De l’influence de l’esclavage domestique sur l’esprit et la nature du gouvernement.

CHAP. 15: > On the influence of domestic slavery on the spirit and nature of government.

I have previously observed that peoples change their maxims according to the point of view from which they consider themselves; if they look at themselves in their relations with the individuals whom force or chance has given them for masters, they willingly proclaim as principles of law or morality individual liberty, freedom of opinion, and respect for labor and property; but if they consider themselves in their relations with the individuals whom violence or cunning has subjected to them, they invoke the legitimacy of their possessions, the inviolability of existing laws or forces, and respect for the authorities established by divinity itself; which always means that those who have been the strongest desire to preserve the advantages of force, even when it abandons them.

This double doctrine manifests itself nowhere more naively than in States where there exists a class of masters and another of slaves, and where the individuals of the former are not completely enslaved. A man who attempted, in America or in England, a usurpation similar to that which an army chief executed in France at the end of the last century, would be struck down from all sides with the maxims of the imprescriptible rights of man; but he who armed himself with the same maxims to call to liberty men who are disposed of like beasts, and who are treated much more cruelly, would raise general opinion against him, and would be prosecuted as a malefactor.

But it is in vain that the possessors of men form for themselves two moralities and two justices: they can establish them in theory; sooner or later, in practice, one or the other must reign supreme. What is just and true is so by itself or by the nature of things, and not by an effect of the caprices of power. The most foolish or most insolent of pretensions would be that of an individual who imagined that it belongs to him to make a proposition false or true, just or unjust, according as it suits his interests. What would be absurd in an individual is absurd in a collection of individuals, however numerous it may be; were the entire human race to rise up to declare an axiom of geometry false, things would remain the same; there would only be one more absurdity in the world; now, moral truths depend no more on our caprices than do physical or mathematical truths. A man who, by cunning or by violence, managed to seize the person of another; who dragged him by force into his house or onto his field, where he compelled him with whip blows to work for him, would not be judged by a moralist otherwise than as a robber who must be urgently repressed. If this man, having arrived home, took it into his head to write in a register and to proclaim, within his family, that he is the legitimate owner of the person he has abducted, that he has the right to dispose of him according to his caprices, and that no one can, without iniquity, set limits to his violence, neither these declarations nor his pretensions would change anything in the nature of the facts. What, in an individual, would be a crime, is equally one in an armed multitude; a band that, instead of seizing one person, seized fifty or a hundred, would be in a similar case to that of the individual I have already supposed; there would be no other difference except that the crime would be much more serious in the second case than in the first. But a nation is only a collection of individuals, and when it proceeds like those I have supposed, it finds itself in the same case; the declarations it makes and writes with more or less solemnity, that such and such an act is just, that such and such a possession is legitimate, change nothing in the nature of things. In such a case, the law is force; legitimacy is the conformity of the conduct of the weak to the will of the strongest. To appreciate slavery, we therefore have no need to concern ourselves with what the peoples who established it have written in the registers of their deliberations; their resolutions and their writings, even when they call them laws, can change neither its nature, nor its causes, nor its effects.

When domestic slavery exists among a people, and the individuals of the master class wish to establish a government, they must hold to those among them to whom they entrust the functions of magistrates, military chiefs, or administrators, roughly the following language:

1. You shall exercise no violence against our persons even if you have the strength to do so, because, with regard to us, force would not be justice; you shall prevent any cruelty from being exercised against us; you shall repress all attacks on our security, without respect of persons; you shall listen to us all equally, and you shall administer justice with impartiality, whenever we address our complaints to you; but you shall grant no protection to the men or women we possess, and if it pleases us to exercise violence or cruelty upon them, you shall lend us a strong hand in case of need, because, with regard to them, force and cruelty are justice; not only shall you not repress any of the attacks that might be made by us on their security, but, if they should come to complain, you shall not listen to them, and you shall always show respect of persons; between them and us, you shall always administer justice in a partial manner.

