l and
irreparable misfortune of causing the negroes to be imported, did at
least as much as any system possible in the period could have done toward
adapting the bulk of them to life in a civilized community.

CHAPTER XVIII

ECONOMIC VIEWS OF SLAVERY: A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE

In barbaric society slavery is a normal means of conquering the isolation
of workers and assembling them in more productive cooerdination. Where
population is scant and money little used it is almost a necessity in the
conduct of large undertakings, and therefore more or less essential for
the advancement of civilization. It is a means of domesticating savage or
barbarous men, analogous in kind and in consequence to the domestication of
the beasts of the field.[1] It was even of advantage to some of the people
enslaved, in that it saved them from extermination when defeated in war,
and in that it gave them touch with more advanced communities than their
own. But this was counterbalanced by the stimulus which the profits of
slave catching gave to wars and raids with all their attendant injuries.
Any benefit to the slave, indeed, was purely incidental. The reason for the
institution's existence was the advantage which accrued to the masters.
So positive and pronounced was this reckoned to be, that such highly
enlightened people as the Greeks and Romans maintained it in the palmiest
days of their supremacies.

[Footnote 1: This thought was expressed, perhaps for the first time, in
T.R. Dew's essay on slavery (1832); it is elaborated in Gabriel Tarde, _The
Laws of Imitation_ (Parsons tr., New York, 1903), pp. 278, 279.]

Western Europe in primitive times was no exception. Slavery in a more or
less fully typical form was widespread. When the migrations ended in the
middle ages, however, the rise of feudalism gave the people a thorough
territorial regimentation. The dearth of commerce whether in goods or in
men led gradually to the conversion of the unfree laborers from slaves
into serfs or villeins attached for generations to the lands on which they
wrought. Finally, the people multiplied so greatly and the landless were
so pressed for livelihood that at the beginning of modern times European
society found the removal of bonds conducive to the common advantage. Serfs
freed from their inherited obligations could now seek employment wherever
they would, and landowners, now no longer lords, might employ whom they
pleased. Bondmen gave place