would become at length a general and almost universal institution. This view we find borne out by all historical testimony. "Slavery and the slave-trade," says an eminent historian, "are older than the records of human society. They are found to have existed wherever the savage hunter began to assume the habits of pastoral or agricultural life; and with the exception of Australasia, they have extended to every portion of the globe. They pervaded every nation of civilized antiquity. The earliest glimpses of Egyptian history exhibit pictures of bondage; the oldest monuments of human labor on the Egyptian soil are evidently the results of slave-labor. The founder of the Jewish nation was a slave-holder and a purchaser of slaves. Every patriarch was lord in his own household. The Hebrews, when they burst the bond of their own thraldom, carried with them beyond the desert the institution of slavery. Slavery planted itself even in the Promised Land. The Hebrew father might doom his daughter to bondage; the wife and children and posterity of the emancipated slave remained the property of the master and his heirs. It is even probable, that, at a later period, a man's family might be sold for the payment of his debts. The countries that bordered on Palestine were equally familiar with domestic servitude; and, like Babylon, Tyre also, the oldest and most famous commercial city of Phœnicia, was a market for the 'persons of men.' The Scythians of the desert had already established slavery throughout the plains and forests of the unknown North. "Old as are the traditions of Greece, the existence
