that they may be runaway servants, for “there be many servants now a days that break away every man from his master.” But when we inquire who were with David in the cave of Adullam, we find that they were men “in distress,” “in debt,” and “discontented,” not runaway slaves.[1]
The economical marks of a Slave State are almost as clear as its political marks. “The great plantations,” (latifundia,) says a Roman writer, “have ruined Italy, and they are ruining the provinces too.” “Slave labour,” says Pliny, “makes bad husbandry, like everything that is done by despair.”[2] Within sixty years after the death of Constantino, Campania, once the garden of Italy, was surveyed by the government, and an exemption from taxes was granted in favour of three hundred and thirty thousand acres of desert land. “As the footsteps of the barbarians,” says Gibbon, “had not yet been seen in Italy, the cause of this amazing desolation which is recorded in the laws, can be ascribed only to the administration of the Roman Emperors.” A blight more deadly to the fruitfulness of the land than that of imperial administration had been there. In America, as is well known, Slavery subsists by moving forwards to fresh soil, and it leaves a desert, like that of ruined Campania, where it has been. But the land of the Hebrews appears to have been cultivated with a care which carried fertility to the hill-
