452 Modern Abolitionism 



religious and violent, were the leaders of the crusade. But the repug- 

 nance of free labour to the recognition of slavery in any part of the 

 Republic (and it was this sentiment that furnished the necessary voting- 

 power) was not so purely philanthropic. Students of American history 

 are well aware of the moral change brought about by a single me- 

 chanical invention in the southern states. The economic advantages 

 of the cotton-gin made slavery so profitable that existing tendencies 

 towards emancipation died out in the South. A new life was given to 

 a confessed evil, and the developed plantation-system, industrialized 

 for the profit of a few, went down the road of fate to end in tragedy. 

 The result of the great civil war at all events settled one question. 

 Henceforth labour was to stand on a footing of self-disposal and wage- 

 earning, with freedom to improve its conditions on those lines. The 

 solution, obtained at an awful cost, was final for the time: what will 

 be its ultimate outcome is at present (1919) a matter of some doubt, 

 for reasons not to be discussed here. 



The fact that Abolitionism is a phenomenon of the modern 1 world, 

 and not of the ancient, will not seem insignificant to those who have 

 read widely in the ancient writers and remarked how very little we 

 hear of free wage-earning labour. If we deduct the references to in- 

 dependent artisans practising trades on a small scale (and their cases 

 are not relevant here), what we hear of mere wage-earners is very little 

 indeed. And of this little again only a part concerns agriculture. 

 I take it that we may fairly draw one conclusion from this: the wishes 

 of the free wage-earning class, whatever their numbers may have been, 

 were practically of no account in the ancient world. From first to last 

 the primitive law of superior force, the 'good old rule' of which slavery 

 was a product, was tacitly accepted. Civilization might undergo 

 changes of character, periods of peace might alternate with periods of 

 war: still bondage and labour were closely connected in men's minds, 

 and honest labour as such commanded no respect. How could it? Of 

 a golden age, in which all men were free and slavery unknown, we have 

 nothing that can be called evidence. The curtain rises on a world in 

 which one man is at the full disposal of another. What is at first a 

 small domestic matter contains the germ of later developments; and 

 in the case of agriculture we see clearly how demands of an industrial 

 nature transformed single bondservice into the wholesale and brutal 

 exploitation of human chattels in slave-gangs. We have no good 

 reason to believe that men ever in the ancient world abstained from 



1 The slow progress of emancipation is referred to by E Meyer Kl Schr p 178, of course 

 from a very different point of view. He mentions that slavery was not completely forbidden 

 in Prussia till 1857, and is against its abolition in German colonies. Seeley in his Life of 

 Stein points out that the armies of Frederic the Great were mainly recruited from serfs. 



