De l’influence de l’esclavage domestique sur les facultés intellectuelles des maîtres et des esclave

CHAP. 4: > On the influence of domestic slavery on the intellectual faculties of masters and slaves.To understand how slavery affects the intellectual faculties of masters, they must be considered from several different perspectives: in their relations with one another, with the government, and with the enslaved population.

Among the Romans, from the beginning to the end of the republic, the men who belonged to the master class were not subordinated to one another, as vassals were under the feudal regime. If they were not equals, at least no one could command another unless he had been invested with a magistracy by a portion of the population. From this resulted, for any man who aspired to exercise some influence over his fellow citizens, the necessity of winning their confidence, whether by speeches or by actions. Consequently, the art of speech had to be cultivated, along with all the knowledge connected to it; before becoming an orator, a citizen had to be a grammarian, logician, moralist, jurisconsult, and publicist. It was also in these branches of human knowledge that the men of the master class made great progress, so long as no one among them had the means to substitute force or authority for reason. This kind of development, far from being judged degrading for the masters, had, on the contrary, to be judged honorable, because it increased the power of man over man. It was, moreover, the result of liberty; for among themselves, the citizens were neither masters nor slaves.

But if an individual of the master class found it necessary to develop his intellectual faculties in his relations with his equals, he was under no such necessity in his relations with his slaves. With regard to the former, he was a free man; his only force was reason. With regard to the latter, he was a despot; he had nothing to explain, nothing to demonstrate; he needed only to command. There existed, therefore, among the men of this class, two insurmountable obstacles to the progress of knowledge whose object is to increase man’s power over nature: the first is the degradation into which slavery had cast all industrial labors, which forbade free men from engaging in them; the second, the faculty that masters possessed of employing force or authority instead of reason. When the masters were in turn enslaved, the knowledge they had acquired in the time of their liberty died out, and domestic slavery continued to act upon them. In relation to their government, they were now only slaves; in relation to their slaves, they continued to be despots. This dual status made it difficult for them to make any intellectual progress.

Under the feudal regime, the masters were not organized as those of Greece and Rome had been. They made more frequent use among themselves of cunning, deceit, or force than of eloquence and reason; thus, nothing is found among them that indicates any development of the art of speech and the knowledge related to it. Those of these peoples who, without ceasing to be possessors of slaves, fell under the despotism of an individual or a family, like the Poles and the Russians, found themselves in a position similar to that of the Romans after the establishment of the empire. They suffered the disadvantages of two opposing conditions: that of being a slave and that of being a master. We have, indeed, previously seen that the philosophers who went to study the morals of these peoples were surprised to find them similar to what the Romans were in their decadence.

The colonies founded by Europeans in Africa, America, and the West Indies were not left to themselves; the governments of the peoples who founded them retained a power over them nearly equal to that which they enjoyed over the national territory. This power was even sometimes more extensive in the colonies than in the mother country: this was particularly the case in the French colonies. The masters, generally enjoying no political liberty and not even forming, properly speaking, independent nations, had no need to develop any of those intellectual faculties which, in countries where political liberty is established, secure dominion for those who have given them the greatest extension. The English colonies are the only ones to which the government of the mother country has always left some political power; and they are also the only ones in which the kind of development I have just mentioned has been found. In the others, the masters have generally displayed the stupidity that is the hallmark of despots and slaves, unless they received their education in countries where the influence of domestic slavery was not felt. At least, this is what travelers attest, as does the very state of the countries where slavery is permitted.

The Dutch colonists of the Cape of Good Hope have such contempt for every kind of instruction that, although they are not rich enough to send their children to study in Europe, neither the government, nor the clergy, nor persuasion, nor force has ever been able to compel them to contribute jointly for the establishment of a public school. In the city of the Cape, there are no booksellers, no literary societies; it is extremely rare to see a book in a house [46]; the most skilled teacher can at best give lessons in writing [47]. Deprived of all the pleasures of the mind, of conversation as well as of reading, for them, each day is merely a repetition of the last. Nothing, says Barrow, interrupts this sad uniformity but the accidental visit of a traveler, or the less agreeable visit of the Bushmen; if anything varies it, it is their distrust of the Hottentots who serve them, and the fear of being murdered by their own slaves. Their ignorance is such, according to the same traveler, that they will never be seen to profit from new plants that foreigners bring them, nor to perfect those they have long possessed, unless a great number of industrious foreigners come to set them an example [48].

