SLAVERY. It appears to be true that, in the words of Dunoyer, the economic regime of every society which has recently become sedentary is founded on the slavery of the industrial professions. In the hunter period the savage warrior does not enslave his vanquished enemy, but slays him ; the women of a conquered tribe he may, however, carry off and appropriate as wives or as servants, for in this period domestic labour falls almost altogether on their sex. In the pastoral stage slaves will be captured only to be sold, with the exception of a few who may be required for the care of flocks or the small amount of cultivation which is then undertaken. It is in proportion as a sedentary life prevails, and agricultural exploitation is practised on a larger scale, whilst warlike habits continue to exist, that the labour of slaves is increasingly introduced to provide food for the master, and at the same time save him from irksome toil. Of this stage in the social movement slavery seems to have been, as we have said, a universal and inevitable accompaniment.
But wherever theocratic organizations established themselves slavery in the ordinary sense did not become a vital element in the social system. The members of the lowest class were not in a state of individual subjection : the entire caste to which they belonged was collectively subject. It is in the communities in which the military order obtained an ascendancy over the sacer dotal, and which were directly organized for war, that slavery (as the word is commonly understood) had its natural and appropriate place. It is not merely that in its first establish ment slavery was an immense advance by substituting for the immolation of captives, often accompanied by cannibalism, their occupation in labour for the benefit of the victor. This ad vantage, recalled by an old though erroneous' etymology, is generally acknowledged. But it is not so well understood that slavery discharged important offices in the later social evolu tion—first, by enabling military action to prevail with the de gree of intensity and continuity requisite for the system of in corporation by conquest which was its final destination ; and, secondly, by forcing the captives, who with their descendants came to form the majority of the population in the conquering community, to an industrial life, in spite of the antipathy to regular and sustained labour which is deeply rooted in human nature. As regards the latter consideration, it is enough to say
that nowhere has productive industry developed itself in the form of voluntary effort ; in every country of which we have any knowledge it was imposed by the strong upon the weak, and was wrought into the habits of the people only by the stern 'Serous is not cognate with servare, as has often been supposed, it is really related to the Homeric EIpEpo and the verb elpw, with which the Latin sero is to be connected. It may be here mentioned that slave was originally a national name ; it meant a man of Slavonic race cap tured and made a bondman to the Germans. "From the Euxine to the Adriatic, in the state of captives or subjects, . . . they [the Slavonians] overspread the land, and the national appellation of the Slaves has been degraded by chance or malice from the signification of glory to that of servitude" (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. lv.). The historian alludes to the derivation of the national name from slave, glory. See Skeat's Etym. Dict., s.v.; see also SLAVS.
discipline of constraint. From the former point of view the free man, then essentially a warrior, and the slave were mutual auxiliaries, simultaneously exercising different and complemen tary functions—each necessary to the In modern slavery, on the other hand, where the occupations of both parties were industrial, the existence of a servile class only guaranteed for some of them the possibility of self-indulgent ease, whilst it imposed on others the necessity of indigent idleness.