De l’influence de l’esclavage domestique sur la production, l’accroissement et la distribution des r

CHAP. 13: > On the influence of domestic slavery on the production, growth, and distribution of wealth.

Is labor performed by slaves less expensive than that executed by free men? This question, over which very enlightened writers have been divided, seems to me unphilosophical. Does it not presuppose, in effect, that the men who contribute to the production of wealth are but machines whose labors a small number of idlers can arbitrarily direct, accelerate, or slow down, and which have all the more value the less considerable a share of the wealth they produce they absorb? That highway robbers should debate among themselves whether the properties they acquire by holding travelers for ransom cost them more than those acquired by men who practice some branch of industry, I can conceive; that pirates should discuss whether the pains, cares, and dangers of piracy are greater or more productive than the pains, cares, and dangers of maritime commerce, I can conceive as well; for the former as for the latter, the question may not be settled, and neither has to discuss it as either a moralist or a legislator. But to raise an analogous question among civilized peoples, and while treating a science, is, it seems to me, to renounce the impartiality that must preside over all scientific inquiry, and to retrogress toward barbarism. Adam Smith, whose mind was otherwise so sound, posed the question poorly, and he has led into error almost all who have treated it after him [279].

I have observed elsewhere that, when dealing with the moral sciences, we must carefully discard the terms that can warp our judgment by making us see different beings in individuals who are of the same nature. There can be in the moral sciences, no more than in the physical sciences, I have said, neither masters nor slaves, neither kings nor subjects, neither citizens nor foreigners. There can be only men or aggregations of men, differing among themselves in their habits, their prejudices, their enlightenment, their pretensions, acting well or ill upon one another and bearing various names [280].

Starting from this fact, one can therefore see in slaves, as in masters, only human creatures, and thereupon the question posed at the beginning of this chapter comes back to that of knowing whether the labor a man obtains from a great number of others by tearing their skin with lashes of a whip costs him more than the labor he would obtain from them by paying them a just wage. One sees, by the manner in which the question has been posed, that the first writers who debated it belonged to the race of masters, and that it is principally in the interest of the strongest that they examined it. Never would enslaved men have thought to question whether the fatigues and sufferings for which they obtain their meager subsistence are less great than the labors and pains by which free workers purchase their wages. This question is, however, the same as the preceding one; the only difference between them is that in the first it is the masters who examine whether servitude is in conformity with or contrary to their interests, whereas in the second it is the slaves who engage in a similar examination [281].

The calculation that Adam Smith made when he sought to compare the price of labor executed by free men to the price of labor executed by enslaved men should have convinced him that no parallel could be established in this regard, and that the question, thus considered, was not even within the domain of the moral sciences. To determine the price of two things, it is not enough, in effect, to compare them to each other; a third term of comparison is needed; men who need to effect an exchange are needed; but if it is a human being who enters into the bargain or who is its subject, how will his value be determined? Will it be by the demand of the individual who holds him in servitude, and by the offer of the one who wishes to acquire possession of him? But here a difficulty presents itself: it is to know why, in fixing the price, one should not consult the will of the man who is owned, as well as the will of the one who owns him; what is the scale on which one man can fix the value of another? That is not all: when the price of a man has been agreed upon between the seller and the buyer, and the latter has paid it, he must make his bargain with the man who was sold to obtain work from him; but what will he offer him to have this commodity we call labor, and whose price we are seeking to know, delivered to him? He will offer him what is strictly necessary for him to live, plus a number of whip blows sufficient to compel him to accept the bargain: now, this last factor thrown into the balance singularly complicates the calculation.

Suppose, in effect, that an individual with a light purse and a vigorous arm presents himself at a merchant's shop; that he offers to pay him for one-tenth of his merchandise in good coin, and the surplus in blows from a stick; if he is strong enough to have his proposition accepted, must the transaction be considered as having fixed the regular course of merchandise? Such, however, is the calculation made by the possessors of men when they compare what the labor of an enslaved worker costs to what the labor of a free worker costs.

A planter may believe that the labor of a man he holds in chains and stimulates with whip blows costs him only the price at which he bought him, and the expenses of his upkeep, just as a pirate may believe that the merchandise and the men of whom he has made himself master have cost him only a few pounds of powder and a few cannonballs; but we, who have no tariff for fixing the value of our fellow men; we, who do not know what the legitimate price is at which one buys the faculty to do violence to men, children, or women; we, who do not admit that the greater part of the human race was created for the pleasures of a small number of idlers; we, who can see in the relations that take place between a master and his slaves only the action of force and brutality upon weakness and ignorance; we, in whose eyes the slaves are men just as the masters are, and who must calculate what a product costs, not to this or that individual, but to the whole of humankind; we, who cannot count as nothing the violence and miseries to which populations are subjected for the pleasures of a small number of individuals, we must reason differently than the possessors of men.

