Chapitre Premier.

CHAP. 1: CHAPTER ONE.

On the importance of the subject of this book, in the current state of nations.

We have seen, in the preceding books, the action that men exercise upon one another individually or collectively, in the most barbarous state in which they have been found; we have observed them in their relations as husband and wife, parents and children, members of the same association, chiefs and subordinates; we have then considered them in the relations they have with one another from horde to horde or from nation to nation; we have seen how the industry, morals, and social state of each people are first determined by the local circumstances in the midst of which that people is placed; and how this industry, these morals, and this social state then determine the action that nations exercise upon one another; finally, we have seen the effects that this action produces on the physical, intellectual, and moral faculties of those who exercise it, and of those who are subject to it, on the creation and distribution of wealth, and on the increase or decrease of the population.

We have thus been led to observe the nature, causes, and effects of despotism or political enslavement. We have seen armies of barbarians organize to invade countries occupied by industrious populations, share, after victory, the conquered lands and men, exploit them in common, live in abundance and luxury, leave to the enslaved people only what is strictly necessary for them to work, abandon themselves to idleness or engage only in exercises proper to maintaining the vanquished population in slavery. We must now observe a state analogous to the preceding one: that of a country where one sees two peoples on the same soil: one, which performs all the labors, enjoys no security, and lives in the most profound misery; the other, which lives in idleness, consumes the products of the first's labor, and disposes of it in the most absolute manner. The principal difference that exists between this state and the one I have previously described consists in this, that in this case, the exploitation of the enslaved population is carried out in a more individual manner than in the other, and that the enslaved men are abandoned to a more active and continuous arbitrary power; this state is what is designated by the name of domestic slavery.

There exists, between political slavery and domestic slavery, a difference analogous to that which we observe between the territorial properties of a horde of barbarians and the territorial properties of a civilized people: in the first case, the national territory belongs to all in common; in the second, the shares are made, and each disposes of his own as he sees fit. Likewise, in political slavery, the enslaved people is exploited in common, and the products are shared among the masters, each having a share according to his rank; in domestic slavery, on the contrary, the enslaved population is divided into fractions among the masters, and each exploits his own and disposes of it as he deems suitable. These two states are capable of various modifications: if the chief of the possessors shares the products of the exploitation in an arbitrary manner, and if military power remains concentrated in his hands, as is practiced in Persia, Turkey, and other countries, this is called despotism; if, on the contrary, the masters share among themselves, according to their ranks and in a regular manner, the products of the subjugated people, this is called aristocracy. Despotism and aristocracy do not have the same intensity in all countries: the intervals that separate the aristocracies of Berne, of Great Britain, of the archipelagos of the great Ocean, and of the negroes of central Africa are very great. There can also be a great distance between despotism as it is exercised in the Turkish empire and that which is exercised in the Russian empire. Domestic slavery appears capable of fewer gradations than political slavery; however, we will see that it is also subject to great variations.

It is in the nature of man that every vice and every virtue produces for the individuals who have contracted them a certain sum of goods and evils, or of pleasures and pains. Now, slavery, whatever its nature, is always intended by those who establish it to inflict upon the enslaved all the evils engendered by the vices of the diverse classes of the population, and at the same time to rob them of all the goods that are the natural consequences of the practice of virtues. Can this intention, which aims to paralyze laws inherent in human nature, be accomplished? Is it in the power of a certain number of men to attribute to themselves the monopoly of enjoyments, and to cast all the pains and all the labors upon a more or less numerous part of the population? This question will be resolved in the course of this book. But does it deserve to be submitted to examination? Has it not already been sufficiently clarified? And, if it has not been, do we have any interest in its being so?

There are, among us, persons who imagine that human reason has already made so much progress that there are no more errors to destroy in the world. According to them, it is now only a matter of expounding the truth in a small number of maxims, and of knowing how to put it into practice. I do not doubt that, upon reading the title of this book, these persons will experience a sentiment analogous to that which the sight of a work aimed at refuting the errors of alchemy would produce in a scholar of our day. Is it possible to write on such a subject without taking ourselves back two or three thousand years, or at least into the barbarism of the Middle Ages? Who today thinks of defending or re-establishing such a system? To speak of domestic slavery to peoples who have arrived at constitutional monarchy and representative government, to peoples who have meditated on the freedom of the press and the responsibility of ministers, is this not to bring back to the first elements of calculation men whose minds are familiar with the writings of Newton and Laplace?

