De l’influence de l’esclavage sur la constitution physique et sur les facultés industrielles des maî

CHAP. 3: > On the influence of slavery on the physical constitution and on the industrial faculties of masters and slaves.

To judge the effects that slavery produces on the various classes of the population, it is necessary, we have said, to consider men in their physical, intellectual, and moral faculties; but one must, moreover, recall the various kinds of improvement or degradation of which these faculties are susceptible.

The improvement of our physical organs is understood in two ways, as we have seen previously: in one sense, it is taken for the good constitution of each of these organs; in the other, for the aptitude that exercise has given them to fulfill the various functions required for the well-being of the individual, of his family, and even of his species.

Slavery is not always an obstacle to the first kind of physical improvement among individuals belonging to the master race; it does not necessarily have the effect of preventing individuals of this race from having healthy and abundant food, of making them breathe an unhealthy air, or even of forbidding them the exercises that are most suitable for developing their physical strength and a certain kind of skill. Barbarians who, after having reduced a considerable number of industrious men to servitude, find in domination the means to live in abundance, can continue to devote themselves to the exercises that made them victors. After having been hunters and warriors by necessity, they can remain so for pleasure, by habit, by prejudice, and above all by policy; it is the surest means, not only of making new slaves and re-establishing their fortunes through pillage, but also of ensuring their domination over the first men they enslaved.

Among the ancients, as among the moderns, we see all peoples who had founded their existence on the enslavement of a part of their species make hunting, the exercise of arms, and gymnastic games the privileges of the masters. We know what exercises the peoples of Greece devoted themselves to, as long as they preserved their independence. The Romans, as long as there existed to their knowledge industrious and free men to reduce to servitude, did not cease to practice handling weapons, crossing rivers by swimming, making long marches laden with heavy baggage, and giving their voices the sound most suitable for inspiring terror in their enemies: sometimes they pursued the course of these exercises into the most advanced old age [10]. We likewise see, in the various States of Europe after the invasion of the barbarians, that the exercises suitable for developing a certain kind of muscular strength, such as hunting, fencing, and tournaments, remained among the privileges of the new dominators [11]. Finally, in the islands of the great Ocean, where one part of the population lives at the expense of the other, the individuals of the master race all devote themselves to gymnastic exercises and the use of arms. Slavery, far from being a cause of degradation of the physical organs in the dominator class, contributed on the contrary to strengthening their constitution; it furnished them with abundant food, it exempted them from labors that could have weakened their organs, and it gave them the means, or even imposed on them the necessity, of devoting themselves to the exercises most favorable to their development.

Another cause contributed, in almost all countries, to the physical improvement of the masters; this was the power to take for themselves the most beautiful women found among the slaves. This practice, carried on for centuries, must have eventually established a perceptible difference between the two classes of the population; for the same cause that contributes to perfecting the one, necessarily has the effect of producing the degradation of the other.

This power to take the most beautiful women produced, for the dominator class, less extensive effects in countries where aristocratic pride forbade any legitimate union between a master and his slave; but, in countries where such pride did not exist, the exercise of this power, over a few centuries, was sufficient, in a way, to change the species: this is what is particularly observed among the Persians and the Turks, and perhaps it is to a similar power that one must attribute, at least in part, the beauty of Greek forms [12].

If we were to judge the physical constitution of the men of antiquity who belonged to the master class by their statues that have come down to us, or by what some of their historians have told us of their strength, we would perhaps form exaggerated ideas of the excellence of their physical constitution; however, when one pays attention, on the one hand, to all the circumstances that contributed to their development, and recalls, on the other hand, the descriptions that modern travelers give us of some peoples situated in analogous circumstances, it is difficult not to believe that these peoples enjoyed an excellent physical organization.

