136 SLAVES EMPLOYED CHAP. IV. 



productive. The new masters in each country 

 were therefore compelled to become the pupils 

 of the people over whom they ruled, and to 

 follow blindly the practices they found already 

 established. 



The mere manual labour in the mines of the 

 conquered countries, as in upper Italy, had been 

 exercised by slaves, and the Romans had been 

 too long habituated to the practice of domestic 

 and agricultural slavery to feel any repugnance 

 to the continuance of it. The practice of slavery 

 seems, by all the records of antiquity, to have 

 at first originated, in some degree, from an im- 

 provement in the moral feelings of mankind, as, 

 before it, captives taken in war had been com- 

 monly put to death ; and cruel as slavery may 

 be, it is certainly less so than indiscriminate 

 slaughter. 



Whatever may have been its origin, the exten- 

 sion of it arose from and strengthened the basest 

 and most degrading feelings. It soon became 

 connected with commerce, and was perhaps 

 generally attendant on the earliest maritime ex- 

 peditions among the Greeks, who first practised 

 navigation. It appears from Homer in the inter- 

 esting story of Emseus 1 , that the Greeks, whilst 

 they carried on trade in distant countries, en- 

 trapped the inhabitants and sold them for slaves. 



1 See Odyss. book xiii. v. 403, b. xiv. v. 15, and b. xv. v. 288. 



