and they were thus frequently in a position to purchase their own
freedom and become independent craftsmen. Slavery in the household and
in small workshops is open to many and serious dangers, which need not
be particularized here; but the worst abuses of slavery have always
taken place where slaves have been easily recruited, as in the early
days of European contact with Africa, and when there were large openings
for their employment in gangs on work of a rough and unskilled
character. The problem of slavery in its worse forms is thus at bottom a
cheap-labour problem analogous to that which confronts North America and
South Africa to-day; and there is an essential difference which is often
ignored between the educated slave in a Roman Government office who did
the work of a First Division Civil Servant for his imperial master and
his compeer working in the fields of South Italy: and between the
household servants of a Virginian family and the plantation-slaves of
the farther South. Let us remember, in passing judgement on what is
admittedly an indefensible system, that during the war which resulted in
the freeing of the American slaves the slaveholders of the South trusted
their household slaves to protect the women and children during their
absence from home and that that trust was nowhere betrayed. There is
another side to _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ as surely as there is another side
to Mr. Carnegie's paean of modern industrialism in his _Triumphant
Democracy_.

Systems of serfdom or caste which bind the workman to his work without
permitting him to be sold like a slave may be regarded as one step
higher than slavery proper. Such systems are common in stable and
custom-bound countries, and persisted throughout the European Middle
Ages. We need not describe how the rising tide of change gradually broke
up the system in this country and left the old-time villein a free but
often a landless and property less man. The transition from serfdom to
the system of wage-labour which succeeded it was a transition from legal
dependence to legal freedom, and as such it marked an advance. But it
was also a transition from a fixed and, as it were, a professional
position of service to the community to a blind and precarious
individualism. It was a transition, as Sir Henry Maine put it, from
status to contract. This famous nineteenth-century aphorism is eloquent
of the limitations of that too purely commercial age. Every thinking man
would