Page:The Effects of Civilisation on the People in European States.djvu/55

Rh the regular and laborious occupations of agriculture. During many of the first ages, even of the most polished states, the business of agriculture was left to the slaves; the freemen enjoying their liberty in the sports of the field, or in the camp. This was the case in Sparta, where the Helots performed the business of tilling the earth. And after man had arrived, as in Rome, at a state of civilisation, in which the labour of the field was become tolerable, and held honourable, the arts and manufactures were thrown upon the slaves, and practised by them only: and it is not to be wondered at, since the works of manufactures, though so many and various in trading nations, are all of them, as has been observed before, carried on within doors, in confined rooms, shutting out the pleasant objects of nature, frequently within frames like cages, in offensive atmospheres generally rendered more nauseous by the effluvia of the subject worked on, always by that of the bodies and filthy clothes of the workmen; their postures bent, doubled, and every way distorted. Add to this, the tendency of them, so injurious and destructive to their health and lives. It seems, therefore, that it was never through choice that manufactures were entered into by any people; it must, therefore, be from one or both of the other causes, viz., delusion or compulsion.