We must, no doubt, expound the effects that servitude produces on the growth and decline of wealth; but, in making this exposition, we must not forget that wealth is but a means, and that we must evaluate it less by its quantity than by the influence it exercises on the well-being of nations. We must take care above all, when we calculate the sum of wealth produced in a given circumstance, not to cast our eyes only upon that which is possessed by a small fraction of the population; we must consider that which is possessed by all classes of men, without distinction of rank or nation. If we calculate on one side what the labor he has done costs a landowner or a manufacturer, we must calculate, on the other, what the subsistence he buys with labor costs the poor man. The most miserable country is that in which one must give the greatest sum of labor to obtain the smallest sum of the means of existence, for in all countries the mass of the population is composed of laboring families.

To extort the capital of the rich by violence is not to create wealth or to increase its sum, it is to displace it; likewise, to extort the labor of the poor by whip blows or by analogous means is not to diminish the costs of production, it is to snatch from the mass of the population its means of existence to fatten a small number of idlers. What is true for individuals compared to individuals is true for nations compared to other nations; there is no difference between the first case and the second, except that, in the latter, brigandage is established on a broader base.

Adam Smith and some of the writers who came after him and who treated the same question seem to have believed that, to judge the effect that domestic slavery produces on wealth, it was sufficient to calculate what the labor of an enslaved man and the labor of a free man costs an entrepreneur; this is almost as if one were to judge the difficulty of making a heavy carriage advance by the resistance offered by the atoms that flutter in the air.

To judge the influence of slavery on wealth, one must first compare the quantity produced in a country where slavery is unknown to the quantity produced in a country where all labors are executed by slaves, all other circumstances being equal; one must then examine how, in both countries, this wealth is distributed among the diverse classes of the population; one must determine, moreover, what influence the diverse modes of distribution exercise on consumption; finally, one must examine the sum of labors or pains for which they are purchased.

All the wealth that nations possess is the product of man's labor combined with the forces of nature. Most of the things that exist doubtless contribute, in concert with human industry, to the formation of the objects that are necessary to us. Air, earth, water, fire, wind, lend us their forces to produce wealth, to create, or to set in motion productive machines. But, if man had never known how to direct these forces, no more wealth would exist in the countries that are today the most flourishing than existed in New Holland before the Europeans arrived there. If all labor were to cease among the richest nations, they would in a short time have disappeared from the face of the earth, and the soil they inhabit would, in a small number of years, be similar to the deserts into which civilization has never penetrated.

There cannot, therefore, properly speaking, exist any wealth, unless man contributes to producing it. But how can he contribute to it? In three ways: by the development of his intelligence, which makes him know the forces of nature and which teaches him to take advantage of them; by the skill he gives his physical organs to execute the operations his intelligence has conceived; finally, by moral habits that give him the means to preserve and increase his wealth, or to dispose of it in the most advantageous manner. It is therefore necessary, to assess the effects that slavery produces on the growth or decline of wealth, to judge first of the effects it produces on all human faculties.

The first effect that slavery has always produced on the morals of masters has been to debase in their eyes the labor of man upon things. We find in this regard no exception either among the ancients or among the moderns; the Greek masters thought as the Roman masters did; the possessors of blacks or men of color as the possessors of whites attached to the glebe. Labor being debased, the masters renounce all industrial profession; they abstain from applying their physical organs to the production of the things necessary for man's existence. Thus, wherever the population is divided into masters and slaves, the action of the former upon things is completely lost for the production of wealth.At the same time that slavery inspires in individuals of the master class contempt for labor, the idleness to which it condemns them gives rise in them to a passion for physical enjoyments and for all that can break the monotony of their existence without requiring any fatigue from them: the table, women, games of chance, and spectacles then absorb all the time that is not devoted to domination or to sleep; if in this respect some individual exceptions have existed, none are found when considering nations in the mass. Thus, while slavery nullifies the labor of the masters, and places at their disposal the wealth produced by the labor of others, it gives them the vices necessary to dissipate it. And as the annual production of wealth is in a compound ratio of labor and the accumulation of capital, it is clear that production can never be very great where all revenues are consumed unproductively as they are produced.

Intellectual labors are a little less debased among individuals of the master class than are manual labors; however, it is very rare to see masters develop their intelligence, unless it be to multiply the number of their slaves, to consolidate or to extend their domination. In countries where they have preserved their political liberty, they sometimes exercise their minds in the art of persuading or commanding; but they never exercise it in the art of making man's labor upon nature more productive. They would believe, in devoting themselves to studies of this kind, that they are tiring themselves to spare the enslaved population some trouble, and they do not take enough interest in it to seek to make its labor lighter. As for the masters who enjoy no political liberty, the vices and prejudices that slavery gives them do not permit them to develop their intelligence about anything. If there are individuals who rise above the common class, they seek hardly anything but to acquire the knowledge that seems to them most favorable to their own emancipation. The intellectual and moral faculties of the masters are therefore lost for the production and conservation of wealth, as well as their physical strength.