2. You shall protect the freedom we claim to enjoy to go or come as we please, to change place as often as it suits us; you shall prevent above all that anyone should lock us up, either in our homes or in any other place, except in the case where we are accused of some crime against the masters, and observing the legal forms we shall have established; but you shall at the same time protect the freedom we claim to enjoy, to prevent the persons whom force has subjected to us from going or coming as they please, or from changing place when it suits them; you shall help us, in case of need, to lock them up in whatever place it pleases us to choose, without our needing to justify our wishes or to observe any legal formality.

3. You shall protect our industry and the use we intend to make of our intelligence and our limbs; you shall guarantee us the freedom to follow the profession that will best suit our means, and to work or to rest as we judge useful to our interests; but you shall also protect the ability we have to give to the men possessed by us the industry that suits us, and to regulate the use of their faculties according to our caprices; you shall not suffer them to work or to rest according to their needs; but you shall oblige them to work or to remain idle according to ours.4° You shall guarantee us the faculty to express our opinions, whether verbally or through printed or other writings; you shall suffer each of us to state openly what he thinks, even if our thoughts might displease you or thwart your plans; but you shall guarantee us, furthermore, the faculty to prevent the men who are subject to us from expressing, by any means, opinions that might displease us; and if they contravene our prohibitions in this regard, you shall protect the arbitrary punishments it may please us to inflict upon them.

5° You shall guarantee us the faculty to practice the religious worship we deem most reasonable or most pleasing to the Divinity, as well as the faculty to pray or to rest on whichever day we have chosen, and you shall use no force to impose your own beliefs upon us; but you shall furthermore guarantee us the faculty to have the men who are subject to us practice the worship it pleases us to impose upon them, and to prevent them from rendering to the Divinity such homage as might be commanded them by their conscience.

6° You shall collect from our revenues, or from the products of our labors, only those sums that are strictly necessary for you for a good administration, and you shall render us a clear, net, and public account of all that you have collected and spent; but, at the same time, you shall protect the faculty we have to appropriate the fruit of the labors of the men who are subject to us, and to leave them only what is strictly necessary to sustain their existence; for, with regard to them, extortions are justice.

7° If there should arise among us, who are the masters, men who wish to subject us to an arbitrary power, you shall use your power to repress them and to protect us; you shall punish them with the full rigor of the laws; but, if men should arise who wish to remove from our arbitrary power the individuals whom force has subjected to us, you shall remember that you are the protectors of that arbitrary power; you shall deliver to the tribunals any individual who attempts to protect, against our violence, the persons we possess, in order to place them under the protection of justice.

8. You shall protect above all the virtue of our daughters and our wives, and you shall punish with rigor the wretches who would dare to make an attempt on their persons; but you shall also protect us in the exercise of the arbitrary power we intend to exercise over the daughters or wives of the men who are subject to us; if a husband should take it into his head to defend his wife, or a father his daughter, against our enterprises, you shall lend us the force at your disposal, to chastise them for their temerity, and thus facilitate the accomplishment of our desires.

“You swear to be faithful to this declaration of the rights of man and the rights of the master; and if you fail in this, by protecting against our extortions, against our violence, and even against our lust, the men or women whom force has subjected to us, we hope from the wisdom and justice of the Supreme Being who hears us, that he will punish you for your prevarications with eternal punishments.”

The human mind lends itself so easily to the various impressions one wishes to give it, and it is so difficult to account for the opinions one has received in childhood, that I can very well conceive of possessors of men instilling in the minds of their children a series of contradictory propositions, similar to those to which I have just reduced the pretensions of a planter or an Anglo-American of the south. I can even conceive that after reading these propositions that the French, Dutch, and English, or American colonists aspire to put into practice, both the one and the other find them reasonable and just, precisely because they are absurd. But it is to be strangely mistaken to imagine that men regulate their conduct by the formulas one makes them recite, and not by their needs or their habits. The Italian and Spanish brigands who lie in ambush on the main roads to rob travelers are neither idolaters nor atheists; they have the same gospel, and a faith as robust as the honest and industrious men who populate our great cities. They can recite the moral and religious maxims they were taught from childhood as fluently as an Anglo-American of the south can recite the rights of man and the rights of the master inscribed in the laws of his country; yet, their maxims and even their beliefs are not enough to keep travelers safe.

