excluded from the exercise of
political power; but in sociological study things ought to have
their right names, and those names should, as far as possible,
be uniformly employed.

But this use of the word we may safely regard as a metaphor; nobody will
assert that these laborers and women are really slaves. Whoever uses the
term slavery in its ordinary sense attaches a fairly distinct idea to
it. What is this idea? We can express it most generally thus: a slave is
one who is not free. There are never slaves without there being freemen
too; and nobody can be at the same time a slave and a freeman. We must,
however, be careful to remember that, man being a "social animal," no
man is literally free; all members of a community are restricted in
their behavior toward each other by social rules and customs. But
freemen at any rate are relatively free; so a slave must be one who does
not share in the common amount of liberty, compatible with the social
connection.

The condition of the slave as opposed to that of the freeman presents
itself to us under the three following aspects:

First, every slave has his master to whom he is subjected. And this
subjection is of a peculiar kind. Unlike the authority one freeman
sometimes has over another, the master's power over his slave is
unlimited, at least in principle; any restriction put upon the master's
free exercise of his power is a mitigation of slavery, not belonging to
its nature, just as in Roman law the proprietor may do with his property
whatever he is not by special laws forbidden to do. The relation between
master and slave is therefore properly expressed by the slave being
called the master's "possession" or "property"--expressions we
frequently meet with.

Secondly, slaves are in a lower condition as compared with freemen. The
slave has no political rights; he does not choose his government, he
does not attend the public councils. Socially he is despised.

In the third place, we always connect with slavery the idea of
compulsory labor. The slave is compelled to work; the free laborer may
leave off working if he likes, be it at the cost of starving. All
compulsory labor, however, is not slave labor; the latter requires that
peculiar kind of compulsion that is expressed by the word "possession"
or "property" as has been said before.

Recapitulating, we may define a slave in the ordinary sense of the word
as a man who is the property of another, pol