The effect that slavery produces on the intellectual faculties of the enslaved part of the population is even more extensive than that which it produces on the intellectual faculties of the masters. Three causes contribute to the brutification of the slaves: the first is the care masters take to make them stupid, to ensure their own security; the second, the labors with which they overwhelm them, which leave them no time to reflect on anything; the third, the complete absence of any interest in becoming enlightened.

A slave seeks to develop his intelligence only to escape the violence of his master; he becomes grovelling, deceitful, or flattering; but what reason would he have to become more intelligent and more industrious, since he can never dispose of the products of his industry? In him, every principle of activity is extinguished. What motive, in effect, could a slave have to make any progress? For whom would he take the trouble? For himself? He can do nothing for his own destiny. For his children or for his wife? He can do nothing for them; he can transmit to them neither wealth, nor enlightenment, nor sentiments. For his companions in servitude? He can render them no service, and in turn they can do nothing for him. Would he work for his reputation, for his glory? There is none for slaves. For the race of masters? They are enemies whom it is in his interest to destroy. There can exist, in a word, among slaves neither transmission of wealth, nor transmission of knowledge, nor transmission of moral ideas. The slave is accountable only for the use of his raw physical strength, and when he has delivered its product to his master, the latter has nothing more to ask of him. The effect of slavery is therefore to make the slaves descend to the last degree of misery and brutification that it is possible for man to reach, and to render stationary or retrograde the entire enslaved part of the population.

Slaves have no more influence, by their morals, on the production and growth of wealth, than they have by their intellectual faculties. Reduced to what is strictly necessary for them to live, they have nothing to save; and even if they had a surplus, they would make no savings, since they can possess nothing of their own. Those who have some power over the wealth possessed by their masters are interested in consuming as much of it as possible. For them, taking is not stealing, it is repossessing a value that their labors have produced, and for which the price has been paid to them only in blows of the whip. If they happen to seize some value, they must consume it instantly, or run the risk of being stripped of it; they are in this respect in the same position as savages. Finally, all the faculties of the part of the population that belongs neither to the class of slaves nor to that of masters are equally null for the production of wealth. When the men of this class do not have the means to emigrate, they live in idleness; they beg or steal; in the eyes of the masters, this kind of life is less dishonorable than labor: it is more analogous to the way they themselves live. In a country exploited by an enslaved population, there thus remains for the production of wealth only the physical organs of the slaves, destitute of all principle of intelligence and activity, and stimulated only by the action of the whip. Now, corporal punishments may well demand a certain movement of the body, but they cannot create that energy that a free will gives; and even if they succeeded in creating it, a force destitute of skill, intelligence, and morality could not produce and still less conserve much wealth, however energetic it might be otherwise.

The general facts I state here are not simple conjectures drawn from the knowledge we have of the nature of diverse species of men; they are observations made among all peoples who have had slaves. From these facts, three consequences result: the first, that slavery opposes the accumulation of capital that constitutes wealth; the second, that it is an obstacle to all invention, or to the adoption of any discovery proper to facilitating production; the third, that it is an obstacle to the exercise of any art that requires, on the part of the artist, attention, intelligence, or skill.

To know if the particular facts correspond to these observations, it is sufficient to know what are the diverse branches of industry practiced by the masters or by the slaves; what are the labors to which individuals who belong to neither of these two classes devote themselves, and what is the abundance which both enjoy [282].

We do not know enough about what the industry of the ancient peoples was, from their origin to their decadence, nor what part the diverse classes of the population took in it, to enter into very precise details in this regard. We see only that everything degenerated when the conquests of the Romans, having put all peoples on the same level, had multiplied to excess the number of slaves, and when the state of peace no longer permitted free men to be reduced to servitude. We will be able to judge, moreover, of the effects that slavery produced in all the arts, by the influence it exercised on agriculture, according to the testimony of the writers of that nation themselves [283].

I have already observed that as the number of slaves increased in Italy, the country became less fertile, and that it ended up being converted into pastures. Pliny asked what had been the cause of those abundant harvests that existed in the early days of the republic; and the principal cause he found for it is that, in those times, men who had reached the consular dignity cultivated their fields with their own hands, whereas in his time cultivation was delivered to wretches laden with irons, and bearing on their foreheads the mark of their servitude. Columella and Varro likewise observed the baleful influence that slavery exercised upon agriculture [284].

