Adam Gurowski

“ Indeed, it may be stated as a general rule, clearly confirmed by history, that agriculture never can flourish under slave labor, nor even under villanage. It never did so in antiquity and it never has done so in modern times. In proportion as Egypt, Syria and Assyria fell a prey to political servitude and her twin-sister, or rather generator, domestic slavery, did their agriculture deteriorate and decay. In proportion as the nations of modern Europe have emerged from slavery and serfdom, has agriculture become a civilizing agency, progressive, rational and scientific. ”

“ Slavery is as fatal to society as are the Southern and tropical swamps to human life. And as material culture drains the marshes, clears the forests, and renders the soil productive and the air healthy: so in like manner, will moral and social culture yet make the institutions of this republic rich and refulgent—unblighted by the presence of a slave! ”

“ Humanity would gratefully applaud even an intermediate step from absolute chattelhood toward emancipation, or any public measure foreshadowing an intention on the part of the slaveholding States to become humane. First of all, let them recognize in the bondman the sacred, imprescriptible, natural rights of man and of family; then let them abandon the slave traffic, and thus avoid separation of man and wife, of parent and child. ”

“ Thus, in the history of the Phœnicians, and therefore, in the earliest authentic epoch, a great historical and social law manifests itself in full action. This activity it retains through all the subsequent social and political catastrophes in the life of nations and empires, down even to Hayti with her immortal Toussaint. Slavery generates bloody struggles. Many of these have resulted in the slaves violently regaining their liberty, while others have destroyed the whole state—swallowing up the slaveholders in their own blood, or burying them under the ruins of their own social edifice. ”

“ States than among all the militant oligarchs and knight-errants of slavery the world over.
An experiment generally proves successful if made with properly adapted and unadulterated materials. A structure raised on a treacherous foundation and built with rotten materials must fall. It is an experiment altogether new to the human race to construct a society and government with chattelhood as an integral element. It is an experiment to attempt to bring down horrified humanity on its knees to the worship of chattelhood and the devilish slave traffic. ”

“ Gas generally arises from substances in process of decomposition. Posterity venerates only the names of the orators who stand up for a sacred cause or a grand idea, who act under generous impulses, who defend human rights and liberties, and who brand with infamy every kind of oppression.
Every day freedom gets a firmer and more enduring foothold in Europe. Every nation of the old continent enjoys greater liberty to-day than it did on the birthday of the American Republic. ”

“ In the gray twilight of history, the apparition that first distinctly presents itself is Egypt—that land of wonders, standing on the shores of the "venerable mother the Nile." The Egyptians already form a fully-elaborated, organic social structure, nay, a powerful nation, with a rich material and intellectual civilization, when as yet the commonly accepted chronology begins to write only rudimental numbers. ”

“ But what civilization and humanity assert to be their greatest afflictions are upheld as blessings in this New World by the Young Republic. Sadness and even despair fill the mind when witnessing the loftiest and best social structure ever erected by man sapped to its foundations by the sacrilegious champions of human bondage! ”

“ It exists in the Free States, and here freemen practically believe in and uphold it. But an ignorant and degraded population of oligarchs, oppressors and slave-breeders never were capable of exercising popular sovereignty, and consequently nowhere could they ever have faith in it: barbarians generally mistrust civilization. Universal suffrage is not a failure in the villages and townships of the Free States, though it does fail on slave plantations, or among a so-called free population drilled and led by oligarchs. ”

“ When, therefore, positive history slowly rises on the limitless horizon of time, Phœnicia appears as an ominous illustration of how domestic slavery, from an external social monstrosity, tends to become a chronic but corrosive disease. And neither does the evidence of history end with her. Over and over again will it be found that slavery, after eating so deeply into the social organism as to become constitutional and chronic, has the same ultimate issue, even as a virus slowly but surely penetrates from the extremities into the vitals of the animal organism. ”

“ Such was the condition of the Roman world and its western provinces, Spain and Gaul, when the avalanche from the north burst upon it with its torrent of invaders. The oligarchic slaveholders, having destroyed the republic, transmitted to the Cæsars a society which had through their means become utterly degenerate and depraved. The emperors, in their turn, transmitted to the new era a world putrescent with domestic slavery. Often does a virus eat its way so deeply into a healthy organism, as to change its very character and the conditions of its existence. ”

“ The disease is the same—its workings alone are different. The sword was the soul of Spartan institutions: the pure and elevated conception of the American social structure rests not on physical but on intellectual and moral force; but its deterioration is visible in the new conception of slavery inaugurated and sustained by the militant oligarchs. The process of moral and intellectual decomposition in the South would be still more rapid but for the various influences from the Free States, which, like refreshing breezes, fan its fainting energies. ”

“ Any one condemned to compound in money for murder or any other offence, if he had no money, gave himself as a slave into the hands of the family or individual whom he had offended, or to the man who loaned him money to pay the composition. The schalks were more absolutely in the power of their master than were the Roman slaves under the empire, or even, if possible, than the chattels of the American slave states. ”

“ The old laws of most of the American colonies, north and south, contain repeated regulations, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concerning conspiracies, revolts, and tumults perpetrated by negroes; and this, too, several generations before the birth of active abolitionism. For not to abolitionism but to the love of liberty inborn in human nature—in the Spartan Helot as in the colored chattel of the Southern oligarch—are to be attributed the conspiracies continually fermenting among Southern slaves. ”

“ In the course of about four centuries, both during and after the Peloponnesian war, the Spartan oligarchy was enriched more and more by the spoils of victorious wars, and by the importation of slaves as war prisoners from other Greek and from barbarous nations. Then the difference between the rich and poor was more striking, and the eternal process of oppressing the poor, seizing upon their property, or buying them out, was busily and cheerfully pursued. ”