But the same circumstances that contributed to giving the masters a good organization, also contributed to weakening the organization of the slaves; the latter had food, clothing, and housing only insofar as it pleased the masters to leave them any [13]. Any exercise that could have given them strength, skill, and courage was forbidden to them as being dangerous for their possessors [14]. The small number of mechanical operations to which they were obliged to devote themselves, in the interest of their masters, could develop only a few of their organs. This development could only be very limited, because a forced, excessive exercise, accompanied by deprivation of food, is a cause of weakness far more than a cause of strength. If one adds to these considerations that the enslaved men could have for companions only the least beautiful women, the others becoming the concubines of the masters, one will easily conceive how the enslaved part of the human race must have become more degraded every day. We possess few documents suitable for informing us what the physical constitution of slaves was among the peoples of antiquity; but one can believe, without fear of being mistaken, that it was not among the Helots that Phidias went to seek his models [15].It would be difficult to judge the effects that a long slavery can produce on the physical constitution of slaves in the European colonies. The excess of the labors to which they are subjected, the ill-treatment with which they are overwhelmed, and the lack of healthy and abundant food, have never allowed them to perpetuate themselves there beyond a small number of generations. For the species not to die out, it has had to be constantly renewed by free men imported from the coasts of Africa. According to one historian, the number of slaves in the French colonies decreased by one-fifteenth every year; and yet these slaves were treated less harshly than those of the English and Dutch colonists [16].

The physical improvement that consists in the art of employing our organs, and which is the result of exercise, has such intimate relations with intellectual development and moral improvement, that it is difficult to expound the manner in which the former is affected by slavery, before having expounded the effects that the same cause produces on ideas and on morals. However, as each of man's parts reacts upon the others, and as it is impossible to make known all the phenomena at the same time, it is necessary to expound them one after another, beginning with those that are most evident.

We have previously seen that the kind of improvement that exercise gives to our physical organs is evaluated by the advantages that result from it for the individual, for his family, for his nation, and finally for the human race. One cannot proceed, in the appreciation of this improvement, otherwise than one proceeds in the judgment of human actions, habits, and laws [17]. It seems evident to me, for example, that the man who, by dint of study and exercise, has given his hands the power to furnish two individuals with the things necessary for their existence, without harming anyone, has acquired in this part of himself a greater improvement than that acquired by a man who can furnish only for the existence of one. It appears no less evident that one could not consider as an improvement the power that an individual has given to some of his organs, to procure means of existence for a family, if he can obtain this result only by causing two to perish. To adopt a contrary opinion, one would have to make the improvement of the human race consist in its destruction [18].

The first effect that slavery produces, with regard to the masters, is to dispense them from the labors that immediately furnish men with means of existence. The second is to make them view these labors with contempt: we find among the masters of all races and all epochs the same sentiments. In all times, the possessors of men have considered the application of their organs to a productive labor as a degrading act. This way of judging had become so well established among the peoples of Greece, that their philosophers who, as almost always happens, did nothing but reduce to general maxims the phenomena they observed, made it a principle of politics. In a perfectly governed State, says Aristotle, the citizens must exercise neither the mechanical arts, nor the mercantile professions; they must not even be laborers [19]. If one wishes that those who are to cultivate the land be such as one might desire, it is essential that they be slaves, but not of the same nation, nor of too high a heart [20]. Plato had the same ideas on all industrial labors; they inspired in him such contempt that he was indignant that the sciences had been debased to the point of making them useful by applying them to the arts [21].

The Romans, at the beginning of their republic, and before they had acquired by victory a sufficient number of slaves to have the labors necessary for their existence performed, despised no useful occupation. But as their slaves multiplied, they themselves disdained the mechanical arts, commerce, and even the agriculture they had at first honored [22]. The countrysides that, in the beginning, had been cultivated by free hands, were rapidly populated with slaves, and the citizens disappeared from them [23]. Even the men who held most to the ancient morals, like M. Cato, renounced the cultivation of the fields [24]. The abandonment of agriculture by free men became so general that, when Caius Gracchus crossed Tuscany to go to Numantia,

“he found, says Plutarch, the country almost deserted, and those who worked the land or guarded the beasts there were for the most part barbarian slaves, come from foreign countries [25].”

The great number of slaves that had been acquired in the wars, having caused the exercise of all productive professions to fall into their hands, it was established as a maxim of politics that these professions were degrading, and that it was unworthy of a citizen to exercise them. We need, said Menenius to the senate, hardened soldiers, and not laborers, mercenaries, merchants, or other people of that kind, accustomed to exercising vile and contemptible professions [26]. The gravest reproach that Antony addressed to Octavian was not that he had been guilty of hypocrisy, vengeance, or cruelty; it was that he had had, among his ancestors, a man who had exercised a useful industry, who had been a banker [27]. The laws naturally followed the course of morals and ideas; soon it ceased to be permitted for citizens to devote themselves to any trade, or to exercise any commerce. Thus was reached the last degree of perfection that Aristotle had marked out [28].

