CHAPTER V. SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE. Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring. SLAVERY: -Horace Mann. LAVERY: “The right of property of one man in another man, in his family, in his posterity, and in the products of his labor." There is no injustice more revolting than slavery, and yet there is no fact so widespread in history. In antiquity the system of labor was everywhere slavery. It was found in Rome, in Greece, in Egypt, in Austria, in Gaul, among the Germans, and it is said even among the Scythians. It was recruited by war, by voluntary sale, by captivity for debt, and then by inheritance. It was not everywhere cruel, and in patriarchical life it was scarcely distinguishable from domestic service; in some countries, however, it approached the service of beasts of burden. The brutal insensibility with which Aristotle and Varro spoke of slaves is revolting; and the manner in which they were treated by the laws is even more so. These men who were of the same race, who had the same intellect and the same color as their owners, were declared incapable of holding property, of appealing to the law, of defending themselves; in a word, of conducting themselves like men in any of the circumstances of life. Only the law of the Hebrew people tempered servitude by humanity. Doubtless we might quote certain words of Euripides or Terence, of Epictetus or of Seneca, colored with a more tender pity and evincing some heart. We find also both in Greek and Roman laws, on the monuments, and in the inscriptions and epitaphs which our contemporaries have so carefully studied, the proof that the granting of freedom to slaves, in individual cases, was frequent, and that it was inspired, especially at the moment of death, by religious motives. But the brutal fact of slavery is incontestible. The evil outweighed the good in an enormous measure; servitude remained from century to century, from country to country, during all antiquity, the universal fact, and the legitimateness of servitude, the universal doctrine. To the rare and barren protests of a few noble souls, Christianity finally added the power of its mighty voice. The brotherhood of men, the dignity of labor, the absolute duty of perfection: with these three principles, clothed with the authority of God himself, the human race entered a new phase, commenced the great battle of good against evil, and, little by little, forced back the scourges which, in the past, had reigned with undivided supremacy. Servitude was destined to be among the vanquished, but it was not without a long and grievous combat, which, at the present time, is not entirely terminated. The learned labors of M. Edouard Biot and M. Janoski warrant the affirmation that servitude had almost entirely disappeared in Christian Europe from the tenth to the thirteenth century; but it is only too well known, that after the discovery of the New World, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the re-establishment of this odious institution in all the colonial possessions of the nations of Europe. As we will hereafter see the most Christian kings of France, Spain and England did not blush to place their signatures at the bottom of treaties intended to assure to them the monopoly of the sale and transportation of millions of human beings. An entire continent-Africa-became like a mine to be worked, furnishing the other continents with the living merchandise, to enrich and fill the coffers of potentates, kings and nations. To the nineteenth century belongs the honor of waging against servitude, a war, which is not yet ended, but which has been distinguished, however, by remarkable victories. The revolution is complete as far as ideas are concerned. Morality spoke first, and all the sciences, little by little, came to agree with it. Philosophy gives to all slaves a soul equal to our own, which Aristotle, perhaps, refused to them. Physiology declares blacks and whites, despite important differences, to be members of the same family. History no longer discovers between slave owners and slaves the trace of any legitimate conquest. The law does not recognize any validity of a pretended contract which has no title, the object of which is illicit, and one of the parties to which is not a free agent, and the other party to which is without good faith. Ethnology lifts to the dignity of a beautiful law the radical difference which places in the first rank the races which labor like the European, and in the last rank the races who make others work for them, like the Turks. Political economy affirms the superiority of free labor to forced labor, and it condemns everything which deprives man of the family. Politics and charity, from different points of view, accept the same conclusion: Charity, more tender. detests slavery, because it oppresses the inferior race; politics, more lofty, condemns it above all, because it corrupts the superior race. Thus the revolution above referred to, complete in the order of ideas, is not complete in the order of facts, as we will hereafter see. History cannot penetrate the depths of antiquity sufficiently to ascertain the