Slavery the Result of Civilization i6i 



with the most simple operations, such as the 

 gathering of fruits, and developed with the crea- 

 tion of instruments and tools, which, beginning 

 with the palaeolithic stone hatchet have advanced 

 to the highly complex and perfected machinery of 

 our own time. We can hardly imagine the first 

 man who fashioned a flint hatchet saying to him- 

 self, as the anthropological romance would have 

 us believe he said: "Now the period of labour 

 in the economic sense has commenced; I will go 

 and reduce my neighbour to slavery." For one 

 thing, he did not have the means of reducing his 

 neighbour to slavery, because his neighbour was 

 an individual who possessed just as much force 

 as he himself. Man did not commence by slavery 

 for the same reason that man, in common with 

 the other animals, did not commence by being a 

 cannibal, — because his own kind was for him 

 the most dangerous prey. The first savage has 

 therefore followed the line of least resistance. 

 He must have submitted to the universal law which 

 determines the direction of force. He must have 

 manufactured his hatchet himself, and, after this 

 first hatchet, have come in the same manner the 

 innumerable other tools which have been fashioned 

 by our ancestors from the Palaeolithic Age to the 

 sixtieth century before our era, when the great 

 States of the valleys of the Nile and the Euphra- 

 tes were organized. By this epoch, the division 

 of labour had made considerable progress, and 

 when the workshops were in operation, it was 