Men are directed only by habit and by example; however contradictory their doctrines or their reasonings may be, they show themselves in their conduct to be consistent with what they have always practiced or seen practiced. It is not in schools or in the books of legislators that citizens are formed for government; it is in their homes and in the relations they have with the individuals who surround them. A child who, from his birth until the moment he has reached the age of a man, sees himself surrounded by masters and slaves, necessarily observes the relations that exist between the one and the other. He sees in these relations only what is in fact there: the continual use of force against weakness; the constant triumph of the desires and caprices of some, and the complete abnegation of the will of others; authority instead of reasoning. He cannot yet speak, yet he has already taken on the absolute tone and imperious air of a master; he sees in his parents the members of a government; in the slaves, he sees subjects: he has contracted the habits of a despot before even knowing what magistrates are.

What difference can a man thus raised see between the individuals he possesses as slaves, and the individuals who are not in slavery? There are only two: force, and the prejudice that some are born to obey, work, and suffer, and the others to command and live in idleness. Every free individual, to consider all others as his slaves, therefore needs only to find himself invested with command, and to possess instruments that give him over his equals the force he has over his slaves. Now, we shall soon see that these instruments cannot be difficult to find in countries where one part of the population is born and raised in the practice of arbitrary power, and where the other part is fashioned for servitude.

One of the most remarkable effects of slavery is to place in a perpetual contradiction the men who exercise a part of public authority, and to condemn them to approve or to stigmatize alternately the same actions. They must either lie ceaselessly to their conscience, or stigmatize themselves in their own judgments. This necessity is the result of the opposition that exists between the claims that masters make in their capacity as citizens, and those they wish to exercise in their capacity as possessors of men. In order to make my thought better understood, I will cite a few examples.

An individual who possesses a herd of men or women employs a part of them to cultivate his lands; he hires out the others to people who pay him for their hire. But, as is the practice, he leaves to both only what is strictly necessary for them not to die of hunger; as for himself, he lives in abundance by means of the product of their labors. This man, after having wrested from the wretches whom force has subjected to him all that their labor could produce, goes into a court of justice in the capacity of a magistrate or even a juror. He takes his seat; workers or artisans present themselves and demand the condemnation of a man who, after having long made them work, has refused to pay them their wages. The facts are established; the laws are positive; the magistrate condemns the individual brought before him, on the grounds that it is unjust to make people work and not pay them the value of their labor. The sentence pronounced, our magistrate descends from his seat, and goes to dine on the product of a labor he has paid for only with blows of the whip.

Another possessor of men gives one of his slaves an order that is not executed promptly enough, or else he imagines that this slave has expressed a disrespectful opinion. Instantly, he commands that he be stripped, has his limbs tied to four stakes, and administers two hundred blows of the whip to him. The expedition finished, and still boiling with anger, this master passes into a hall of justice, and goes to sit on the magistrates' bench. There, he waits for the public force to bring him the malefactors who are to be submitted to a judgment; an accused person presents himself; his crime is to have shown himself too sensitive to injury, and to have inflicted a barbarous punishment on a weaker being who had shown him disrespect. The laws being again positive, the magistrate pronounces the sentence; he condemns the accused to infamous penalties. The judgment pronounced, he goes off to have the children and women he holds in chains torn apart by whip blows.

A third, pressed for money, addresses himself to a slave trader; the latter agrees to buy some from him, but he will receive only young ones. Our possessor goes to his plantation; he chooses the most beautiful children; tears them from the arms of their mothers or fathers, and delivers them to the merchant; and if the cries of the parents wound his ears, he has them silenced with blows of the whip. But our planter is a magistrate; when he has settled his own affairs, he must administer justice; he therefore goes to take his place beside his colleagues, and an important case attracts his attention. A mother in despair presents herself; a wretch has taken her son from her and sold him far away as a slave; the fact is established, the malefactor is in the hands of justice; but it is not possible to find the child who was abducted. The magistrate again does his duty: he condemns to be hanged the accused whom he knows to be no more guilty than himself, nor than most of the other possessors of men.

