It is almost needless to say that this
excuse for slavery is only available in a very early state of society.
A civilised people have far other means of imparting civilisation to
those under their influence; and slavery is, in all its details, so
repugnant to that government of law, which is the foundation of all
modern life, and so corrupting to the master-class when they have once
come under civilised influences, that its adoption under any
circumstances whatever in modern society is a relapse into worse
than barbarism.
At some period, however, of their history, almost every people,
now civilised, have consisted, in majority, of slaves. A people in
that condition require to raise them out of it a very different polity
from a nation of savages. If they are energetic by nature, and
especially if there be associated with them in. the same community
an industrious class who are neither slaves nor slave-owners (as was
the case in Greece), they need, probably, no more to ensure their
improvement than to make them free: when freed, they may often be fit,
like Roman freedmen, to be admitted at once to the full rights of
citizenship. This, however, is not the normal condition of slavery,
and is generally a sign that it is becoming obsolete. A slave,
properly so called, is a being who has not learnt to help himself.
He is, no doubt, one step in advance of a savage.
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