“ The rigid organization of the castes was a counter-poison, a check imposed upon the extension of domestic slavery, preventing it from eating up the healthy agencies of society. The caste system—and above all priestly caste—was, to a great extent, a curb on the despotism of the Pharaohs. The castes for many centuries prevented the fusion of the two greatest social plagues: domestic and political slavery. ”

“ Indeed, during the fourteenth century, the whole of Europe might be said to be divided into two great hostile camps: the nobles with their exactions and oppressions forming one, and the laborers, peasants and serfs, resisting their oppressors with battle-axe and fire, forming the other. And thus the oppressed everywhere hewed out their path to freedom and civilization. ”

“ On this American continent the kidnapped and enslaved African has accepted both the creed and the language of his oppressor—but for him there is neither liberty nor law.
Not to enslave, but only to subdue—preserving, at least partially, the rights of the conquered—was the policy of the Aryas in their encounter with barbarians. And in the domestic wars of tribes and dynasties which yet dimly echo through the second or Mantra period, no traces of the enslavement of their conquered enemies are to be found. ”

“ The slaveholders could not defend the empire, and beneath them was a degraded population of so-called freemen, and millions of serfs and slaves, all of them without a spark of love for their country, and destitute even of material incitements to urge them to defend their homes or uphold the existing condition of society. None of them had any interest to sustain their slaveholding masters or the fiscality of the empire; and at times the lower classes, the slaves especially, even joined the invaders. Thus, when Alaric appeared before Rome, over forty thousand slaves joined his camp. ”

“ Slavery is not the subject of the covenant with God or of the covenant with man; neither did the possession of slaves confer any political, religious, or social rights. All this was left for the deduction of modern theology and politics.
The Mosaic law deals with slavery as with an existing evil, and regulates it as an abnormal institution. The lawgiver recalls to the memory of the Jews that they were themselves captives and bondsmen—an historic fact to which, as we have already seen, the ancestry of many of the slaveholders in the United States, at the present day, furnish a parallel. ”

“ Nowhere, however, in these venerable Nabathean fragments is slavery or the slave ever mentioned, and still less as constituting the basis of domestic husbandry and field labor; but freemen and freeholders only are alluded to as cultivating the land and reaping the rewards of their toil; thus furnishing an additional and most forcible proof that human slavery is not coeval with the existence of society. ”

“ Insurrections of the down-trodden and oppressed classes are like feverish efforts of diseased physiology to resist the disorder, to throw out the virus, and restore the normal condition in the economy of life. The whole world admires the glorious insurrection of the Swiss-German peasantry against their insolent masters. Then the bondmen, villeins, etc., individually or in small bodies, by the axe, by fire, and in every possible manner, protested their imprescriptible right to liberty. ”

“ When the profits from slave-labor shall dwindle, and the danger from great masses of chattels shall increase, self-preservation and fatality will force the slaveocracy into attempting to re-enact the Spartan krypteia: the cattle-breeder easily transforming himself into the butcher. ”

“ If in the despotic oriental empires, domestic and political slavery at times played into each other's hands until they jointly destroyed national life, it was domestic slavery, single-handed, which did the work in Greece, and particularly in Sparta and Athens. Domestic slavery enervated the nation and made it an easy prey to foreign conquest. ”

“ One deviation from a sound social principle is speedily followed by another; violence ever begets violence; and this is the fatal genesis of all oppressions and tyrannies. The oligarchic despotism in the Slave States runs rapidly through all the stages with which individual despotism has filled the dark records of history. ”

“ Citizens and freemen were a scarcity during the Augustan period; but slaves, the property of a few wealthy owners, actually covered Lacedemonia and Sparta. Domestic slavery undermined and destroyed the Spartan nation in precisely the same manner as it did others before and since. The enslaved Helots and Greeks, and many of the descendants of the enslavers, became, in their turn, slaves of the Romans, then of the Slavic invaders, afterward of the Crusaders, till finally all of them, masters and slaves, groaned under the yoke of the Osmanlis. ”

“ Science emancipates the mind from prejudices, falsehoods, and superstitions, and from the tyranny exercised over man by the elements and forces of nature, as well as from the far more malignant forces of social oppression. It is doubtless this divine character of true science which makes it so repulsive to the apostles of human degradation. ”

“ Many consider the American institution of self-government as a new experiment; and European serviles and American slave oligarchs utter fearful forebodings that the experiment is already a failure. But the prophecy only expresses their desires. For this so-called experiment is but the natural, progressive development of man, and for this reason proves itself every day more and more successful in the Free States. ”

“ Slavery relaxed the ties of family and society among the Jews, as history shows it to have done in every place and in all ages of its existence—for slavery, sensuality and general depravity mutually engender and sustain each other. ”

“ Every person who is even slightly acquainted with history must be familiar with the absolute degradation of the oligarchs, capitalists, and rich slaveholders of imperial Rome. Tiberius despised them and tyrannized over them with a cold-blooded and contemptuous cruelty only equalled by the manner in which they crushed their chattels, or the populace of Rome, whom they had impoverished and degraded. ”

“ Thus, even during the most brilliant periods, the numerous free persons in the cities became more and more impoverished, and lived by panem et circenses, as in Rome. Under this deceitful glitter, the disease slowly undermined the prosperity of the cities, and the first shock revealed the terrible reality. Soon fiscal rapacity seized hold of every thing both in the Italian and Italianized cities. Not only the poorer classes but even the wealthy began to feel it. One after another the cities lost their domains and their treasure, and thus lost the means to sustain their internal administration. ”