They failed to take into the account the fact that when
Greece and Rome were in the zenith of their glory, all
contemporary nations were also slaveholding nations, and that if
they were the greatest and most highly civilized nations of their
times, they were not fitted to be the greatest and most highly
civilized nations of all times. They failed also to perceive
that, if the Graeco-Roman republic did not include the whole
territorial people in the political people, it yet recognized
both the social and the territorial foundation of the state, and
never attempted to rest it on pure individualism; they forgot,
too, that Greece and Rome both fell, and fell precisely through
internal weakness caused by the barbarism within, not through the
force of the barbarism beyond their frontiers. The world has
changed since the time when ten thousand of his slaves were
sacrificed as a religious offering to the manes of a single Roman
master. The infusion of the Christian dogma of the unity and
solidarity of the race into the belief, the life, the laws, the
jurisprudence of all civilized nations, has doomed slavery and
every species of barbarism; but this our slaveholding countrymen
saw not.
It rarely happens that in any controversy, individual or
national, the real issue is distinctly presented, or the precise
question in debate is clearly and distinctly understood by either
party.
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