The Dutch colonists of America, placed in the same position as those of the Cape of Good Hope relative to their government and their slaves, cultivate their intellectual faculties no more than they do.

The French colonists of Louisiana, as long as they enjoyed no political liberty, remained strangers to the arts, the sciences, and even the most ordinary knowledge. They entrusted the education of their children to their slaves, and consequently could have no ideas more extensive than those of their tutors [49]. Their union with the United States has doubtless compelled them to give their intellectual faculties some development analogous to that which the Roman masters gave to theirs before their enslavement; but the maintenance of slavery must have turned them away from all knowledge that gives man the means to act upon things.

The Spanish-Americans, in their qualities as subjects, conquerors, and slave masters, have been no more disposed than the French and Dutch colonists to develop their intellectual faculties. Before these peoples had won their independence, one could not find in the largest cities, such as Caracas, any public establishment proper to characterizing an educated and civilized people. There were, it is true, some colleges of theology in which canon law, civil law, and even a little medicine were also taught; but little more was required of the students than to know how to defend the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception [50]. Even the most educated men of the country did not know the precious plants that grew around them; they had roots brought from afar and at great expense, which they trampled under their feet [51]. However, as the number of slaves was not considerable, and as in some parts of the country there were almost none, the free men, obliged to work, were sometimes also obliged to exercise their intelligence on the objects of their labor [52].

The Anglo-Americans who have drawn their subsistence from the labor of their slaves have found themselves, in several respects, in a position analogous to that of the Romans before the overthrow of their republic; free with respect to one another, they have been despots in relation to the enslaved population. The development of their intellectual faculties has corresponded to this dual position; in their quality as masters, they have disdained the knowledge that would have given them the means to act upon things; they have acted upon nature only through their authority and through the muscles of their slaves. But, as in their quality as free men they could not employ force against their fellow citizens, nor against their confederates, they had to make use of their intelligence; they had to acquire by their talents or by their character the authority that violence could not give them. Washington and Kosciusko, destined to fight or to govern men, could be born on a land exploited by slaves; but Franklin, destined to enlighten the world and to increase man’s power over nature, could develop only in a country where the arts were practiced by free hands. If the southern states have furnished the union with a greater number of men fit for government than the northern states, and if the northern states have given birth to a greater number of active and laborious men than the southern states, this phenomenon must not be attributed to chance; it is due to the presence of slavery on one side, and to the presence of liberty on the other. There, the principal aspiration is to act upon men, whether by talent or by force; here, the aspiration is above all to act upon things, and to make them fit to satisfy our needs. We shall now see the differences found in the results of these two directions, relative to the industrial faculties [53].

The Dutch are among the most intelligent, active, and industrious peoples of Europe; but in the colonies where they have their work done by slaves, they show neither intelligence, nor activity, nor industry. At the Cape of Good Hope, their plow is a heavy machine, drawn by fourteen or sixteen oxen, which only scrapes the surface of the soil, and does not even penetrate it at all when it is a little firm. If the peasants need ropes, they use leather thongs; if they need thread, the sinews of wild beasts serve them instead; if they need ink, they make it with water, soot, and a little sugar. If necessity did not make one inventive and force one to work, says Barrow, the Cape peasant would help himself with nothing and would let himself lack everything. The country must be covered with sharp stones for him to make shoes for himself from the skin of his animals. One can judge the industry of the slaves by the lifestyle of the masters [54].

In the American colonies where all manual labor is performed by slaves, the masters are obliged to have brought from countries where slavery is not permitted any industrial product whose production requires some intelligence. The masters can employ their slaves to cut down and transport trees; but if it is a matter of building ships, they must send these trees to countries where free workers can be found [55]. They can have them cultivate the land crudely, and obtain wheat by their labors; but when this wheat must be converted into flour, it must be sent to places where workers capable of building mills can be found [56]. The slaves cannot even devote themselves to all the cares that agriculture requires; they have neither enough intelligence nor enough care to cultivate vegetables or fruit trees [57]. Finally, their incapacity is such that agriculture is still in the most barbarous state, and the masters have coal for their heating brought from England, although the forests are only six miles away [58]. Sometimes they even have the very bricks with which they build their houses brought from there [59].

The slaves employed in the interior service of the house are no more skilled than those who are employed in other kinds of work.

