The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 1 of 4 eBook

American Anti-Slavery Society
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 888 pages of information about The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 1 of 4.

The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 1 of 4 eBook

American Anti-Slavery Society
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 888 pages of information about The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 1 of 4.

Having dwelt so much at length on this part of the subject, the reader’s patience may well be spared further details.  We close it with a suggestion or two, which may serve as a solvent of some minor difficulties, if such remain.

I. It should be kept in mind, that both classes of servants, the Israelite and the Stranger, not only enjoyed equal natural and religious rights, but all the civil and political privileges enjoyed by those of their own people, who were not servants.  If Israelites, all rights belonging to Israelites were theirs.  If from the Strangers, the same political privileges enjoyed by those wealthy Strangers, who bought and held Israelitish servants, were theirs.  They also shared in common with them, the political disabilities which appertained to all Strangers, whether the servants of Jewish masters, or the masters of Jewish servants.

II.  The disabilities of the servants from the Strangers, were exclusively political and national.

1.  They, in common with all Strangers, could not own the soil.

2.  They were ineligible to civil offices.

3.  They were assigned to employments less honorable than those in which Israelitish servants engaged; agriculture being regarded as fundamental to the prosperity and even to the existence of the state, other employments were in far less repute, and deemed unjewish.

Finally, the condition of the Strangers, whether servants or masters, was, as it respected political privileges, much like that of unnaturalized foreigners in the United States; no matter how great their wealth or intelligence, or moral principle, or love for our institutions, they can neither go to the ballot-box, nor own the soil, nor be eligible to office.  Let a native American, who has always enjoyed these privileges, be suddenly bereft of them, and loaded with the disabilities of an alien, and what to the foreigner would be a light matter, to him, would be the severity of rigor.

The recent condition of the Jews and Catholics in England, is a still better illustration of the political condition of the Strangers in Israel.  Rothschild, the late English banker, though the richest private citizen in the world, and perhaps master of scores of English servants, who sued for the smallest crumbs of his favor, was, as a subject of the government, inferior to the veriest scavenger among them.  Suppose an Englishman, of the Established Church, were by law deprived of power to own the soil, made ineligible to office, and deprived unconditionally of the electoral franchise, would Englishmen think it a misapplication of language, if it were said, “The government rules over that man with rigor?” And yet his life, limbs, property, reputation, conscience, all his social relations, the disposal of his time,

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The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 1 of 4 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.