Excerpt from The Slave in History: His Sorrows and His Emancipation What the Serpent was to Laocoon, slavery with its entwining folds and its Slow torture has been to the world. The nineteenth century saw many changes, but none Of greater social effect than the movement which broke the power Of slavery. A usage of primitive times, it had grown with the rise and fall of empires, and ruled as the sum of all tyrannies, the embodiment of all cruelties, - pleading as its justification from age to age, even after the emancipation Of Europe, necessity, convenience, tradition, - till at last the spirit of free men rose against it. The struggle which followed was prolonged; it had its prophets and its martyrs; the inward light of conscience led the way with new illuminating power; and human sympathies that had been well-nigh strangled awoke, put on their strength, and did not slumber till they had won for the slave a place in the brotherhood of men. The final adjustment is yet to come. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.