ranklin was
then at the height of his fame as a philosopher, and his merits as a
statesman were beginning to be acknowledged; but, wise as he was, he
would have smiled, had there been a prophet capable of telling him the
exact truth as to the future of America. Probably there was not a person
then on earth who could have supposed that that would be which was
written in the Book of Fate. That freedom should come to a people from
a despot's throne was almost as hard to understand as that the rankest
kind of despotism should rise up from among a people the most boastful
of their liberty that ever existed. There are, unhappily, but too many
instances of free nations that have behaved oppressively. The first
African slaves that were brought into the territory of the American
nation came under the flag of a people who had most heroically struggled
for their rights, and the recollection of whose efforts has been revived
by the brilliant labors of the most accomplished of living American
historians. The Greeks, who had so much to say about their own liberty,
believed that they had the right to enslave all other men; and the
Romans, who sometimes talked as if they had a Fourth of July of their
own, assumed that it was in the power of society to enslave any race
whose services its members required. The slaves of free peoples have
generally fared worse than the slaves of men themselves despotically
governed. Thus there is nothing so very strange in the conduct of those
Americans who, concerned for their "right" to trade in black humanity,
and to live on the sweat of black humanity's brows. That which is
strange in the condition of the world is the contrast which is furnished
to the action of our Southern population by the action of the rulers of
Russia. Since American democrats have endeavored to show that no such
contrast exists,--that between the enslavement of black men and the
granting of freedom to white men there is a close resemblance,--and that
the two proceedings are one in fact, how much soever they may differ in
name; that it is not because he is an enemy of slavery, as it is here
understood, that the Czar has become an emancipationist, but because he
is hostile to the slavery of white men,--that, were the Russian serfs as
dark as American slaves, his heart would have remained as hard toward
them as that of Pharaoh toward the Israelites when the plague-pressure
was temporarily removed from his people,--that he would as so