ult to control merely
by, physical force;--the rigidity of the law being in ratio to the
deficiency of the force. In times semi-civilized, and even
comparatively enlightened, conquerors have little respect for the
conquered--an immense and insurmountable distinction is at once made
between the natives and their lords. All ancient nations seem to have
considered that the right of conquest gave a right to the lands of the
conquered country. William dividing England among his Normans is but
an imitator of every successful invader of ancient times. The
new-comers having gained the land of a subdued people, that people, in
order to subsist, must become the serfs of the land [65]. The more
formidable warriors are mostly slain, or exiled, or conciliated by
some remains of authority and possessions; the multitude remain the
labourers of the soil, and slight alterations of law will
imperceptibly convert the labourer into the slave. The earliest
slaves appear chiefly to have been the agricultural population. If
the possession of the government were acquited by colonizers [66],--
not so much by the force of arms as by the influence of superior arts
--the colonizers would in some instances still establish servitude for
the multitude, though not under so harsh a name. The laws they would
frame for an uncultured and wretched population, would distinguish
between the colonizers and the aboriginals (excepting perhaps only the
native chiefs, accustomed arbitrarily to command, though not
systematically to enslave the rest). The laws for the aboriginal
population would still be an improvement on their previous savage and
irregulated state--and generations might pass before they would attain
a character of severity, or before they made the final and
ineffaceable distinction between the freeman and the slave. The
perturbed restlessness and constant migration of tribes in Greece,
recorded both by tradition and by history, would consequently tend at
a very remote period to the institution and diffusion of slavery and
the Pelasgi of one tribe would become the masters of the Pelasgi of
another. There is, therefore, no necessity to look out of Greece for
the establishment of servitude in that country by conquest and war.
But the peaceful colonization of foreign settlers would (as we have
seen) lead to it by slower and more gentle degrees. And the piracies
of the Phoenicians, which embraced the human species as an article of
their mar