privilege, it is against the principle that they contend, and not against the mere accident that they themselves are not privileged parties.