for your own, lived in spite of it.  How could it?  Manifestly, because its genius was wholly unlike that of Southern slavery; and because its rigors and wrongs, if rigors and wrongs there were in it, bear no comparison to those which characterize Southern slavery; and which would impel nine-tenths of its adult subjects to fly from their homes, did they but know that they would not be obliged to return to them.  When Southern slaveholders shall cease to scour the land for fugitive servants, and to hunt them with guns and dogs, and to imprison, and scourge, and kill them;—­when, in a word, they shall subject to the bearing of such a law as that referred to their system of servitude, then we shall begin to think that they are sincere in likening it to the systems which existed among the Jews.  The law, enacted in Virginia in 1705, authorizing any two justices of the peace “by proclamation to outlaw runaways, who might thereafter be killed and destroyed by any person whatsoever, by such ways and means as he might think fit, without accusation or impeachment of any crime for so doing,” besides that it justifies what I have just said about hunting fugitive servants, shows, 1st.  That the American Anti-Slavery Society is of too recent an origin to be the occasion, as slaveholders and their apologists would have us believe, of all the cruel laws enacted at the South. 2d.  That Southern slaveholders would be very unwilling to have their system come under the operation of such a law as that which allowed the Jewish servant to change his master. 3d.  That they are monsters, indeed, into which men may be turned by their possession of absolute power.

You, perhaps, suppose, (and I frankly admit to you, that there is some room for the supposition,) that the servants referred to in the 15th and 16th verses of the 23d chapter of Deuteronomy, were such as had escaped from foreign countries to the country of the Jews.  But, would this view of the matter help you?  By taking it, would you not expose yourself to be most pertinently and embarrassingly asked, for what purpose these servants fled to a strange and most odious people?—­and would not your candid reply necessarily be, that it was to escape from the galling chains of slavery, to a far-famed milder type of servitude?—­from Gentile oppression, to a land in which human rights were protected by Divine laws?  But, as I have previously intimated, I have not the strongest confidence in the anti-slavery argument, so frequently drawn from this passage of the Bible.  I am not sure that a Jewish servant is referred to:  nor that on the supposition of his being a foreigner, the servant came under any form of servitude when entering the land of the Jews.  Before leaving the topic, however, let me remark, that the passage, under any construction of it, makes against Southern slavery.  Admit that the fugitive servant was a foreigner, and that he was not reduced to servitude on coming among the Jews, let me ask you whether the