be said for us is that people must and do live and let live
up to a certain point. Even the horse, with his docked tail and bitted
jaw, finds his slavery mitigated by the fact that a total disregard of
his need for food and rest would put his master to the expense of buying
a new horse every second day; for you cannot work a horse to death and
then pick up another one for nothing, as you can a laborer. But this
natural check on inconsiderate selfishness is itself checked, partly by
our shortsightedness, and partly by deliberate calculation; so that
beside the man who, to his own loss, will shorten his horse's life in
mere stinginess, we have the tramway company which discovers actuarially
that though a horse may live from 24 to 40 years, yet it pays better to
work him to death in 4 and then replace him by a fresh victim. And
human slavery, which has reached its worst recorded point within our own
time in the form of free wage labor, has encountered the same personal
and commercial limits to both its aggravation and its mitigation. Now
that the freedom of wage labor has produced a scarcity of it, as in
South Africa, the leading English newspaper and the leading English
weekly review have openly and without apology demanded a return to
compulsory labor: that is, to the methods by which, as we believe, the
Egyptians built the pyramids. We know now that the crusade against
chattel slavery in the XIX century succeeded solely because chattel
slavery was neither the most effective nor the least humane method of
labor exploitation; and the world is now feeling its way towards a still
more effective system which shall abolish the freedom of the worker
without again making his exploiter responsible for him.

Still, there is always some mitigation: there is the fear of revolt; and
there are the effects of kindliness and affection. Let it be repeated
therefore that no indictment is here laid against the world on the score
of what its criminals and monsters do. The fires of Smithfield and of
the Inquisition were lighted by earnestly pious people, who were kind
and good as kindness and goodness go. And when a negro is dipped in
kerosene and set on fire in America at the present time, he is not a
good man lynched by ruffians: he is a criminal lynched by crowds of
respectable, charitable, virtuously indignant, high-minded citizens,
who, though they act outside the law, are at least more merciful than
the American legislators and