owever, been able to ascertain in definite terms, from
the declaimers against slavery, what they understand by it. If they mean
only the imprisonment or compulsion of one person by another, such
imprisonment or compulsion being in many cases highly expedient,
slavery, so defined, would be no evil in itself, but only in its abuse;
that is, when men are slaves, who should not be, or masters, who should
not be, or even the fittest characters for either state, placed in it
under conditions which should not be. It is not, for instance, a
necessary condition of slavery, nor a desirable one, that parents should
be separated from children, or husbands from wives; but the institution
of war, against which people declaim with less violence, effects such
separations,--not unfrequently in a very permanent manner. To press a
sailor, seize a white youth by conscription for a soldier, or carry off
a black one for a labourer, may all be right acts, or all wrong ones,
according to needs and circumstances. It is wrong to scourge a man
unnecessarily. So it is to shoot him. Both must be done on occasion; and
it is better and kinder to flog a man to his work, than to leave him
idle till he robs, and flog him afterwards. The essential thing for all
creatures is to be made to do right; how they are made to do it--by
pleasant promises, or hard necessities, pathetic oratory, or the
whip--is comparatively immaterial.[73] To be deceived is perhaps as
incompatible with human dignity as to be whipped; and I suspect the last
method to be not the worst, for the help of many individuals. The Jewish
nation throve under it, in the hand of a monarch reputed not unwise; it
is only the change of whip for scorpion which is inexpedient; and that
change is as likely to come to pass on the side of license as of law.
For the true scorpion whips are those of the nation's pleasant vices,
which are to it as St. John's locusts--crown on the head, ravin in the
mouth, and sting in the tail. If it will not bear the rule of Athena and
Apollo, who shepherd without smiting ([Greek: ou plege nemontes]),
Athena at last calls no more in the corners of the streets; and then
follows the rule of Tisiphone, who smites without shepherding.

131. If, however, by slavery, instead of absolute compulsion, is meant
_the purchase, by money, of the right of compulsion_, such purchase is
necessarily made whenever a portion of any territory is transferred, for
money, from one monarch to a