Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/106

 *cised by the whites against the people of colour. Had the Christianity which overthrew paganism, in the three first centuries, continued to prevail in the world, and succeeded in assimilating the laws and institutions of nations to the law of the Gospel, it is certain slavery must have long since become extinct. Christianity knows no distinction between black men and white men—between noble and peasant—between proletarian and millionaire. Wages-slavery is as incompatible with its spirit as is chattel-slavery. Were that spirit to prevail, our laws and institutions would be such that neither form of slavery could for an instant raise its head anywhere.

It is true, great efforts are being made by a certain class of soi-*disant Christians to procure the abolition of chattel-slavery. We must, however, regard all such efforts as the fruits of folly or hypocrisy, so long as we find no efforts made by the same parties to abolish wages-slavery—a slavery which we have shown to be immeasurably worse for white slaves than is chattel-slavery for the blacks. If it be said that to abolish wages-slavery would be impossible, we answer, No! We shall show, before we dismiss this inquiry, that wages-slavery is wholly and solely the work of tyrannical laws which one set of men impose upon another by fraud and force, and which they have no more right to impose, nor necessity for imposing, than they have to traffic in human flesh, or the black king of Dahomey has to make war upon his neighbours that he may conquer and sell them for slaves.

As long as these infamous laws (the laws alluded to) continue to be in force, we hold it to be disgustingly absurd and even infamous to agitate the world for the abolition of chattel-slavery. If we attempt to alter the condition of slaves we should do so for their own benefit, and not for ours. We should do so to ameliorate their condition, and not to make it worse. The ranters of Exeter Hall have no idea of ameliorating the condition of the negroes they so yearn to "emancipate." Their whole and sole object is to "proletarianize" them for the benefit of employers and usurers. Their object is, in fact, to reduce them to the level of the Irish peasantry, or of the labourers in Dorsetshire or the weavers in Lancashire. The planters themselves did not deny that they would have preferred "independent labourers" to slaves, if they could have got them. They acknowledged that white labour would have been more profitable to them than slave-labour—even in cotton and sugar planting—if they could only have made sure of a constant supply of it when wanted. But they said the white labourer was too independent to render it safe for the planters to trust to his services in seasons of pressure, as during the time of cane-pressing, sugar-boiling, and cotton-picking. Assure him of a supply of such labour—only give him a "surplus population" of starving proletarians to be ever ready at his hand, like so many sheep in a crib, and you will make him an abolitionist at once. And why? Because wages-slavery would be then cheaper and better for him than chattel-slavery. On no other principle would he emancipate them. Upon no other principle did any emancipations ever take