Perversion of history.
The New York
Tribune thus perverts history upon the slavery subject:
‘
"What a drawback the institution of Slavery is to our national prosperity and happiness, those may judge who see the effects it is producing at this very moment.
The judgment of the civilized world recognizes slavery as utterly incompatible with high civilization."
’
The New York
Express, always ready to meet this perverter of history and pretender to scholarship, at every turn, reminds him that
Egypt, in her palmiest days, when magnificent
Thebes went up and the gigantic temples on the
Upper Nile, and when letters first started from her nurseries of instruction toward
Greece, was a Slaveholding Monarchy.
Greece, the
Greece of the days of
Pericles,
Themistocles,
Demosthenes,--the Greece that created the Parthenon and the
Temples of the Acropolis,--was a Slaveholding Democracy, or Republic.
Rome, too, in her palmiest days, when
Cicero spoke, when Virgil wrote his Epic, when Horace,
Ovid, Sillust, Martial,
Tacitus, and
Seneca lived, was a Slaveholding State.
The Augustan era was a Slaveholding era.
The highest civilization of
Egypt,
Greece, and
Rome, was in the strongest era of Slavery.
Then Civilization and Slavery, whether Slavery be right or wrong, were perfectly compatible.
Gibbon shows us,
that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire began with the abolition of Slavery.
Let the
Tribune put this
Express tobacco in its pipe and smoke it. Moreover, how would cotton and rice be cultivated without negro slavery?
And without negro slavery, gracious Heavens!
we should have no
Tribune, and then, what would become of the civilization, Christianity and decency of the age?
