ure of slavery in time of peace.

Now, slavery and indented servitude are analogous to serfdom in that they
may yield to the employers all the proceeds of industry beyond what is
required for the sustenance of the laborers; but they have this difference,
immense for American purposes, that they permit labor to be territorially
shifted, while serfdom keeps it locally fixed. By choosing these
facilitating forms of bondage instead of the one which would have attached
the laborers to the soil, the founders of the colonial regime in industry
doubtless thought they had avoided all economic handicaps in the premises.
Their device, however, was calculated to meet the needs of a situation
where the choice was between bond labor and no labor. As generations passed
and workingmen multiplied in America, the system of indentures for white
immigrants was automatically dissolved; but slavery for the bulk of the
negroes persisted as an integral feature of economic life. Whether this
was conducive or injurious to the prosperity of employers and to the
community's welfare became at length a question to which students far and
wide applied their faculties. Some of the participants in the discussion
considered the problem as one in pure theory; others examined not only the
abstract ratio of slave and free labor efficiency but included in their
view the factor of negro racial traits and the prospects and probable
consequences of abolition under existing circumstances. On the one point
that an average slave might be expected to accomplish less in an hour's
work than an average free laborer, agreement was unanimous; on virtually
every other point the views published were so divergent as to leave the
public more or less distracted. Adam Smith, whose work largely shaped the
course of economic thought for a century following its publication in 1776,
said of slave labor merely that its cost was excessive by reason of its
lack of zest, frugality and inventiveness. The tropical climate of the
sugar colonies, he conceded, might require the labor of negro slaves,
but even there its productiveness would be enhanced by liberal policies
promoting intelligence among the slaves and assimilating their condition to
that of freemen.[3] To some of these points J.B. Say, the next economist to
consider the matter, took exception. Common sense must tell us, said he,
that a slave's maintenance must be less than that of a free workman, since
the master will impose a