" But the supposition that it is milder, being allowed to be
correct, would only prove, that God's abhorrence of Southern bondage as
much exceeds that which he expressed of Egyptian bondage, as the one
system is more full than the other of oppression and cruelty.
We learn from the Bible, that it was not because of the _abuses_ of the
Egyptian system of bondage, but, because of its sinful nature, that God
required its abolition. He did not command Pharaoh to cease from the
_abuses_ of the system, and to correct his administration of it, but to
cease from the system itself. "I have heard," says God, "the groaning of
the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians keep in bondage;"--not whom
the Egyptians, availing themselves of their absolute power, compel to
make brick without straw, and seek to waste and exterminate by the
murder of their infant children;--but simply "whom the Egyptians keep in
bondage." These hardships and outrages were but the leaves and branches.
The root of the abomination was the bondage itself, the assertion of
absolute and slaveholding power by "a new king over Egypt, which knew
not Joseph.
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