"The proprietors," says a learned historian of our time, "having extended their patrimony in Rome, by the lands confiscated from conquered peoples; in Greece, by the wealth they owed to commerce; they abandoned manual labor, and soon after they despised it. They fixed their residence in the cities; they entrusted the administration of their lands to stewards and to inspectors of slaves; and from then on the condition of the greatest part of the inhabitants of the countryside became intolerable. Labor, which had established a relationship between the two ranks of society, changed into a barrier of separation: contempt and harshness replaced care; tortures multiplied, all the more so as they were ordered by subordinates, and as the death of one or several slaves did not diminish the wealth of the stewards. These slaves, poorly fed, mistreated, poorly rewarded, lost all interest in the affairs of their masters and almost all intelligence. Far from caring with affection for the products of the earth, they felt a secret joy whenever they saw wealth diminish, or the hopes of their oppressors deceived...

"The study of the sciences and the habit of observation did, it is true, lead to progress in the theory of agriculture; but at the same time its practice declined rapidly, and all the agronomists of antiquity complain of it [285]. The working of the land was absolutely stripped of that intelligence, that affection, that zeal which had hastened its successes. The revenues were smaller, the expenses more considerable, and from then on they sought to save on labor rather than to increase its products. The slaves, after having driven all the free cultivators from the countryside, themselves rapidly diminished in number. During the decadence of the Roman empire, the population of Italy was no less reduced than is that of the Agro romano today, and it had at the same time descended to the last degree of suffering and misery [286]."

The effects that slavery produces on wealth in the colonies are still easier to appreciate than those it produced among the ancients. Agriculture is almost the only branch of industry that exists in the colonies where slavery is established; but it is practiced there without care, without intelligence. We have seen elsewhere the stupidity of the peasants of the Cape of Good Hope; it is such that one may be tempted to doubt whether, in terms of intellectual development, the colonists are above their herds. They are rich in the sense that they are abundantly provided with butcher's meat, their herds multiplying without any care on their part; but, that aside, they are devoid of all the conveniences of life. As for the slave population, there, as elsewhere, it is reduced to the last degree of misery; it is possessed, and possesses nothing [287].

In the English colonies, agriculture is likewise the only art that is cultivated, and it is cultivated in the most miserable manner. The art of using the plow and the labor of animals is still unknown there; they know how to stir the soil only by means of a hoe that the weak hand of enslaved men or women can barely lift. The progress that agriculture has made in most European States is equally ignored there; and harvests that exhaust the soil succeed one another there without interruption and without rest [288]. Finally, to give an idea of the progress that the arts have made in these colonies, it will suffice to say that some of them count bricks among the objects of importation that they draw from England [289].

We have seen previously that the slave population of the English colonies is more poorly fed, more poorly clothed, more poorly housed than the most miserable classes of the poorest countries of Europe. The portion of wealth devolved to this part of the population is therefore almost null; it cannot decrease without famine or other analogous scourges manifesting themselves. However, the number of this part of the population exceeds 800,000 persons [290].

Seeing the excessive labors that are imposed on the slaves, and the misery to which they are condemned, one might naturally be led to believe that the masters at least possess great wealth; but it is not so. They number only 1,700[291]; yet nine-tenths are always in distress; they cannot find the means to pay their debts, although a very heavy tax gives them in some sort the monopoly on the sale of their commodities in England. Their vast possessions can hardly pay the costs of exploitation anymore; and most do not have the means to satisfy their creditors.

The state of the French colonies is even worse than that of the English colonies. The enslaved population is no less miserable there, and the class of possessors of men enjoys even less ease. The slaves, whom no interest excites, and who are moved only by fear, devote themselves to labor only with extreme nonchalance. A traveler who observed them in Martinique found that, for an equal price, they did barely a tenth of the work that laborers execute in France.

"I frequently saw at Saint-Pierre," says Robin, "some forty slaves carrying, with a mournful air, on their heads, small baskets of manure that they had come to take from the seashore, to go to a neighboring plantation. What a difference, I said to myself, in load and in pace with our Burgundians climbing their steep hillsides, bent under the weight of their baskets, filled with damp and compact earth, and with our robust peasant women still enlivening their painful course with village songs! Seven to eight sous pay the vigilant day of the latter, and four to five times as much would not pay for the brute slave, who quickens his pace a little only under the pain of the whip. These slaves therefore do not make agriculture produce as much as our free peasants; hence, the commodities, the fruit of their labor, are necessarily more expensive. The European must therefore also pay more for them than if they came from free hands [292]."

One might think that the state of barbarism in which all the arts have remained in the colonies formed by the Europeans must be attributed to the oppression that the mother countries have made weigh upon them; but the effect of this oppression has been almost imperceptible next to that which has resulted from slavery. The United States of America have enjoyed, for more than half a century, the most complete independence; they have, moreover, the advantage of possessing the least expensive governments; the men who belong to the master class enjoy there a civil and political liberty greater than that of the freest peoples of Europe; and yet, in those of these States where slavery is established, there exists little wealth, and almost no branch of industry has been able to develop. This phenomenon is all the more remarkable as all the arts are making rapid progress in the States where labors are executed by free men.

