Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/34

 are living amongst, if we would but substitute a few of our modern commercial terms for the old dice-table terms employed by Tacitus. "They (the Germans)," he says, "practise gambling amongst their serious pursuits, and are quite sober over it. So desperate is their lust of gain or fear of losing, that when all other means fail, they stake their liberty and their very bodies upon the last throw of the dice; nay, the beaten party (the loser) enters voluntarily and resignedly into slavery. Although younger and more robust than his antagonist, he quietly submits to be bound in fetters and sold. Such is their perverseness in depravity—they, themselves, call it, ! The successful parties (winners) dispose of this class of slaves in the way of commerce, that the infamy of their victory may be lost sight of by the removal of their victim." In this almost literal translation, we have paraphrased Tacitus no further than his elliptic style and the different genius of our language render necessary; yet we can hardly persuade ourselves that we have not been describing the process and the very terms by which commercial speculation and our system of public and private credit manufacture the slaves of our own day. The only substantial difference is, that our gambling and slave-making are upon an immeasurably larger scale, and that our enslaved Saxons, unlike their German progenitors, have not even a chance of saving themselves: for, though they are made to contribute all the stakes, they are allowed no further share in the game than to look on and pay the losses, whoever may be the winners. Tacitus's term, fides (faith, honour), is the identical term made use of now-a-days to enforce the payment of national debts by those who never borrowed, and the payment of "debts of honour" by those who forget to pay their tailors' bills and their servants' wages. The old German gamester's trick, too, of getting his victim out of the way by disposing of him as merchandise, instead of keeping him to serve as a slave upon himself, is not without its analogies in our modern practice. Indeed, our whole system of commerce and of public credit is based upon a similar practice and similar motives. The slaves of our modern landlords, merchants, and manufacturers are always the apparent slaves of somebody else—of some wretched go-between underling, on whom the odium, though not the profits, of the system is made to fall. The landlord throws it upon the farmer or agent; the millowner, upon his overseer; the coal-king, upon his manager; the exporting merchant, upon the slop-shops and sweaters; and so on, throughout every ramification of trade and manufacture. The loanmonger retains not in his own hands his purchased privilege of rifling the pockets of all taxpayers twice a year for no value received. That would make his position as odious as that of Tacitus's successful old German gamester would have been, had he made the "plucked pigeon" his personal slave, who was whilom his boon-companion and equal. Business could not go on in that way. Our loanmonger knows it, and, therefore, no sooner does he get his bonds than he diffuses the "scrip" as widely and plentifully as the dews of heaven, till there is hardly a grade or calling in society that is not made directly interested and instrumental in enslaving the producer and