are mine.”  That it does not succeed in getting its victim out of God’s hand, and in unmanning and chattelizing him—­that God’s hold upon him remains unbroken, and that those upward tendencies of the soul, which distinguish man from the brute, are not yet entirely crushed in him—­is no evidence in favor of its nature:—­it simply proves, that its power is not equal to its purposes.  We see, then, that the Jews—­if it be true that they reduced their fellow men to involuntary servitude, and did so as the Heaven-appointed ministers of God’s justice,—­are not to be charged with slaveholding for it.  There may be involuntary servitude where there is no slavery.  The essential and distinguishing feature of slavery is its reduction of man to property—­to a thing.  A tenant of one of our state prisons is under a sentence of “hard labor for life.”  But he is not a slave.  That is, he is not the thing which slavery would mark its subject.  He is still a man.  Offended justice has placed him in his present circumstances, because he is a man:  and, it is because he is a man and not a thing—­a responsible, and not an irresponsible being, that he must continue in his present trials and sufferings.

God’s commandments to the Jews, respecting servants and strangers, show that He not only did not authorize them to set up the claim of property in their fellow men, but that He most carefully guarded against such exercises of power, as might lead to the assumption of a claim so wrongful to Himself.  Some of these commandments I will bring to your notice.  They show that whatever was the form of servitude under which God allowed the Jews to hold the heathen, it was not slavery.  Indeed, if all of the Word of God which bears on this point were cited and duly explained, it would, perhaps, appear that He allowed no involuntary servitude whatever amongst the Jews.  I give no opinion whether he allowed it or not.  There are strong arguments which go to show, that He did not allow it; and with these arguments the public will soon be made more extensively acquainted.  It is understood, that the next number of the Anti-Slavery Examiner will be filled with them.

1st.  So galling are the bonds of Southern slavery, that it could not live a year under the operation of a law forbidding the restoration of fugitive servants to their masters.  How few of the discontented subjects of this oppressive servitude would agree with Hamlet, that it is better to

  —­“bear those ills we have,
  Than fly to others that we know not of.”

What a running there would be from the slave States to the free!—­from one slave State to another!—­from one plantation to another!  Now, such a law—­a solemn commandment of God—­many writers on slavery are of the opinion, perhaps too confident opinion, was in force in the Jewish nation (Deut. xxiii, 15); and yet the system of servitude on which it bore, and which you cite as the pattern and authority