Agriculture is almost the only art that is practiced in the southern States; but the operations of this branch of industry are not as numerous, as varied, as complicated as they are among most European peoples; they are as simple and as few as the limited intelligence of the slaves requires. The use of the plow is as foreign in some of them as in the English colonies [293].

Rice, corn, and cotton are the principal and almost the only productions that are cultivated there; one finds there almost none of the numerous plants that enrich our soil, although it would be easy for free cultivators to grow them all there; those that are found there are sold at an excessive price. It is the free workers of New York or Philadelphia who supply the possessors of men of the southern States with potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, apples, oats, corn, and even hay. Most fruit trees are known only by name in certain parts of the country; to execute the crudest operations of agriculture, blows of the whip suffice; but they are insufficient to form the intelligence and activity necessary for a gardener [294].While the ignorance of the owners and the incapacity of the slaves make it impossible for them to cultivate the plants most common among us, an unvarying succession of harvests exhausts the soil, making it less and less able to yield the requested produce. Soil degradation, wherever slavery is established, is such a notorious fact in the colonies and in the southern part of the United States that it is not considered necessary to offer proof. The colonists of Jamaica, in petitioning the English Parliament for an increase in duties in favor of their sugar, give as their reason that they can no longer produce it cheaply, because the soil, which is very fertile when new, is sterile when old. In the Bahama islands and in some parts of Dominica, a considerable expanse of once-fertile land has become so sterile that the owners have lost the means to employ and feed their slaves. Several petitions presented to the English Parliament a few years ago by the colonists establish the same facts. Finally, the latest travelers to visit the southern United States have witnessed the same phenomenon [295].

The art of raising and caring for domestic animals is no better known than that of managing the land or cultivating plants. They are left in the woods for the entire year and provide for their own subsistence as best they can; in winter, one merely gives a few corn stalks to the oxen destined for market. Butcher's meat is therefore of poor quality, and always inferior to what it is in countries where cultivation is performed by free hands [296].

Since agriculture has made infinitely more progress in countries where all labor is performed by free men than in those where it is left to slaves, the latter have vaster and more accessible forests than the former. Lumber and firewood should therefore be less expensive in the southern States than in the northern States; it ought to be all the more common there as less should be consumed, the climate being milder. In countries farmed by slaves, the forests are in fact only five or six leagues from the most considerable cities, particularly Charleston; yet it is the northern States, farmed by free men, that send planks to the southern States to build their houses, and it is the free miners of England who ship them coal for their heating [297].

Men who, despite having immense forests almost at their doors, are nonetheless obliged to import planks from abroad to build their houses and coal for their heating, cannot possibly have sufficient capacity to practice the art of the carpenter, joiner, or mason; and since they cannot have houses shipped from New York or Philadelphia, they bring in the workers they need to build them at great expense. Before arriving at their destination, these workers sometimes have two hundred leagues to travel; to get them to go work in a slave country, one must pay their travel and return expenses; one must compensate them for the contempt attached to the practice of arts and trades, and consequently raise the price of their daily wage beyond what it would be in their own country [298]. Once a house has been built, it must be maintained: sooner or later, it will need repair. But the free workers disappear as soon as the jobs for which they were summoned are finished, and the slaves, whose carelessness and clumsiness degrade everything, can remedy nothing. If the windowpanes are broken, if the doors are smashed, if the roof needs repair, one must wait for years before anything can be fixed. Thus, few houses are in good condition, and it sometimes happens that one sees a table sumptuously served and covered with silverware in a room where half the windowpanes have been missing for ten years [299].

To build ships requires more intelligence and skill, in both the entrepreneurs and the workers, than is needed to build houses. It is therefore almost needless to say that the small number of vessels built in the ports of the southern States are built by workers from the north. I must add that freight in the latter is much more expensive than in the former, and that, for these two reasons combined, the southern States can have almost no navy [300].

Since slaves are incapable of practicing the most common arts that demand care and intelligence, such as those of the gardener, joiner, carpenter, and mason, they are all the more incapable of practicing any of those that demand more skill or more developed intellectual faculties. It is not among a people where all labors are given over to enslaved men that one can hope to find a watchmaker, a mechanic, an engraver, or a multitude of other artisans whose talents have become indispensable to us. The masters must therefore import from abroad not only a portion of their food, but all manufactured goods.

Most foodstuffs are generally more expensive in the southern States than they are in the northern States; there is no traveler who has not been struck by the difference. Manufactured objects are more expensive still; besides the additional transportation costs that must be paid, commerce there demands larger profits [301].