“Lacking any preservative ideas of order and economy for themselves,” says a traveler, “they can have none for their masters. Thus, those who are reserved for the domestic service of the houses have a disagreeable service. They cannot be accustomed to that daily arrangement of which social man is careful and protective; every day the same orders must be repeated to them; they must be told again at every moment. And a mistress of a house whose family is numerous, whose details are a little multiplied, finds herself busy enough all hours of the day, merely commanding several of her servants. What is most recommended to them, as being more important, is no better executed than what is indifferent; and those vases, those pieces of furniture cherished for their price or their forms, will be broken or mutilated, like the most indifferent thing, so incapable is their attention of discerning or recalling the circumstances where it is necessary to be doubly vigilant and careful [60].”

The causes of the slaves’ incapacity in all kinds of industry are easy to perceive. The hand executes well only what the mind has conceived well; our physical organs are, as I have already said, only the instruments of our intelligence, and when the intelligence has received no development, it can only poorly direct the organs at its disposal. Now, in countries where slavery is established, not only are masters incapable of developing the intellectual faculties of their slaves, but they almost all have a natural tendency to arrest their development. The need for security, stronger than the passion of avarice, obliges them to keep the enslaved men as close to the level of brutes as possible. The traveler I have just cited reports that a French colonist in Louisiana repeated incessantly that he feared nothing so much as negroes with spirit; he says that his attention was directed to preventing them from acquiring any, and that he succeeded only too well [61]. There is nothing in this that should surprise us; such have been, at all epochs, the sentiments and the conduct of all possessors of men. The colonists judge no differently than the Romans judged. Cato the Censor saw nothing more dangerous than slaves with intelligence; when his own were not working, he condemned them to sleep, so afraid was he that they might take it into their heads to think [62]. The Anglo-Americans of the southern states, who are today the least ignorant and least brutal of masters, nevertheless recoil in fright from the idea of having their slaves taught to read. The colonists subject to the English government see with no less terror the efforts that several inhabitants of Great Britain are making to give some enlightenment to their slaves. In some colonies, they have repelled or condemned to death missionaries who came to teach the Christian religion. They have demolished, with their own hands, the temple in which enslaved men assembled to hear the reading of the Gospel. The same men who would have thought themselves debased by laying a single stone for the construction of a building did not fear to lose their station by engaging in the destruction of a temple [63].

Since the masters believe it is in their interest to prevent the development of their slaves’ intellectual faculties, and since the slaves can have neither the desire nor the means to become enlightened, it is understandable that they must be in a state very near to complete brutishness.

“Such men,” says Robin, “must have an extremely limited intelligence, and it is so indeed to a degree that a European can hardly measure. I have seen some who could not count five or six coins; it is rare to find any who are able to state their age, or even that of their children, or to determine how many years it has been since they left their country, at what time they belonged to such masters, or passed to such others. With so few ideas of the past, they must have many fewer of the future; thus, they possess a deplorable carelessness. They use up or rather spoil the particular clothing they have, without thinking if they will need it one day; they break and destroy what is at hand with the same carelessness; what pleases them most, they then abandon with the greatest indifference [64].”And yet, colonists use their slaves to practice every kind of trade; but how can trades be practiced by men whom everything conspires to make stupid? Who can take on the task of instructing them in the arts? It is not the masters, since they are ignorant of them and would fear degrading themselves by practicing them: it is necessary, therefore, that slaves be trained by slaves. The one who teaches has no interest in teaching anything; the one being instructed has no interest in learning anything, and the common master tends to brutalize them both. Thus, they have no idea of what is beautiful, useful, or convenient.

“I have had occasion to employ them from several professions,” says the traveler I have just cited, “and I have always found them to be below mediocrity in skill, even for the country. The same thing they made for me twice had particular imperfections each time [65].”

From the preceding facts, it follows, firstly, that slavery does not necessarily vitiate the physical constitution of men belonging to the master class, but it has always resulted in preventing the application of their organs to the improvement of the things nature has placed at our disposal. Secondly, it follows that slavery favors the intellectual development of individuals of this class in all that serves to extend man's dominion over his fellow men, but that it also arrests the development of these same faculties in all that might extend man's dominion over nature. Thirdly, it follows that slavery vitiates the physical constitution of men belonging to the slave class, and makes them incapable of putting their organs to any advantageous use, either for themselves or for others. Finally, it follows that slavery is an invincible obstacle to the intellectual development of this same class of the population.