158 The Special Sociological Errors 



slavery begins here. The slaves are compelled to 

 work, and labor in the economic sense begins here. 

 The enslavement of the producers and compelling 

 them to work was the only way in which mankind 

 could have been taught to labor, and therefore the 

 whole industrial system of society begins here. * 



Since Professor Ward was not present at the 

 moment when, "the conquered race having been 

 reduced to slavery," "labor, in the economic 

 sense, began," he must have deduced, a posteriori 

 what seemed to him the most probable course of 

 events. We are not dealing, then, with positive 

 science, but with mental speculations. But as 

 soon as we begin to apply the test of logical 

 analysis to these mental speculations, it becomes 

 evident that slavery could not have been a very 

 ancient institution, and therefore that it could not 

 have been a primitive institution. We find that 

 slavery must have come much later than the 

 establishment of industrial labour. Slavery, there- 



' American Journal of Sociology, March, 1905, p. 594. A num- 

 ber of illustrations have been taken from the writings of Professor 

 Lester F. Ward, especially because of the position of leadership 

 which his intellectual power and magnetic personality secured 

 for him among American sociologists of the last generation. 

 Fortunately, the work of Professor Franklin H. Giddings, who 

 may be considered the leader of modern American sociology, is 

 free from the distortion of the philosophy of force. In his The 

 Principles of Sociology, Professor Giddings frankly takes Adam 

 Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments as the starting point for 

 sociology and follows Darwin, in finding in the social instincts — 

 sympathy and the consciousness of kind — the chief cause of 

 social progress. 