Since slaves are incapable of bringing to the cultivation of the land the exertion and intelligence that belong to free men, the products they obtain from it are neither as considerable nor as varied. These products are almost all of the same kind; they cannot, therefore, be consumed immediately on site. The masters can enjoy them only by means of exports and exchanges, since they do not have an industrious population around them that can consume them. It follows from these various circumstances that land has much less value in countries cultivated by slaves than in countries cultivated by free men; the difference is nearly double [302]. Thus, a landowner in the southern States, who has land equal in quality and extent to that possessed by a landowner in the northern States, nevertheless has only half the latter's income, and with this income he is obliged to pay much more for everything. Add to these various causes of misery the effects of the vices that slavery produces, and one will be convinced that it is impossible for the possessors of men not to be in continual distress [303].

If the wealth possessed by the masters is inconsiderable, that possessed by the slave population is completely null; in no part of Europe, not even excepting the countries occupied by the Turks, does there exist any class of men as debased and as miserable as that which is attached to the cultivation of the land in the southern part of the United States.

I have previously observed that, in the transactions that take place between the possessed men and their possessors, the latter offer the former, in exchange for their labor, what is strictly necessary for them to live; and that the thing offered having a value far inferior to the labor demanded, the difference is paid in lashes of the whip. This last kind of merchandise, which determines the possessed man to deliver his labor to his possessor, costs little to those who dispense it; from which it follows, it seems, that the men of the master class purchase the value we call labor at as low a price as possible. But reality does not match appearances; nowhere is labor as expensive as in countries cultivated by slaves. This high cost is so manifest a fact that it has struck most travelers.

At the Cape of Good Hope, where meat sells for four sous a pound (two English pence) and brown bread for two sous, a slave is rented for fifty sous a day (two shillings) and a free worker for six or seven francs (five or six shillings). This high cost of labor is the greatest obstacle to the colony's progress. According to Barrow, one cannot hope for great improvements unless a way is found to increase the quantity of labor and decrease its price [304].

In the part of the United States where slaves exist, labor is even more expensive than it is at the Cape of Good Hope. In Charleston, Carolina, and in Savannah, Georgia, a white artisan—a joiner, carpenter, mason, tinsmith, tailor, or shoemaker—earns two piastres a day, and spends not quite one [305]. This high price of labor does not permit the inhabitants to have the trees from their forests, which they need for heating, cut down and transported a distance of six miles. They find it costs them less to pay the miners in England who extract the coal from the earth, the owners who sell it, and the sailors who transport it [306]. It is likewise to the high cost of labor that one must attribute the high price of most necessities of life, and the preference given to foodstuffs imported from the free States over those that could be produced in the country [307]. Land being half as expensive in the States where slaves exist as in those where they do not, the excessive price of most agricultural products can only be caused by the high cost of labor. In Maryland, as at the Cape of Good Hope, a free man's day of labor is valued at three times that of a slave.

A day's labor that costs two piastres in Georgia or South Carolina costs only one in the State of New York [308]. In Mexico, where one finds almost no slaves, the best workers in the mines earn 25 to 30 francs a week, not including Sunday; workers who labor in the open air, such as farmhands, are content with 7 fr. 80 a week on the central plateau, and 9 fr. 60 near the coasts [309]. In the Aragua valley, where almost all labor is likewise performed by free men, and where sugar, cotton, and indigo grow, labor is less expensive than in France; a free worker is paid only 4 or 5 piastres a month, without food, which is very inexpensive due to the abundance of meat and vegetables [310].

In Louisiana, where free workers are very rare because they cease to work as soon as they have acquired the means to buy a man to work for them, labor is even more expensive than it is at the Cape of Good Hope. A master who possesses a good slave rents him out for 20 or 30 piastres a month, and as it has been observed that a good free worker's day is worth two or three times that of an enslaved worker, one can calculate the resulting cost of labor [311]. The high cost of labor obliges landowners to neglect the details of agricultural economy and to forgo the diversification of produce [312]. Hence the scarcity of vegetables in the markets, and the excessive price at which they are sold. Butcher's meat, which is obtained without labor because the animals multiply without being cared for, is much less expensive [313].

The difference between the price of labor in the free States and the price of labor in the States where work is performed by slaves is manifest in the very appearance of the country; in the northern States where free men cultivate the land, the forests disappear with rapidity, and the countryside fills with farmers; in the southern States where almost all work is done by slaves, the clearing of land, on the contrary, is done with such slowness that it is not possible to foresee the time when the entire country will be brought under cultivation; in the former, landowners draw a more or less considerable income after having paid the price of labor; in the latter, the operating costs equal or surpass the value of the products [314].