A fourth is called as a magistrate or as a juror: he must pronounce on a grave accusation brought against one of his fellow citizens. A father has reported an attempt made with violence against the virtue of his daughter; he has seized the scoundrel, and he produces numerous witnesses to his crime. Our judges, possessors of men, again apply the law: the accused is condemned and hanged without mercy. But the act for which he suffers the ultimate punishment is not considered a crime in itself: the witnesses, the jurors, and the judges themselves, after having condemned or had the accused condemned and having been witnesses to his punishment, will return home and will be able to indulge, with impunity, in attempts even more serious than the one they have just punished; they will be able to commit them against weaker beings, and even against their sisters or against their own daughters born in servitude.

Finally, there is almost no crime, of whatever nature it may be, to which an individual cannot with impunity give himself over in his capacity as a possessor of men, and which he cannot be called upon to punish in his capacity as a magistrate. From this opposition between conduct and the principles that must direct judgment, it results that moral sentiments are extinguished, and that justice is nothing more than brute force, directed by the pride and interest of the masters. When the same dispositions are found in all the men of whom a government is composed, from the humblest functionaries to the heads of state, can there exist security for a single individual? Can one hope that men who habitually give themselves over at home to arbitrary power, to violence, and to all vices, will suddenly become just, humane, disinterested, and that this miracle will be wrought in their person, for the sole reason that they change their denomination?

One of the best-established facts in the moral sciences is that the habit of exercising arbitrary power gives the need and in a way the passion for it; when men have become accustomed to living off their fellow men, every other kind of life is abhorrent to them; labor that is exercised on things is so vile in their eyes that it can suit only slaves. We have established this fact, not by a few isolated and individual observations, but by observations made on entire races, among peoples of all species, on the principal parts of the globe, and at all epochs of civilization.

Another fact that is no less well established than the preceding one is that, when possessors of men cannot restore their fortunes by the plunder of foreign nations, they recognize no other honorable means of enriching themselves than the plunder of their own fellow citizens. We have seen, in effect, that although the English and French colonists had obtained, for the sale of their commodities, monopolies in very extensive markets, they were all in distress. A similar phenomenon manifested itself among the Romans, when the number of slaves had greatly multiplied, and especially when the state of peace had concentrated in the hands of the master of the empire the taxes levied on the vanquished peoples. The principal accomplices of Sylla, of Catiline, of Caesar, were ruined masters, who did not even have the means to pay their debts.

From the two phenomena I observe here, there results a third that deserves to be remarked; it is the tendency of all masters to seize the government. Each, according to his position, aspires to obtain an employment that puts him in a position to act upon men and to enrich himself, or at least to live, if he can, without working. Tacitus observed, in his time, that the Romans willingly renounced liberty, to enter into a share of the products that the exercise of arbitrary power gives. Travelers have already observed among the Anglo-Americans an avidity for public offices, greater than that which we observe in most of the States of Europe. If they had sought from what ranks the aspirants came, there is no doubt that they would have found that the greatest number belonged to families possessing or having formerly possessed slaves. There is an irrefutable fact that confirms this observation: it is the large number of men that the States exploited by slaves have furnished to the federal government. The State of Virginia alone has furnished more than any of the northern States, although it is far inferior to them in industry, in wealth, and in enlightenment. In the northern States, where slavery is almost abolished, one is born a farmer, manufacturer, merchant, artisan. In the southern States, when one is born a possessor of men, one is born a governor, or one is fit for nothing [330].

The existence of slavery pushing the men of the master class toward government employments, making it a need for them to enrich themselves by this means, and giving them at the same time the prejudices and habits of arbitrary power, it remains to be seen what resources the diverse classes of the population present to the governors who aspire to maintain themselves in power and to establish despotism.

