Section LXXI.. Disadvantages of Slavery.

Disadvantages Of Slavery.

Slavery promotes the division of labor only in the very beginning. The more dependent the slave is, the worse he works. Whatever he spoils or allows to go to waste injures only his master. Hence it is that slave-husbandry is only one degree removed from what the Germans call Raubbau, and which means, as nearly as we can translate it, the most thoughtless and wasteful management possible.(414) Whatever he consumes is simply so much gain to himself. Industry and skill are injurious to him, because, if remarkable for these qualities, his master exacts more work from him and is more adverse to setting him at liberty. Instead of the numberless incentives of the free workman: care for the future, for his family, honor and comfort, the slave is generally moved by one—the fear of ill-treatment, and to this he gradually becomes insensible.(415) The division of labor demanded by manufactures, and which is to be found for the most part only where each person is at liberty to choose his own avocation, is scarcely supposable where slavery, in the strict sense of the word, prevails. The same is true of the spirit of invention and improvement.(416) And even where the milder glebæ adscriptio obtains, the division of labor is much hindered. Hence, competent judges all agree on the badness of slave labor;(417) which, as for instance in the United States, was used only where the slaves were crowded together in large numbers and could therefore be easily superintended. And not only are the slaves themselves indolent, but their masters as well; more particularly in slave countries where all labor is considered disgraceful. What must be the national husbandry of a people, one half of whom refuse to do anything that is right and proper, through malice, and the other half through pride! As soon as, on account of increased population and consequent increased consumption, this enormous waste of force can be endured no longer, free workmen become more profitable, not only to themselves and to the whole community, but to the greater number of the individuals who compose it.(418) On the Bernstoff estates the quantity of rye harvested before and after emancipation was as 3:8-⅓; of barley-corn as 4:9-⅓; of oat-grain as 2-⅔:8.(419)

The owners of serfs, especially, are apt to be very wasteful of their labor, because they imagine that they obtain it gratis. Tucker has made a curious calculation tending to show that when civilization reaches a certain point, the master’s self-interest leads to emancipation. In Russia, where there are seventy-five persons to the English square mile, it seemed to him that serfdom was still a good economic speculation. In western Europe, where there were one hundred and ten persons to the square mile, freedom, in all relations of master and servant, he considered more advantageous to all parties. Emancipation began in England in the fourteenth century, when that country had a population of forty to the square mile, and was completed in the seventeenth, when the population was ninety-two to the square mile.(420) Tucker concludes, that the turning point comes, when the population is relatively to the number of square miles as 66:1.(421) Such a calculation cannot, of course, be universally true. The free workman can usually command a much larger portion of the sum total of economic profits than can the slave or serf, who must be satisfied with the minimum necessary to support life.(422) Hence, free labor is more profitable to masters only when production in general is so much enhanced thereby that a greater quantity of goods falls to their share also. But this will always be the case where workmen are capable of development.(423)