Price J ,306 [January. 



society, with its fewer temptations, that virtue chiefly took refuge ; 

 and it was there that woman fulfilled her most useful duties in the 

 family, and was held in highest regard. It is consequently in the 

 greater equality of a republic where her power can be made to be 

 most pervasive and useful ; and it is there that men and law should 

 do all that is practicable to aid her best influences, and to sustain 

 the conservative power of the family. Between a republican equal- 

 ity and a Christianity where all are equal in the Divine sight, there 

 is the highest congeniality, and these double potencies should here 

 place woman where she shall exercise her happiest influences. 



The peoples of all Europe were virtually divided into classes, dur- 

 ing the middle ages, and are so yet. There existed kings and queens, 

 lords, nobility, gentry, and freemen, and yet another numerous class 

 who were not freemen, and were not comprised nor secured in the 

 rights of England's Magna Charta. These, and their children, be- 

 longed to their master, and all that they could acquire belonged to 

 him. They were bound to his person or estate, could be reclaimed 

 if they escaped, had no legal redress for wrongs done their persons, 

 and were compelled to do the lowest work, and perform the most me- 

 nial offices. They were called villeins, and were slaves of the same 

 color and blood as their masters. The name they gave to our lan- 

 guage signifies how they were regarded. It is obvious that their 

 condition was, as all slavery is, wholly hostile to the attainment of 

 the highest civilization, and to the best influences of the family rela- 

 tions, and that as regards both master and servant. This thraldom 

 gradually wore out, under the beneficent influences of Christianity, 

 and its last vestige disappeared under the first king of the line of 

 Stuarts. Our own Magna Charta declared all men free and equal, 

 and in terms made no distinction of class; yet was there an excep- 

 tion understood, and described in the Federal Constitution, of the 

 worst phase of slavery. 



In the same ages that slavery was expiring, as an effiete institution, 

 in England, the merchants of the same British nation and some of 

 her colonists this side of the Atlantic, were busy in planting it in her 

 colonies, and we took it as an inheritance at our Revolution ; and with- 

 out its recognition, the Federal Constitution could not have embraced 

 all the original thirteen of the United States. It was taken by part 

 of the North as a hard necessity, while part voted for it. Its fruits 

 have always been inimical to the best education, and to pure morals 

 in the family, and are now felt in a bitter fratricidal war. Should 



