Читать книгу The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery. How it came into the world and how it shall be made to go out онлайн

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If we be right in these antecedents, our conclusions from them must be, that the first fathers were the first masters, and the first children were the first slaves. To determine the history of the first masters is,therefore, virtually to suggest the history of the first slaves. Yes, the unbounded power of paternity in the first ages of the world was the origin of all human slavery; and therefore is slavery a thing anterior to all written constitutions, to all human laws, traditional or imposed.

Now come the questions, Why did our first parents make slaves of their children? and how came the domestic institution, established by parental despotism, to become a social institution diffused throughout the whole of society? Our natural instincts, undeveloped by reason and undisciplined by knowledge and experience, would, methinks, lead us to account satisfactorily for both facts. It was natural that the head of the family should govern the family. It was not unnatural that the parent, who had given life to the child, and who had preserved that life when the child was unable to take care of itself, should in some measure regard that life as his own; and as the maintenance of his offspring must have been a burden on the parent, and kept him comparatively poor in the days of early manhood, it is no more than what we should expect from the selfishness of old age—especially in a rude social state—that he should seek to indemnify himself, by the future labour of his children, for his cost and pains in bringing them up. Let us also bear in mind, that we are treating of those primitive times when man’s animal instincts interpreted polygamy and the law of nature to be one and the same—times which Dryden describes as