ve. But the general state
of slavery was defended by philosophers like Aristotle; was recognized
by the legislation of Judea, Greece, and Rome; was accepted as part of
the established order by Jesus and the early church. It is beyond our
limits here to measure either its service, as the foundation on which
rested ancient society; or the mischief that came from the supplanting
of a free peasantry, as in Italy. We can but glance at the influence of
Christianity, first in ameliorating its rigor, by teaching the master
that the slave was his brother in Christ, and then by working together
with economic forces for its abolition. By complex and partly obscure
causes, personal slavery--the outright ownership of man--was abolished
throughout Christendom. Less inhuman in theory, less heartless in
practice, though inhuman and harsh enough, was the serfdom which
succeeded slavery and rested on Europe for a thousand years; till by
slow evolution, by occasional bloody revolt, by steady advance in the
intelligence and power of the laborer, compelling for him a higher
status, the serf became a hired laborer and thence a citizen throughout
Europe.

The recrudescence of slavery came when the expanding energies of
European society, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dashed
against the weak barbarians of Africa and America. The old story was
retold,--the stronger man, half-savage still under the veneer of
civilization and Christianity, trampled the weaker man under foot. In
Europe there was little need or room for slaves--the labor supply was
sufficient, but on the new continent, in the words of Weeden (_Economic
and Social History of New England_): "The seventeenth century organized
the new western countries, and created an immense opportunity for
labor. The eighteenth coolly and deliberately set Europe at the task of
depopulating whole districts of western Africa, and of transporting the
captives, by a necessarily brutal, vicious and horrible traffic, to the
new civilization of America." The European was impartial between African
and Indian; he was equally ready to enslave either; but the Indian was
not made for captivity,--he rebelled or ran away or died; the more
docile negro was the chief victim. The stream of slavery moved mainly
according to economic conditions. Soil and climate in the Northern
States made the labor of the indolent and unthrifty slave unprofitable,
but in the warm and fertile South, developing plantations