Unskilled labour 443 



take this point of view, though well aware of the influence of prospective 

 manumission in producing contentment. 



But how far was this comparatively genial arrangement applicable 

 to the ruder forms of unskilled labour ? Take for instance mining. 

 Freemen would have none of it, and the inhuman practices of exploiters 

 were notorious. Yet hired slaves were freely employed. Owners knew 

 that their slaves were likely to waste rapidly under the methods in use, 

 and at Athens a common stipulation was that on the expiry of a con- 

 tract the gang hired should be returned in equal number, the employer 

 making good the losses certain to occur in their ranks. Here we have 

 the mere human chattel, hopeless and helpless, never likely to receive 

 anything but his keep, as an engine receives its fuel and oil, but differing 

 in this, that he was liable to cruel punishment. Such labourers could 

 not work for a freedom that they had no prospect of living to enjoy. 

 And how about the case of agriculture ? That freemen did work for 

 wages on farms we know, but we hear very little of them, and that 

 little almost entirely as helpers at certain seasons. So far as I have 

 been able to learn, free wage-labour did not really compete with slave 

 labour in agriculture : moreover the hired man might be a hired slave, 

 while migratory harvesters, probably freemen, appear at least in some 

 cases as gangs hired for the job under a ganger of their own, responsible 

 to the employer for their conduct and efficiency. Most significant is 

 the almost complete absence of evidence that rustic slaves had any 

 prospect of manumission. In former chapters I have commented on 

 this fact and noted the few faint indications of such an arrangement. 

 At all events the crude plantation-system, while it lasted, was a work- 

 to-death system, though worn-out survivors may have had a better lot 

 than miners, if allowed to exist as old retainers on the estate. But 

 cultivation by slave labour for the purpose of raising an income for the 

 landlord was, even in its later improved organization, a system implying 

 brutal callousness, if not downright cruelty. Slave stewards and over- 

 seers, at the mercy of the master themselves, were naturally less con- 

 cerned to spare the common hands than to escape the master's wrath. 

 When writers on agriculture urge that on all grounds it is wise to keep 

 punishments down to a minimum, the point of their advice is surely 

 a censure of contemporary practice. 



Now in modern times, humanitarian considerations being assumed, 

 the prevailing point of view has been more and more a strictly economic 

 and industrial one. It has been assumed that the freedom of an in- 

 dividual consists first and foremost in the freedom to dispose of his 

 own labour on the best available terms. And this freedom rests on 

 freedom to move from place to place in search of the best labour-market 

 from time to time. But the movement and the bargaining have been 