I must first observe that the same words do not have, in a country where slavery is established, the same meaning they have in a country where no slaves exist. When Anglo-Americans or planters from Jamaica, or even Polish lords, say that property must be guaranteed, and that no one must be stripped of his own without having been previously indemnified, they do not attach to these words the same meaning as we do. To their eyes, to guarantee property is to abandon to their arbitrary will the men, women, and children whom force has subjected to them; to infringe upon property is to shelter the enslaved population from violence; it is to guarantee it a portion of the fruit of its labors; it is, in a word, to set limits to the arbitrary power of its possessors. This being understood, one will easily comprehend how it is in the interest of the enslaved population to second with all its efforts the men who aspire to the enslavement of the masters.Of all kinds of despotism, none is more active, more violent, or more continuous than that which a master exercises over his slaves. The violence and extortions that a despot exercises over the mass of a population are nothing in comparison to the extortions and violence that most masters have, at all times, exercised. Can any analogy be drawn between most of the subjects of Tiberius and Nero, and those multitudes of slaves whom Roman proprietors made work in their fields, laden with chains, spurred on by blows from a stick, deprived of clothing, fed coarse and meager food, and locked up at night in subterranean caverns? Is not the lot of the peasants of Persia a hundred times preferable to that of the slaves in the English, French, Dutch, or Spanish colonies? The interest of all slaves therefore disposes them to support any ambitious man who comes forward to enslave the master class, and even if their efforts were to result in establishing the most tyrannical government that has ever existed, that government would be a benefit to them.

Between the masters and the slaves, there is a class of men for whom the enslavement of the former is a benefit and a step forward: the class of freedmen. The men of this class stand to gain in three ways from the establishment of an absolute government. First, they cease to be excluded from public office, as the masters no longer control appointments. Second, they are less debased, because the masters can less easily oppress them, and because the power established above them places all on the same level. Finally, the masters can less easily seize a monopoly on all industrial professions; the government, unable to exploit each individual privately, is obliged to establish taxes on the mass of the population, and it must grant a kind of protection to every individual who works.

In ancient Rome, all the men who sought to establish despotism looked for and found support in the classes of the population that belonged neither to the masters nor to the slaves—that is, among those designated by the name of proletarians. We first see the men of this class, in their capacity as citizens, selling their votes to those who offer them the most money for them. We then see them ally with Marius, and support him in all measures aimed at the enslavement or destruction of the masters. We soon after see them become the allies of Caesar, fill the ranks of his legions, and march with him to the conquest of Rome. We see them, at the dictator’s death, ally with new tyrants, and avenge the murder of their leader upon the great men. Later, we see them ally with Nero, serve him with all their power, and mourn him after his death. Finally, we see them, under the name of legionaries, remain masters of the empire, selling it to the highest bidder, and taking it back to sell it again, when its possessor ceases to conform to their will.

Is it necessary to point out the causes for the perseverance of men who are neither slaves nor slave-owners in allying with all the enemies of the masters? Have we not seen the latter seize all the lands, either as proprietors or under the name of farmers of the republic, and have them exploited exclusively by the hands of foreigners possessed under the name of slaves? Have we not seen them thus drive the free cultivators from all the countrysides of Italy and leave them with no means of existence? Have we not seen them seize all branches of industry and commerce within Rome itself, by means of their capital and their slaves? Have we not seen them first stigmatize and then prohibit labor performed by free hands, in order to better secure a monopoly on it through the hands of their slaves? The free classes in Rome, which corresponded to our laboring classes, could not, therefore, have had more formidable or more cruel enemies than the slave-owners. The master class, which was the most terrible scourge for the slaves, was no less a formidable scourge for all the individuals classified under the contemptuous name of proletarians. For such men, Marius, Caesar, and even Nero were benefactors; for, at the same time that they gave them the means of existence, they were destroying their enemies.

But when there exists, within a nation, an aristocratic class whose members all seek to wrest power from one another, and to enrich themselves by its means when they possess it; a numerous class that possesses neither property nor industry; and a still more numerous class that not only possesses nothing, but is considered the property of the aristocracy—the civil wars born of the habit and love of domination take on a character of greed and cruelty of which one can have no idea among peoples who have no slaves. It is then that all the vices developed within families by the perpetual use of arbitrary power come out into the open and are exercised upon the entire mass of the population; each leader is the representative of all the vices of the fraction of the people he governs. Hatred, vengeance, and denunciation set in motion a population of slaves or freedmen; pride, ambition, cruelty, and greed put weapons in the hands of the masters; and a population of proletarians becomes the instrument of any ambitious man who wishes to use them. Fear, ambition, and vengeance command proscriptions that are always followed by the confiscation of goods and the ruin of families; and, on the other hand, the need for riches and the necessity of rewarding the wretches who serve as instruments lead to the proscription of individuals or families who have enough wealth to tempt the victors. Such are the characteristics of the Roman civil wars, from the moment the great men acquired a large number of slaves until the overthrow of their empire.

