Self-interest, avrovpyia 439 



slavery. Meanwhile a stage had been traversed in which slavery was 

 recognized as necessary in spite of its admitted evils, and therefore 

 requiring justification; a movement most clearly illustrated by the 

 special pleading of Aristotle. That great writer was fully alive to the 

 manifold merits of the farmer class as citizens and producers, but his 

 trust in the power of self-interest proves him a confirmed individualist. 

 How to combine self-interest with patriotic devotion to the common 

 welfare is the vital problem, even now only solved ideally on paper. 

 That coldly-reasoned conclusions of thinkers were really the foundation 

 of the esteem in which we find the working farmer held, I cannot 

 believe. Much more likely is it that it sprang mainly from immemorial 

 tradition of a time when ownership and cultivation went together, and 

 that theory merely absorbed and revived what was still an indistinct 

 impression in the minds of men. 



The Greeks had a significant word, dvrovpyos, the usage of which 

 may serve to illustrate my meaning. That it connotes the fact of a 

 man's bearing a personal part in this or that work is clear on the face 

 of it. That no other person also bears a part, is sometimes implied by 

 the context, but it is not necessarily contained in the word itself. To 

 put it differently, he does his own work, not necessarily all his own 

 work. I note two points in connexion with it that seem to me inrpor- 

 tant. First, it is so often used as descriptive of rustic labour that it 

 seems to have carried with it associations of farm-life: most of the 

 other uses are almost metaphorical, some distinctly so. Secondly, I 

 have never found it applied to the case of a slave. Why? I think, 

 because it conveyed the further notion of working not only yourself 

 but for yourself. If in some passages it is not quite certain that an 

 owner (rather than a tenant) is referred to, surely this extension of 

 meaning is not such as to cause surprise. It is not enough to suggest 

 serious doubt that the common and full sense of the word was that a 

 man did work with his own hands on his own account on his own land. 

 This was the character to which immemorial tradition pointed; and, 

 whenever tenancy under landlords began, the word fitted the working 

 tenant-farmer well enough. The Romans had the tradition in the most 

 definite form, though Latin furnished no equivalent word. Their 

 literature, moralizing by examples and unapt for theory, used it as 

 material for centuries. But neither in the Greek world nor in 

 Italy can I detect any reason for believing that the peasant farmer, 

 idealized by later ages, is rightly to be conceived as a person un- 

 willing to employ slave labour if and when he could get it. The 

 tradition, in which rustic slaves appear from very early times, seems 

 to me far more credible than late legends of a primitive golden age 

 in which there were no slaves at all. That a man, to be enslaved, must 



