by PROVISIONAL institutions, if I may so call them. The most
important of these--slavery--arises out of the same early conquest as
the mixture of races. A slave is an unassimilated, an undigested atom;
something which is in the body politic, but yet is hardly part of it.
Slavery, too, has a bad name in the later world, and very justly. We
connect it with gangs in chains, with laws which keep men ignorant,
with laws that hinder families. But the evils which we have endured
from slavery in recent ages must not blind us to, or make us forget,
the great services that slavery rendered in early ages. There is a
wonderful presumption in its favour; it is one of the institutions
which, at a certain stage of growth, all nations in all countries
choose and cleave to. 'Slavery,' says Aristotle, 'exists by the law of
nature,' meaning that it was everywhere to be found--was a rudimentary
universal point of polity. 'There are very many English colonies,' said
Edward Gibbon Wakefield, as late as 1848, 'who would keep slaves at
once if we would let them,' and he was speaking not only of old
colonies trained in slavery, and raised upon the products of it, but
likewise of new colonies started by freemen, and which ought, one would
think, to wish to contain freemen only. But Wakefield knew what he was
saying; he was a careful observer of rough societies, and he had
watched the minds of men in them. He had seen that LEISURE is the great
need of early societies, and slaves only can give men leisure. All
freemen in new countries must be pretty equal; every one has labour,
and every one has land; capital, at least in agricultural countries
(for pastoral countries are very different), is of little use; it
cannot hire labour; the labourers go and work for themselves. There is
a story often told of a great English capitalist who went out to
Australia with a shipload of labourers and a carriage; his plan was
that the labourers should build a house for him, and that he would keep
his carriage, just as in England. But (so the story goes) he had to try
to live in his carriage, for his labourers left him, and went away to
work for themselves. In such countries there can be few gentlemen and
no ladies. Refinement is only possible when leisure is possible; and
slavery first makes it possible. It creates a set of persons born to
work that others may not work, and not to think in order that others
may think. The sort of originality which slavery gives is o