When we read, in Roman history, the complaints made by the patricians about the influence of the freedmen, about their denunciations, and about the zeal they showed in serving the emperors, we are naturally disposed to take the side of the masters against their former slaves. We do not see that this is the beginning of the terrible reaction of the enslaved against their oppressors, a reaction that had the same goal and the same principle as that of the proletarians, and which was not to cease until the complete extermination of the master class. A freedman might have some obligations to the individual who had given him his liberty; these obligations were analogous to that inspired by a thief, or the heir of a thief, in the individual to whom he restores a portion of the goods that were stolen from him, when he could have kept them with impunity. But the gratitude of a freedman could no more extend to the entire master class than the gratitude of a man to whom stolen property had been restored could extend to the entire class of thieves. The freedmen and the slaves formed a particular nation, essentially an enemy of the master class; the very name "freedman" was a stigma that could be erased only by the destruction of the race that had imposed it.

Among peoples where no justice is established, individual or family vengeances become terrible and pass from generation to generation, until they have been satisfied, or until the races that are their object have been completely destroyed. This is another characteristic common to men of all kinds, which we have observed in all races and under all climates. Now, the relations of master and slave leave no room for justice; they exclude even the idea of it. The vengeance that ferments in the breast of the slave is all the more powerful for being more concealed, for the injustices multiplying day by day, and for each individual, besides his own outrages, being the daily witness of those done to his father, his mother, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, or his daughters. When crimes have thus been accumulated for centuries, and the obstacles that make their punishment impossible finally break, should one be surprised at the violence of the reaction, and at the perseverance with which the oppressed races pursue their oppressors?

Several of the Roman tyrants who succeeded the republic of masters were monsters in their cruelty, if we compare them to the customs of the current peoples of Europe; but if we compare their conduct toward the masters to the conduct of the latter toward their slaves, we will judge them less severely. Tiberius never manifested toward his subjects the dark suspicions, the avarice, the cruelty, or the contempt that slave-owners manifested and still manifest today toward their slaves. At no time, nor in any country, has any tyrant reduced his subjects to the excess of destitution and misery to which the chained cultivators of the Roman countryside were reduced; none has ever reduced his subjects to the condition of the slaves in the modern colonies.

It is true that the subjects of the Roman despots, upon whom the misfortunes of servitude weighed, were more numerous than the slaves of one member of the aristocracy; and that an order from Tiberius or Nero struck a greater number of individuals than the order of a rich landowner. But, to judge equitably, one must compare the violence, extortions, and cruelties of all the masters to the violence, extortions, and cruelties of a single despot: one must compare the effects of the collective despotism of the former to the effects of the individual despotism of the latter. Now, in making this comparison, one can very well conceive how the men who had belonged or who still belonged to the enslaved race sought shelter under a power that showed itself to be the enemy of the rich slave-owners. The slave-owners, to better secure their domination, took care to brutify their slaves, to maintain mistrust among them, and to encourage and reward denunciation. When they were enslaved in their turn, they reaped what they had sown: the freedmen put into practice against them the lessons they had received when they were slaves.

It would, moreover, be judging in a very narrow fashion to imagine that despotism began in Rome only on the day it had emperors; Rome had despots the very day one man had the ability to dispose of another arbitrarily; the day one individual could with impunity mistreat, extort, and brutify another individual. If the enslaved and the freedmen had had their historians, as the masters have had theirs, and if these historians had described to us the vices and crimes of the masters, the history of the emperors would seem less horrible to us; we would find under their reigns only the large-scale application of the doctrines established and practiced under the republic.

Thus, in a State where one part of the population is possessed by the other as property, we find that a large part of the master class is naturally disposed to seize power and to take possession of the wealth created by others; we find that the part of the population that can live only by its labor, and whose industry is debased or hindered by slavery, is equally disposed to league with any individual who proposes to enslave or destroy the master class; finally, we find that even the most violent despotism, which weakens or destroys the power of the masters, is a benefit to the slaves. The tendency of the mass of the population, therefore, leads it toward the establishment of the despotism of a single ruler, and when that despotism is established, it is exercised with the rapacity, brutality, cruelty, and stupidity that masters employ in the exploitation of their slaves.

