to hirelings and peasant proprietors,
status gave place to contract, industrial society was enabled to make
redistributions and readjustments at will, as it had never been before. In
view of the prevailing traits and the density of the population a general
return whether to slavery or serfdom was economically unthinkable. An
intelligent Scotch philanthropist, Fletcher of Saltoun, it is true,
proposed at the end of the seventeenth century that the indigent and their
children be bound as slaves to selected masters as a means of relieving
the terrible distresses of unemployment in his times;[2] but his project
appears to have received no public sanction whatever. The fact that he
published such a plan is more a curious antiquarian item than one of
significance in the history of slavery. Not even the thin edge of a wedge
could possibly be inserted which might open a way to restore what everyone
was on virtually all counts glad to be free of.

[Footnote 2: W.E.H. Lecky, _History of England in the Eighteenth Century_
(New York, 1879), II, 43,44.]

When the American mining and plantation colonies were established, however,
some phases of the most ancient labor problems recurred. Natural resources
invited industry in large units, but wage labor was not to be had. The
Spaniards found a temporary solution in impressing the tropical American
aborigines, and the English in a recourse to indented white immigrants. But
both soon resorted predominantly for plantation purposes to the importation
of Africans, for whom the ancient institution of slavery was revived. Thus
from purely economic considerations the sophisticated European colonists
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved themselves and their
descendants, with the connivance of their home governments, in the toils of
a system which on the one hand had served their remote forbears with good
effect, but which on the other hand civilized peoples had long and almost
universally discarded as an incubus. In these colonial beginnings the
negroes were to be had so cheaply and slavery seemed such a simple and
advantageous device when applied to them, that no qualms as to the future
were felt. At least no expressions of them appear in the records of thought
extant for the first century and more of English colonial experience.
And when apprehensions did arise they were concerned with the dangers of
servile revolt, not with any deleterious effects to arise from the economic
nat