Another mode in which one state acquires a superiority over
competing states is by PROVISIONAL institutions, if I may so call
them. The most important of these--slavery--arises out of the same
early conquest as the mixture of races. A slave is an unassimilated,
an undigested atom; something which is in the body politic, but yet
is hardly part of it. Slavery, too, has a bad name in the later
world, and very justly. We connect it with gangs in chains, with
laws which keep men ignorant, with laws that hinder families. But
the evils which we have endured from slavery in recent ages must not
blind us to, or make us forget, the great services that slavery
rendered in early ages. There is a wonderful presumption in its
favour; it is one of the institutions which, at a certain stage of
growth, all nations in all countries choose and cleave to.
'Slavery,' says Aristotle, 'exists by the law of nature,' meaning
that it was everywhere to be found--was a rudimentary universal
point of polity. 'There are very many English colonies,' said Edward
Gibbon Wakefield, as late as 1848, 'who would keep slaves at once if
we would let them,' and he was speaking not only of old colonies
trained in slavery, and raised upon the products of it, but likewise
of new colonies started by freemen, and which ought, one would
think, to wish to contain freemen only.
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