Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/38

 years, and were sold to the Virginia planters. The whole colonial labor system was based on the apprentice system, and it is a well-known fact that many men of education and ability came to the colonies as "apprentices," and were sold out as merchandise was.

Even that law of Massachusetts in 1641 so often quoted to prove that the colonists there were opposed to human slavery proves, in fact, that voluntary slavery was common. It says: "There shall never be any bond slavery amongst us, unles it be Lawfull captives, taken in just wars, [or such] as [shall] willingly sell themselves."

Holding in mind these facts, consider next the climate of the tobacco-growing region. The extinction of the colony was at one time threatened. Every immigrant had to endure the "seasoning" fever, and the percentage of deaths was frightful.

In this condition of affairs came a trader who offered to exchange twenty black laborers (who would need no "seasoning") for the products of the land which the colonists had in abundance.

Were men who had never obtained a laborer save by purchase, and men who themselves had voluntarily submitted to being bought and sold, to have their consciences afflicted at the thought of buying these strangers? Such an idea could not enter their heads. The fact is that the English Missionary Society that, in the seventeenth century, supplied all English-American colonies with pious pabulum, owned a plantation in Barbadoes and worked it with slaves, while the great Quaker Fox, after a visit to the West Indies, had nothing to say about the principle involved in the