From this misery, from this last perversion and profanation of the human intellect divine--the being content to be a slave--the Saxon serf had escaped thus far; and, thanks to the great God of nature, of revelation, that last curse, that last profanation, he escaped forever. His body the task-master had enslaved; his intellect he had emasculated, debased, shaken, but he had not killed it; for there, there, amid the dust and ashes of the all-but-extinguished fire, there lurked alive, ready to be enkindled by a passing breath into a devouring flame, the sacred spark of liberty. Ever hoping, ever struggling to be free, when the day dawned of freedom, the Saxon slave was fit to be free, and became free, with no fierce outbreak of servile rage and vengeance, consequent on servile emancipation, but with the calm although enthusiastical gladness which fitted him to become a freeman, a citizen, and, as he is, the master of one half of the round world. It is not, ah! it is not the chain, it is not the lash, it is not the daily toil, it is not the disruption of domestic ties and affections, that prove, that constitute the sin, the sorrow, and the shameful reproach of slavery. Ah! no. But it is the very converse of these--the very point insisted on so complacently, proclaimed so triumphantly, by the advocates of this accursed thing--it is that, in spite of the chain, in spite of the lash, in spite of the enforced labor, in spite of the absence or disruption of family ties and affections, the slave is sleek, satisfied, self-content; that he waxes fat among the flesh-pots; that he comes fawning to the smooth words, and frolics, delighted, fresh from the lash of his master, in no wise superior to the spaniel, either in aspiration or in instinct. It is in that he envies not the free man his freedom, but, in his hideous lack of all self-knowledge, self-reliance, self-respect, is content to be a slave, content to eat, and grow fat and die, without a present concern beyond the avoidance of corporeal pain and the enjoyment of sensual pleasure, without an aspiration for the future, beyond those of the beasts, which graze and perish.