It seems, indeed, when one considers only the surface of the society in which one lives, and does not cast one's gaze beyond the small circle by which one is surrounded, that it is no more necessary to treat of the nature and effects of slavery than to treat of the grossest errors that have disappeared for centuries. But, when one does not let oneself be intoxicated by the continual praises that writers give to the present era, praises that, moreover, the peoples of all ages have given themselves; when, leaving aside the books in which are consigned, alongside our systems, the irrefutable testimonies of our vanity, one casts one's gaze upon what is happening in the world, one feels a little less disposed to yield to these movements of pride; far from believing that nations are as advanced in the sciences of morality and legislation as some writers claim, one is led to think, on the contrary, that they are still surrounded by thick darkness, and that they perhaps do not even possess the first elements of them.

Let the men who believe that peoples are already very advanced in these sciences take the trouble to go and listen to what is taught in the high schools of the most civilized nations, in those where these sciences must be best known. What will they hear there? Professors who, following the principles of a legislation considered to be written reason, teach their students that men are divided into two classes; that some are persons, and that others are things; that men who are persons enjoy all legal guarantees; but that men who are things have neither rights nor wills; that these men-things, capable of creating wealth by their labors, are incapable of doing anything for themselves, of acquiring anything, of possessing anything; that they can unite temporarily with a female of their species, but that they cannot form that durable and permanent union that we designate by the name of marriage; that among them the union of the sexes can produce no reciprocal duty; that they can beget children, but that they can have no authority or power over them; that they are held to no duty toward them, and that, for their part, they can demand nothing from them; that they are incapable of contracting any obligation, but that they nevertheless have a multitude of duties to fulfill toward the men who are persons; that in their quality as things, they are incapable of bearing witness, but that one can, in their quality as men, apply them to torture to extract the truth from them on facts that are foreign to them; that, sensitive in their quality as men, they must show themselves insensitive in their quality as things, and that on their part any act of defense or preservation, with regard to their possessors, is a crime.

And let it not be thought that, in expounding to their students these phenomena of the social state of barbarous peoples, our learned professors present them as facts whose nature, causes, and consequences it is good to study. No, for them, these are rights or principles of legislation; in their eyes, the enslavement of nine-tenths of the population to the caprices and passions of a small number of individuals is a way of being as natural as any other. One would search in vain through all their books of jurisprudence, and the elementary works in which they have expounded its principles, to find a single reflection, either on the causes or on the effects of servitude, not a single comparison between the facts they describe, such as force and stupidity had established them, and the phenomena that were the results of these facts. The young men who are taught to divide men thus into things and persons are particularly those who are destined for the administration of justice, or to fill other functions of government; and it is not rare to see them later apply, under different denominations, the doctrines they have drawn from *written reason.*If we pass from the phenomena taught in schools under the name of doctrines to those defended openly in legislative assemblies, we will find between them only a difference of words: instead of dividing men into persons and things, they are divided into proprietors and properties. Men who are proprietors must enjoy all legal guarantees; men who are properties must be treated like furniture that one keeps, uses, or breaks arbitrarily. This distinction between the human beings who are persons or proprietors, and the human beings who are things or properties, is not merely professed in theory; it is written into the law and recognized by the governments of the most enlightened peoples, such as those of France, England, the Netherlands, and even the United States of America. The English possess in their colonies about 800,000 of these properties who are men; the citizens of the United States possess a little more than a million; the French, the Dutch, and the Spanish possess a slightly less considerable number, and it is not their fault if they do not possess more. In truth, not all individuals who are proprietors possess this kind of property; but all, without exception, pay considerable taxes to preserve for those among them who do possess it the power to dispose of it in the most absolute manner.

What is most singular is that the same men who would be disposed to revolt against their government, should it arbitrarily demand a portion of their income or a part of their time, would revolt equally against it, should it wish to guarantee to the men ranked as properties a part of their time or of the products of their labor. To ravish from the former a portion of their fortune, to lock them up by force for a few hours in some place or other, to inflict upon them, without legal judgment, the slightest penalty—these are offenses against morals, against the laws, against religion, against human nature; but not to allow the latter to be despoiled, chained, imprisoned, tortured, and put to death, without examination or judgment, is considered an equally grave offense. To undermine the power that guarantees to the former the security of their goods and their persons is an act of tyranny that justifies revolt and merits the ultimate punishment; but to attack the force that subjects the latter to continual spoliation and violence is an act no less criminal. The former, by regularly appropriating all the products of the latter's labor, perform just and legitimate acts; but the latter, when they attempt to take back a small part of the fruits of their labor that have been ravished from them, commit a spoliation, a theft that deserves to be punished by arbitrary chastisements.

