Page:Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches by Anne Turgot.djvu/46

Rh their own account. This is pretty much the position in which people find themselves in all the new colonies.

Violent men have therefore conceived the idea of obliging other men by force to labour for them; and they have had slaves. These latter had no justice to look for from fellows who could not have reduced them to slavery without violating all the rights of humanity. Yet the physical law of nature still assures them their part in the products which they cause the earth to bring forth; for the master must needs feed them in order to profit by their labour. But wages of this kind are limited to the barest necessaries and to their subsistence.

This abominable custom of slavery has once been universal, and is still spread over the greater part of the earth. The principal object of the wars which the peoples of antiquity waged with one another was to carry off slaves whom the conquerors made to labour for their benefit or sold to others. This brigandage and this trade still prevail in all their horror on the coasts of Guinea, where they are fomented by the Europeans who go thither to purchase negroes for the cultivation of the American colonies.

The excessive labours to which avaricious masters drive their slaves cause many of them to perish; and it is necessary, in order always to keep up the number requisite for cultivation, that trade should annually supply a very great number of them. And as it is always war which supplies the chief source of this traffic[,] it is evident that it can exist only as long as men are divided into very small Nations, which tear one another without ceasing, and as long as each village makes war upon its neighbour. Let England,