Various circumstances modify, in the European colonies and among the Anglo-Americans of the south, the effects that domestic slavery produces on the spirit and nature of government. The colonies are not independent: they receive governors and a portion of their magistrates and military men from the countries to which they are subject. These military men, these governors, these magistrates are born and raised among peoples who do not permit domestic slavery, and who, consequently, may not have the vices that servitude engenders. Through the complete loss of all national independence, the slave-owners of the colonies avoid a portion of the evils attached to their position. They must be possessed by a power foreign to their country, a power over which they can have no influence, in order not to be the victims of the social state established among them. From this it results that they are at once afflicted with the vices and calamities that belong to slavery and to domination; in their capacity as slave-owners, they have the vices and evils reserved for despots; in their capacity as subjects of a foreign power, they have the vices that servitude imprints. But this state cannot be eternal; domination is a heavy burden for the nations that exercise it; it will last only as long as the errors that sustain it, which are already much weakened. When it no longer exists, the domination of the masters over one another will make itself felt, and we shall see what its consequences are.

A second circumstance contributes to modifying the effects of slavery: the ability of masters to have their children educated in nations where domestic slavery is not in use. By employing this means, they can to a certain extent weaken the bad effects that the continual spectacle of violence and servility produces on intelligence and morals; but this resource can be employed only by rich families, and consequently it is beyond the reach of the mass of the population.

A third circumstance that has the effect of modifying the effects of slavery is the ability of free men of the industrious class to emigrate to nations where labor is not debased. The use of this ability condemns slave nations to remain eternally stationary; but it also partly delivers the masters from the dangers that a numerous class with neither property nor industry would pose to them. The ease of emigration may not be the same in all countries; it is greater among the Anglo-Americans of the south than it is in the French colonies, from which it follows that the danger is not equal for all slave-owners.

The effects of slavery are modified by a fourth circumstance among the Anglo-Americans of the south: by the influence that the northern States exercise over them. It is evident, in fact, that one of the principal results of the federation is to prevent, in the southern States, either usurpations of power or insurrections of slaves. The division of the country into various independent States also contributes to making usurpations difficult. An individual who had subjugated one State might not have the means to subjugate the others.

In describing the various ways in which the Anglo-Americans act upon the slaves, there is one that seems incredible, so absurd and atrocious is it by our standards: it is the absolute prohibition imposed on all masters against teaching their slaves to read. A master who cut off the hands or put out the eyes of one of the men he considers his property would be punished less severely by the other masters than if he had taught him to read and write. We must not consider this law a gratuitous atrocity; it is one of the conditions of the liberty and security of the masters. We cannot conceive that the liberty of a people can be maintained if each person does not enjoy the ability to publish his opinions; but we can no more conceive that servitude can be perpetuated in a country where freedom of the press prevails. The Anglo-Americans of the south, wishing to remain free, have admitted, for all citizens, the unlimited ability to publish their opinions; and wishing at the same time to perpetuate servitude among them, they have made a law of the brutification of the slaves. They have determined that they would make them stupid enough so that freedom of thought could contribute in no way to their instruction. If the slaves knew how to read, in fact, there would soon be freedmen who knew how to write; and, from that moment, the masters could no longer ensure their peace, except by subjecting to prior censorship all writings that were published or introduced into their territory. They would, consequently, be obliged to renounce one of the most precious portions of their liberties, the one that serves as a guarantee for all the others [331].However, the Anglo-Americans already keenly feel the evils attached to slavery, and they would like to be rid of them; but how to go about it? If they deport a portion of their slaves annually, births will exceed deportations; for it will be necessary to ensure the subsistence of the deportees, and that will greatly reduce their number. If they free them, it will be necessary to enlighten them and provide them with a trade; then they will multiply rapidly, they will take advantage of the benefits of open debate, they will want to exercise the rights of citizens, and the masters will judge them to be formidable. If, to prevent the danger of their domination, the men of the master race renounce a part of their liberty; if they subject writings to prior censorship, they will have to fear that, in order to oppress them, their governments will seek support in the men of the freed race.