FOOTNOTES

[Footnote 021:  Homer.  Odys.  P. 322.  In the latest edition of Homer, the word, which we have translated senses, is Aretae, or virtue, but the old and proper reading is Noos, as appears from Plato de Legibus, ch. 6, where he quotes it on a similar occasion.]

[Footnote 022:  Aristotle.  Polit.  Ch. 2. et inseq.]

[Footnote 023:  Ellesin hegemonikos, tois de Barbarois despotikos krasthar kai ton men os philon kai oikeion epimeleisthai, tois de os zoois he phytois prospheresthai.  Plutarch. de Fortun.  Alexand.  Orat. 1.]

[Footnote 024:  Omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci.  Horace.]

* * * * *

CHAP.  VI.

We proceed now to the consideration of the commerce:  in consequence of which, people, endued with the same feelings and faculties as ourselves, were made subject to the laws and limitations of possession.

This commerce of the human species was of a very early date.  It was founded on the idea that men were property; and, as this idea was coeval with the first order of involuntary slaves, it must have arisen, (if the date, which we previously affixed to that order, be right) in the first practices of barter.  The Story of Joseph, as recorded in the sacred writings, whom his brothers sold from an envious suspicion of his future greatness, is an ample testimony of the truth of this conjecture.  It shews that there were men, even at that early period, who travelled up and down as merchants, collecting not only balm, myrrh, spicery, and other wares, but the human species also, for the purposes of traffick.  The instant determination of the brothers, on the first sight of the merchants, to sell him, and the immediate acquiescence of these, who purchased him for a foreign market, prove that this commerce had been then established, not only in that part of the country, where this transaction happened, but in that also, whither the merchants were then travelling with their camels, namely, AEgypt:  and they shew farther, that, as all customs require time for their establishment, so it must have existed in the ages, previous to that of Pharaoh; that is, in those ages, in which we fixed the first date of involuntary servitude.  This commerce then, as appears by the present instance, existed in the earliest practices of barter, and had descended to the AEgyptians, through as long a period of time, as was sufficient to have made it, in the times alluded to, an established custom.  Thus was AEgypt, in those days, the place of the greatest resort; the grand emporium of trade, to which people were driving their merchandize, as to a centre; and thus did it afford, among other opportunities of traffick, the first market that is recorded, for the sale of the human species.