Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/13

 THE

RISE, PROGRESS, AND PHASES

OF

HUMAN SLAVERY.

CHAPTER I.

PROLETARIANISM SPRUNG FROM CHATTEL SLAVERY.

Importance of Social Reform—Universality of Covert or Open Slavery—Partial Prevalence of Working Class—Origin in Proletarianism—Advent of Christianity—Its Effects on Slavery—Middle and Working Classes the Produce of Emancipations—Classification of the Proletariat.

At this critical period of the world's history, when either the whole of society must undergo a peaceful Social Reformation that shall strike at the root of abuses, or else be incessantly menaced with revolutionary violence and anarchy, it becomes a subject of grave interest to ascertain how Human Slavery came into the world; how it has been propagated; wherefore it has been endured so long; the varied phases it has assumed in modern times; and, finally, how it may be successfully grappled with and extinguished, so that henceforth it may exist only in the history of the past.

Glancing over the world's map, we find nearly all the inhabited parts parcelled out into various nations and races—some called civilized, some savage, and the rest, forming the greater part, in some intermediate state of semi-barbarism. One sad feature, however, is found, with hardly an exception, to belong to all. It is Slavery, in one form or another;—it is the subjection of man to his fellow-man by force or fraud. Yes, disguise it as we may, human slavery is everywhere to be found—as rife in countries called Christian and civilized as in those called barbarous and pagan—as rife in the western as in the eastern hemisphere—as rife in the middle of the nineteenth century as in the pagan days of the Ptolomies and the Pharaohs.