We have seen that, according to M. de Humboldt, a good free laborer who works in the most arduous places earns 9 fr. 60 in Mexico for six days of work, which comes to 1 fr. 60 per day; and that, in the Aragua valleys, a worker is content with 4 or 5 piastres a month. We have seen, at the same time, that a good slave is rented out at the Cape of Good Hope for 2 fr. 50 a day, and in Louisiana for about 5 fr. 50, or 30 piastres a month. But a slave does scarcely a third of the work of a free man; let us suppose, however, that he does half, and that he does it with the same intelligence, which never happens. On this assumption, the quantity of labor that a farmer in the Aragua valleys has performed by a free worker for a sum of 6 francs costs a farmer in Mexico 9 fr. 50, a farmer at the Cape of Good Hope 30 francs, and a farmer in Louisiana 60 francs. Here one cannot say that the difference in price results from the difference in climate or in the type of cultivation; for, if Mexico produces all the foodstuffs of Europe, it also produces all the foodstuffs that can grow in the tropics. Seeing such results, how is it not evident, to the most blind of men, that if the landowners who have their lands cultivated by slaves are not already completely ruined, they will infallibly be so in a few years.

And let no one think that it is to the difference that exists between the southern climate and the northern climate, or to the difference that exists between white men and black men, that we must attribute the phenomena we observe here. The Spanish who have had no slaves, and who have enjoyed some liberty, show themselves, in the torrid zone, to be sober, intelligent, active, and industrious like the Anglo-Americans of the north. They prove and will prove more every day that the commodities of the tropics can be cultivated by free men even better than by slaves. We have seen, moreover, that the phenomena produced by slavery in the torrid zone manifested themselves in the most temperate climates as soon as the Romans introduced a regime analogous to that which exists today in our colonies or in a large part of the United States; yet the farmers or workers then belonged to the same race of men as the masters. In the north of Europe, where slavery still exists, the masters and slaves are of the same kind, and neither are enervated there by an excess of heat; yet, slavery there produces exactly all the effects we have observed in all other countries. They are the same prejudices, the same ignorance, the same vices, the same misery; the Russian lords who have freed their slaves and had their lands cultivated by free hands have doubled their revenues [315].

For two centuries, the arts and sciences have made immense progress; but how have the peoples who are divided into masters and slaves contributed to this progress? I would not wish to assert that they have been complete strangers to it; but I confess that I know of no invention, no new idea that can be attributed to them. Not only do they appear to have been strangers to the progress of the human mind, they have even remained several centuries behind other peoples. Let us not compare the progress of the English colonies to the progress of their mother country, nor the progress of the French colonies to that of France; the difference would be too immense. Let us ask ourselves only what branches of industry are operated by masters or by slaves in the countries we know best; let us ask ourselves to what degree of perfection these branches of industry have been brought.Two of the principal causes of the progress that the arts and sciences have made among the moderns are the division of occupations and the use of machinery: now, domestic slavery places an invincible obstacle to the use of machinery and to the division of occupations. The arts have been carried so far, and the occupations they require have been so divided, that the individual whose needs are most limited cannot hope to satisfy them without the cooperation of several thousand people. According to an observation by Adam Smith, the mere manufacture of a pin requires the immediate cooperation of eighteen or twenty individuals; if one adds to this number the individuals who made the tools or machines necessary for the workers; those who extracted the metal from the mine and gave it the various preparations it needs, one will find an immense number. The number will be greater still if one calculates the number of hands that cooperate to produce the most common fabric, from the one who supplies the raw material to the one who delivers the merchandise to the consumer: now, among this multitude of operations, there are very few that can be executed by slaves.

Slavery offers such obstacles to the multiplication of wealth that, if the peoples among whom it is in use were left to their own devices, if they had communications only among themselves, in a few years they would fall even lower than the negroes of central Africa; they would have no other houses than straw huts; they would have for clothing only the skins of beasts, and for agricultural instruments only the branches of trees. Slaves can engage in some kinds of manufacturing when free workers train them and provide them with instruments and machines; but I would not hesitate to affirm that, even if all the slaves of the United States were to unite with those of the European colonies, and pool their intelligence and skill, they would not manage to make a good pin.

Having explained the influence that slavery produces on the formation of wealth, it remains for me to show the influence that the same cause exercises on its distribution.

According to Plutarch, a Roman patrician said that a citizen was not rich if he did not have the means to maintain an army. Must we conclude from this that the Roman population possessed immense wealth? One can easily form an idea of what it possessed by examining the lot of each of the principal classes into which it was divided.

The slaves, whose number was immense in the last days of the republic, possessed nothing of their own. Those who cultivated the land were chained like convicts; they were almost naked, had for dwellings only subterranean lairs in which they were locked up during the night, and fed on the coarsest foods. The slaves attached to the personal service of the masters were less miserable; some could even enjoy a certain comfort; but none had anything he could call his own. The number of slaves can be estimated at four times the number of masters, without being set very high.