origin of human slavery, for it is older than history itself, older than civilization, a vice conceived in darkness and cradled in obscurity. It probably had its origin in war -in the captivity of the vanquished. "Woe to the conquered!" is the primary rule of savage and barbarian warfare, and the victor soon learns by experience that the gratification of killing his prisoner is transient, while sparing him for servitude he will reap an enduring profit, and thus in the misty annals of time we read how, not merely the vanquished warriors, but their wives and children, their dependents and subjects, were considered the legitimate spoils of victory, together with their houses, land, flocks, herds, goods and chattels. We can see in the captivity of the Jews in Babylon, the destruction by Rome of Capua, of Carthage, and of other cities which had provoked her special enmity; that nations which regarded themselves as far advanced in civilization, were no more merciful than savages when enraged by fear and hate. The fruit of war in devastation and waste, the soil furrowed with cannon balls yields uncertain harvests. Rapacity as well as destruction seem almost inseparable from war, The soldier compelled to destroy for his chief's or his country's sake, soon learns to appropriate for his own. The rights and value of property and the distinction between "thine and mine " become confused if not altogether obliterated from his mind. He considers it an act of humanity to enslave rather than kill; a kind act, rather than one of injustice and wrong. Hence the war-like conquering races of antiquity universally rejoiced, when at their acme of power and greatness, in the possession of innumerable slaves. Slavery of a mild and gentle type may even in the absence of war have grown insensibly. The broad acres and comfortable cabins (of the land owner) became the refuge of the unfortunate and destitute from an uncharitable world. The crippled and infirm, the abandoned wife, the unwedded mother, the tender orphan, the outworn prodigal, all betake themselves to his lodge to solicit food and shelter as a compensation for services. Some are accepted from motives of thrift, others under the impulse of charity, and the greater portion of either class exulting in their escape from cold, hunger and starvation, gladly remain through life. Marriages are formed among them and children born, who grow up contented with their station, and ignorant of the world outside of his possessions. If his circumstances require a military force, he organizes it from servants born in his own household. His possessions steadily increase, and he becomes in time a feudal chieftain, ruling over vassals proud of his eminence, and docile to his will. Thus it is that the conditions of slavery precede the laws by which they are ultimately regulated, and it is to some extent plausible that its exponents have contended for it as a natural form of society -a moral development of the necessary association of capital with labor in man's progress from rude ignorance and want, to abundance, refinement and luxury. He who imbibes or conceives the fatal delusion that it is more advantageous to him, or to any human being to procure, what ever his necessities or his appetites required, by address and scheming, than by honest work-by the unrequited, rather than the fairly and faithfully recompensed toil of his fellow creatures—was in essence and in heart, a slave-holder, and only awaited an opportunity to become one in deed and in practice; and this single truth operating upon the infinate varieties of human capacity and culture, suffices to account for the universality of slaveholding in the anti-Christian ages, for its tenacity of life, and for the extreme difficulty of even its partial eradication. The ancients, while they apprehended, perhaps adequately the bitternes, of bondage, which many of them had experienced, do not seem to have perceived so vividly the corresponding evils of slave-holding. They saw that end of the chain which encircled the ankle of the bondman; they do not seem to have so clearly perceived that the other lay heavily across the throat of his sleeping master. Homer says: "Jove fixed it certain, that whatever day but he appears to have overlooked the truth that the slaveholding relation effected an equal discount on the value of the master. The mandate of scripture that "by the sweat of thy brow, shall thy bread be eaten," has all along the ages borne the imprint of wisdom; and just in proportion as this injunction has been unheeded, so have peoples and nations been divided and scattered, for it is true that ancient civilization in its various national developments was corrupted, debauched, and ultimately ruined by slavery, which rendered labor dishonorable, and divided society into a small caste of the wealthy, educated, refined and independent, and a vast hungry, sensual, thriftless and worthless populace, rendering impossible the preservation of republican liberty and of legalized equality even among the nominally free. Diogenes with his lantern might have looked for many a long day among the followers of Marius, or Catiline, or Cæsar, |