There is, however, one industry that slavery did not debase in the eyes of the masters; it is the industry that consists in training, hiring, buying, and selling men. The Roman aristocracy, which would have thought it was demeaning itself by applying its noble hands to the cultivation of a field or the exercise of a profession, did not believe it was losing status by training its slaves itself to do the trades it judged the vilest, even that of gladiators. A citizen who had been a hirer of horses would perhaps have been branded with infamy, but a senator or a consul could be a hirer of men without demeaning his dignity [29]. One of Octavian's ancestors had, it was said, dishonored his posterity by banking; but M. Cato bought and sold men, he particularly sold the old ones, who brought him little profit and could become useless, and Cato was the guardian of morals [30].

The serf of the glebe in Europe produced on the masters, on their descendants, and on those who affiliated themselves with them, an effect exactly similar to that which it produced on the Greek masters and on the Roman masters. Industry and commerce were judged degrading, and any noble man who engaged in them, by that very fact lost status; it was necessary at first, to live nobly, to draw one's subsistence immediately from the labors of the enslaved population. When servitude of the glebe was abolished, it was necessary to draw one's subsistence from the same source, in the form of contributions, unless one had sufficient lands. The only professions considered noble were the military state and the state of public official; in both, when one does not live by pillage, one lives at least by contributions, which sometimes strongly resemble each other.

In the colonies, even the individuals who came from the lowest ranks of the social order considered all useful labors as degrading, the instant they became possessors of men. At the Cape of Good Hope, a peasant never works; his only occupation is hunting [31]. A soldier who, after having obtained his discharge, devotes himself to a manual profession, ceases to work as soon as he is in a position to buy a slave [32]. Not only are agricultural labors and commerce disdained by the masters and abandoned to the slaves, but simple artisans exercise their trade only through the hands of their blacks [33]. A European laborer of the master race, even if he had been branded as a malefactor, if he became the possessor of a man, would immediately believe that he could no longer devote himself to a productive labor without demeaning his nobility. The contempt and aversion that the masters in this colony have for useful labors are such that a man who has studied the morals of this people thought that, to make the country progress, it was necessary to call in Chinese [34].

The Dutch, who know so well how to appreciate all kinds of useful labors at home, show themselves in Batavia as they are at the Cape of Good Hope. The instant they manage to become possessors of men there, they feel an insurmountable contempt and aversion for any industrial occupation [35]. These sentiments have such an empire over them that, according to one traveler, they would let themselves die of hunger rather than work: it is free Chinese who perform most of the labors necessary for their existence [36]. In their American colonies, today subject to the English government, the Dutch have all the labors of the town and the country performed by their slaves; it is slaves who take care of the interior of the house, who cultivate the land, who go hunting and fishing, who exercise the arts of carpenter, cooper, mason, and even surgeon [37].

The effect of slavery on the English has been the same as on the Dutch. In Saint Helena, where slavery was long admitted, the men of the master race do not devote themselves to any labor: the island is cultivated almost exclusively by negroes, freedmen or descendants of freedmen [38].

In the southern part of the United States of America, a man ceases to work from the moment he is the possessor of two slaves, for a single one would not be enough to support him. Possessing men is the principal object of everyone's ambition; there is no other way to live nobly and be admitted among the masters. There is no kind of labor that is not performed by slaves; they alone are farmers, wheelwrights, carpenters, turners, locksmiths, weavers, tailors, shoemakers [39]. The fear that masters have of demeaning themselves by working is such, according to M. de Larochefoucault, that if a fire breaks out at their home, it is to their slaves that they abandon the task of extinguishing it: they would debase themselves by mixing among them [40]. There, consideration is measured by the number of slaves each possesses; he who has only fifty has half the merit of he who has a hundred [41]. As for he who possesses none and is reduced to living from the product of his own labors, he is so despised and forsaken that he is obliged to leave the country and take his industry elsewhere.

Thus, although slavery does not necessarily vitiate the physical organs of the men who belong to the master class, it has the effect of rendering their exercise null in all kinds of occupation that are necessary for the existence of peoples. They are instruments that not only are useless to the human race considered as a whole, but that serve the individual who is endowed with them only by the evil they produce for a multitude of others. If, by some great catastrophe, the master race were to disappear suddenly from a country where slavery is admitted, there is no kind of labor that would remain suspended, no wealth whose loss one would have to deplore. The labors would take a more useful direction for men, the intervals of rest would be better managed: but labor would gain in energy and intelligence much more than it would lose in duration.