The individuals designated by the name of proletarians were scarcely less miserable than the slaves; they possessed no land, and most had no dwellings in which they were permitted to rest. The arts or trades that were then known being practiced by slaves for the profit of the aristocracy, there generally existed for the proletarians no other means of existence than public distributions, or a few trades they practiced clandestinely. The number of individuals of this class contained in the city of Rome, in the last days of the republic, amounted to more than 300,000; this was two-thirds of the free population.

There remained, therefore, about 100,000 individuals who were neither slaves nor obliged to live on free distributions; but, between an individual who is in the class of beggars, and one who lives in abundance, there exists a multitude of intermediate degrees. There can be no doubt that in this third class there was a more or less large number of well-off families; but there can be no doubt either that there were many who bordered on the class of proletarians, or who were overwhelmed with debt.

Wealth was therefore concentrated in a very small number of hands; and the slaves formed a large part of it. Thus, even in the times when the republic appeared to have reached the highest degree of prosperity, the immense majority of the population lived in the most profound misery; it was poorer and more debased than are, among the moderns, the individuals placed at the lowest ranks of the social order. The great who possessed wealth had not created it by their industry; they had seized it from the industrious peoples they had vanquished; a patrician's fortune was composed only of the debris of the fortunes of several thousand families; a consul could enrich himself only by the pillage and ruin of several cities.

The Romans consumed the wealth of the nations they conquered: they converted flourishing regions into pastures or deserts; but it would be difficult to say what wealth they created.

In the English colonies, the number of slaves amounts to more than 800,000; the individuals of this class are more miserable than the poorest workers among us; they have neither lands, nor houses, nor clothing. The most considerable part of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of the planters, whose number amounts to only 1,700 or 1,800; of this number, most can barely pay their debts and cover the operating costs; almost every year, they are obliged to make to the English Parliament the exposition of their distress, and to solicit monopolies, that is to say, taxes in their favor, on the free population of England. The contributions they collect from the English, by means of the monopolies granted to them, are the most reliable part of their revenues. To this picture of wealth must be added that which a few free men of color may possess in the cities of the colonies [316].

In the southern part of the United States, the number of slaves amounted, in 1810, to nearly 1,200,000. This part of the population, which has increased since that time, is almost as miserable as the corresponding population that exists in the English colonies. Wealth is again concentrated here in the hands of the landowners, since there exist in the country almost no other branches of industry than agriculture. Although several individuals affect great luxury, it is difficult to believe that they all possess great wealth, when one sees the excessive price of labor, the nonchalance and incapacity of the slaves, the only individuals who work, and the high cost of all the products one is obliged to obtain from abroad.

The French part of Saint-Domingue had, in 1788, a population of 520,000 inhabitants; of this number, 452,000 possessed nothing, since they were slaves; they had for dwellings only miserable huts, for clothing but a loincloth of blue canvas, and for food only what was strictly necessary for them not to die of hunger. The landed wealth, which was almost the only wealth that existed in the country, was concentrated in the hands of about 40,000 individuals of European origin; but, among these, there was a great number of families who had more debts than assets, or who possessed only a very limited fortune.

We observe the same phenomena in Martinique and Guadeloupe. In the latter island, the number of individuals plunged into the most profound misery amounted to 85,471 in 1788; while the number of white masters amounted to only 13,466. The population was about the same in Martinique in 1815; the number of individuals reduced to the most excessive misery amounted to 77,577, while the number of individuals of European origin amounted to only 9,206. Today, the misery of the laboring class is as profound as it was at that time; centuries of labor and privation have added nothing to the well-being of the men of this class. But has the master class been enriched by all that it has snatched from the laboring class? Have the fatigues and privations it has imposed upon it put a very considerable sum of wealth into its hands? Far from it, the planters of our colonies have unproductively consumed, first all they could tear from the enslaved population, and then all the assets they borrowed. Today, the debts of most of them far exceed the value of their possessions; yet, the colonists having in France the monopoly on the sale of their products, they collect a very heavy tax on the French population, since they make us pay much more for their commodities than we would pay if commerce were free.

From the preceding, it follows, first, that slavery is an invincible obstacle to the formation and accumulation of wealth, because it deprives the laboring class of all means of working with intelligence and of making savings, and because it gives the master class vices that make them unproductively consume the fruit of the enslaved population's labor; it follows, second, that in countries exploited by slaves, labor is infinitely less productive for the worker and especially for the master than it is in countries where all labors are executed by free men; finally, it follows that, in the state of slavery, the small quantity of wealth that can be produced is distributed in the manner most contrary to equality, morality, and justice.