so many of the proudest and most powerful barons to a disastrous end.  They had nothing to lose, and they had liberty to hope for; frequently as the reward of their own faithful services, and not seldom from the piety or kindness of their lords.  This was a steady hope depending so little upon contingency that it excited no disquietude or restlessness.  They were therefore in general satisfied with the lot to which they were born, as the Greenlander is with his climate, the Bedouin with his deserts, and the Hottentot and the Calmuck with their filthy and odious customs; and going on in their regular and unvaried course of duty generation after generation, they were content.

Montesinos.—­“Fish, fish, are you in your duty?” said the young lady in the Arabian tales, who came out of the kitchen wall clad in flowered satin, and with a rod in her hand.  The fish lifted up their heads and replied, “Yes, yes; if you reckon, we reckon; if you pay your debts we pay ours; if you fly we overcome, and are content.”  The fish who were thus content, and in their duty, had been gutted, and were in the frying-pan.  I do not seek, however, to escape from the force of your argument by catching at the words.  On the other hand, I am sure it is not your intention to represent slavery otherwise than as an evil, under any modification.

Sir Thomas More.—­That which is a great evil in itself become relatively a good when it prevents or removes a greater evil; for instance, loss of a limb when life is preserved by the sacrifice, or the acute pain of a remedy by which a chronic disease is cured.  Such was slavery in its origin:  a commutation for death, gladly accepted as mercy under the arm of a conqueror in battle, or as the mitigation of a judicial sentence.  But it led immediately to nefarious abuses; and the earliest records which tell us of its existence show us also that men were kidnapped for sale.  With the principles of Christianity, the principles of religious philosophy—­ the only true policy, to which mankind must come at last, by which alone all the remediable ills of humanity are to be remedied, and for which you are taught to pray when you entreat that your Father’s kingdom may come—­with those principles slavery is inconsistent, and therefore not to be tolerated, even in speculation.

Montesinos.—­Yet its fitness, as a commutation for other punishments, is admitted by Michaelis (though he decides against it) to be one of the most difficult questions connected with the existing state of society.  And in the age of the Revolution, one of the sturdiest Scotch republicans proposed the reestablishment of slavery, as the best or only means for correcting the vices and removing the miseries of the poor.