And let it not be imagined that, in reporting these irrefutable proofs of the immense progress peoples have made in the moral sciences, I am about to take them from the most ignorant nations, or from the most barbarous times. I take them, on the contrary, from one of the most enlightened peoples, and at an epoch not far from our own: it is in the debates that took place less than a year ago in England, within Parliament itself, or in the writings published around the same time by English planters or their friends. It is even remarkable that the society formed for the mitigation and gradual abolition of slavery did not think it prudent to demand the immediate cessation of this distinction between the men who call themselves proprietors and those who are called properties. Nevertheless, it met with very keen opposition; its adversaries considered its attempts to grant some legal protection to 800,000 human beings as attacks on justice. Things went much further in the colonies: there, the possessors of men considered any obstacle to violence and cruelty an unbearable tyranny; they saw, in the men who wished to extend legal guarantees to all, provocations to murder and brigandage; they treated as spoliation the obligation imposed on them not to ravish from the most numerous part of the population all the products of its labor. The other states of Europe are no more advanced than the British empire; one can even say they are much less so, for no one there thinks of erasing from the law the distinction between men who are ranked as things and men who are persons. The trade of abducting, buying, or selling men is, if not protected, at least weakly prosecuted: there would be less danger in introducing and selling, in some European colony, a cargo of men, women, and children of whom one had taken possession by violence, than in introducing and selling there certain goods that one had legitimately acquired from the owner [1].

If we pass from the maxims and practices of the nations that call themselves the most civilized to the maxims and practices of those that are less so, we will find slavery even more widespread. In the legislation of the Russian empire, as in our colonial legislation, the population is divided between men who are persons and men who are things; and the number of the latter is infinitely greater than the number of the former. It is the same in Poland and in almost all of northern Germany. Does one think that a man who, in these countries, took it upon himself to attack this classification, and to prove that if, by their own nature, they are not all persons, they must all be numbered among things, would be advancing only propositions evident to all eyes? Does one believe that by expounding there all the results that slavery produces, he would only be reproducing observations that everyone has already made?

Slavery is a very ancient condition of man; but it is to be strangely mistaken to imagine that a thing is known for the reason that it is ancient and has long been spoken of: most sciences date only from our own day, and the things that are their object are as old as the world. Personal servitude appeared such a natural state to the philosophers of antiquity that they all seem to have thought that the human race could not exist otherwise; even those who expounded with the greatest talent the effects of despotism do not seem to have suspected that any analogy existed between that state and the relations that exist between a master and his slaves. Modern jurists, who convert into principles of law the phenomena described by Roman jurists, have not even thought to expound the consequences of slavery; and if some philosophers of the last century made it the subject of their declamations, others have appeared to consider it a necessary condition of any regular social state [2].

Since slavery still exists in a great number of states, and since in all of them one encounters a considerable number of people who defend or attack it, the phenomena that result from it must not be evident to everyone; if they were, there would no longer be any dispute. The interest one believes one has in defending or attacking it would not suffice to bring it under discussion; for when facts become evident, they cease by that very fact to be an object of controversy, whatever their results may be. It is enough, moreover, that slavery still exists among a great number of nations for all of them to have an interest in knowing the effects it produces. In every epoch, peoples have exercised a very extensive influence on one another, and the nature of this influence has always depended on the morals, intelligence, wealth, and government of the nation that exercised it; but, as slavery itself powerfully influences the morals, intelligence, wealth, and government of the nations where it is established, it follows that the peoples who reject it from their midst will be affected by it as long as it exists among other peoples.

Finally, slavery is not a state so determinate that it cannot be modified without being destroyed: from the point where a man enjoys no liberty to the point where he is perfectly free, there is a multitude of intermediate degrees. A people almost never passes from one to the other in a rapid manner; this movement, sometimes progressive and sometimes retrograde, even seems so natural to men that it appears to have been experienced by all the nations of the globe; when it is not very rapid, peoples often experience it without perceiving it. The best means of judging, in each epoch, the degree of liberty one enjoys, is to expound clearly each of the elements that form the most complete servitude, and then to see which of these elements exist or have been destroyed. In proceeding thus, a people that believes itself free might well perceive that it has but a short way to go to be completely enslaved.

One must never lose sight of the fact that in writing this work, I am concerned only with the masses, and that I do not have to expound facts that are merely individual exceptions to the general facts I describe. In speaking of the effects that slavery produces on the physical, intellectual, and moral faculties of the diverse classes of the population, I therefore have no need to speak of masters or slaves who, through particular and accidental circumstances, have escaped these effects. It is doubtless possible to encounter a skillful slave or one of a vigorous constitution, but this fact does not lead to the conclusion that slavery results in developing the industry or strengthening the physical organs of the enslaved population. One can also encounter, in a country of slaves, a small number of enlightened masters, without being able to conclude from this that the possession of arbitrary power over a part of the species is favorable to the development of the intellectual faculties. Finally, one can encounter, either among the slaves or among the masters, a man who has pure or even severe morals, without it resulting that slavery is favorable to good morals.