It is in this that lies the mortal sin, the never-dying reproach, of him who would foster, would preserve, would propagate, the curse of slavery; not that he is a tyrant over the body, but that he is a destroyer of the soul--that he would continue a state of things which reduces a human being, a fellow-man, whether of an inferior race or no--for, as of congenerous cattle there are many distinct tribes, so of men, and of Caucasian men too, there be many races, distinct in physical, in moral, in animal, in intellectual qualities, as well as in color and conformation, if not distinct in origin--to the level of the beast which knoweth not whence he cometh or whither he goeth, nor what is to him for good, or what for evil, which hopes not to rise or to advance, either here or hereafter, but toils day after day, contented with his daily food, and lies down to sleep, and rises up to labor and to feed, as if God had created man with no higher purpose than to sleep and eat alternately, until the night cometh from which, on earth, there shall be no awakening. But of this misery the Saxon serf was exempt: and, to do him justice, of this reproach was the Norman conqueror exempt also. Of the use of arms, and the knowledge of warfare, he indeed deprived his serfs, for as they outnumbered him by thousands in the field, equalled him in resolution, perhaps excelled him in physical strength, to grant such knowledge would have been to commit immediate suicide--but of no other knowledge, least of all of the knowledge that leads to immortality, did he strive to debar him. Admittance to holy orders was patent to the lowest Saxon, and in those days the cloister was the gate to all knowledge sacred or profane, to all arts, all letters, all refinements, and above all to that knowledge which is the greatest power--the knowledge of dealing with the human heart, to govern it--the knowledge, which so often set the hempen sandal of the Saxon monk upon the mailed neck of the Norman king, and which, in the very reign of which I write, had raised a low-born man of the common Saxon race to be Archbishop of Canterbury, the keeper of the conscience of the king, the primate, and for a time the very ruler of the realm. Often, indeed, did the superior knowledge of the cowled Saxon avenge on his masters the wrongs of his enslaved brethren; and while the learned priesthood of the realm were the brethren of its most abject slaves, no danger that those slaves should ever become wholly ignorant, hopeless, or degraded--and so it was seen in the end; for that very knowledge which it was permitted to the servile race to gain, while it taught them to cherish and fitted them to deserve freedom, in the end won it for them; at the expense of no floods of noble blood, through the sordure and soil of no savage Saturnalia, such as marked the emancipation alike of the white serfs of revolutionized France, and the black slaves of disenthralled St. Domingo.