The effects that servitude produces, relative to the physical organs of slaves, on the kind of improvement that results from exercise, are less easy to know than those that the same cause produces relative to the physical organs of masters. The writers of antiquity have made known to us the ideas and morals of the diverse races of dominators; but they have occupied themselves little with describing the ideas and morals of the enslaved populations. The objects of art that remain to us from the ancients can give us only faint light in this regard, both because we are ignorant of the progression that slavery followed in each State, and because we possess, in general, only the history of the conquering nations.

Italy, before the conquest by the Romans, was covered with a multitude of industrious nations already very advanced in civilization; but the historians of Rome speak of them only to inform us of the countrysides that the Roman armies ravaged, the cities they destroyed, the riches they carried away from them, the number of combatants they slaughtered, the number of free persons they made into slaves. We do not know much better the social state of most of the other peoples of Europe before their enslavement.

We are ignorant of, or at least we know only in a very imperfect manner, the industry of the Roman slaves; but even if we had a complete knowledge of what it was from the beginning to the end of the republic, it could not serve us to judge the effects that slavery produces on the industry of the enslaved population. The Romans, from the expulsion of their kings until the establishment of the empire, were constantly at war, and almost always with peoples less barbarous than themselves. The victories they won and the innumerable cities they destroyed gave them the means to import annually onto their territory, as slaves, an immense number of persons who had always been free and industrious. These persons were necessarily employed to perform their labors, or to instruct their other slaves: but, whatever their address or their skill in the arts may have been, one cannot consider it the effect of servitude, since it was under liberty that it had developed. To judge well the effects that slavery produces on the industry of enslaved men, one must go to the time when free and industrious men ceased to be made slaves, that is to say, to the epoch when, the entire known part of the world having been conquered, there almost no longer existed any war from nation to nation. Now, it is evident that from this epoch, all the arts fell rapidly into decline.

No people ever possessed such a great number of slaves as the Roman people; none was ever so constantly at war; but, although great works of theirs still remain, one must attribute those that required address or intelligence neither to the master class, nor to the slave class. The city of Rome was for a long time, as Montesquieu observed, only an enclosure of walls intended to shelter the products of rapine or pillage, and strongly resembling the cities of Barbary. The chiefs who returned victorious attached to their doors, in the manner of some savage hunters, the bloody spoils of the vanquished enemies, and these spoils were never removed. Most of the public monuments were similar to those with which the victorious soldiers adorned the front of their houses. Until the moment the Romans made themselves masters of Syracuse and put it to pillage, Rome preserved the same aspect. According to the testimony of Plutarch,

“it was only full of barbaric arms, and of harnesses and spoils all soiled with blood and crowned with trophies and monuments of victory and triumph, won over various enemies, which were not pleasant spectacles, but rather frightful to see [42].”

The paintings, statues, and other objects of art that the Romans carried away from Syracuse were the first things of this kind that they possessed: until then they had known nothing similar [43].

There existed, however, in Rome some public monuments of a higher antiquity; but, if the free or enslaved Romans had contributed to raising them, it had been only in the capacity of laborers; it was the other free States of Italy that had produced the artists. The works made under the last of the Tarquins, such as the sewers, the temples, the public squares, were directed and executed by Tuscans or Etruscans [44]. When this king wished to place on a temple he had had built, a chariot of baked earth, he did not find in his kingdom an artist capable of executing it; he was obliged to have it made among the Veientines [45]. It was by pillage or by the tributes they imposed on the vanquished that the Romans procured for themselves objects of luxury. Agriculture, although it had perhaps not been carried very far, degenerated promptly, as we shall soon see, as soon as it had been abandoned to the slaves. As for the most common arts of life, it would be difficult to determine exactly what point they had reached; but we will soon see that it was not by slaves that they could be perfected, and still less invented.

I should now expound here what influence slavery exercises on the kind of improvement that pertains to the skill given by exercise to the physical organs of slaves, whether in the system of servitude of the glebe, or in the colonial system; but the development of these organs is so subordinated to the intellectual development and passions of the masters, that it is necessary to expound what influence slavery produces on the minds of the latter, before expounding the influence that the same cause produces on the intelligence and industry of the former.