f the first
practical advantage in early communities; and the repose it gives is a
great artistic advantage when they come to be described in history. The
patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could not have had the steady calm
which marks them, if they had themselves been teased and hurried about
their flocks and herds. Refinement of feeling and repose of appearance
have indeed no market value in the early bidding of nations; they do
not tend to secure themselves a long future or any future. But
originality in war does, and slave-owning nations, having time to
think, are likely to be more shrewd in policy, and more crafty in
strategy.

No doubt this momentary gain is bought at a ruinous after-cost. When
other sources of leisure become possible, the one use of slavery is
past. But all its evils remain, and even grow worse. 'Retail'
slavery--the slavery in which a master owns a few slaves, whom he well
knows and daily sees--is not at all an intolerable state; the slaves of
Abraham had no doubt a fair life, as things went in that day. But
wholesale slavery, where men are but one of the investments of large
capital, and where a great owner, so far from knowing each slave, can
hardly tell how many gangs of them he works, is an abominable state.
This is the slavery which has made the name revolting to the best
minds, and has nearly rooted the thing out of the best of the world.
There is no out-of-the-way marvel in this. The whole history of
civilisation, is strewn with creeds and institutions which were
invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards. Progress would not have
been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison. A
full examination of these provisional institutions would need half a
volume, and would be out of place and useless here. Venerable
oligarchy, august monarchy, are two that would alone need large
chapters. But the sole point here necessary is to say that such
preliminary forms and feelings at first often bring many graces and
many refinements, and often tend to secure them by the preservative
military virtue. There are cases in which some step in INTELLECTUAL
progress gives an early society some gain in war; more obvious cases
are when some kind of MORAL quality gives some such gain. War both
needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be
called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of
obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others