In barbaric society slavery is a normal means of conquering the isolation of workers and assembling them in more productive cooerdination.  Where population is scant and money little used it is almost a necessity in the conduct of large undertakings, and therefore more or less essential for the advancement of civilization.  It is a means of domesticating savage or barbarous men, analogous in kind and in consequence to the domestication of the beasts of the field.[1] It was even of advantage to some of the people enslaved, in that it saved them from extermination when defeated in war, and in that it gave them touch with more advanced communities than their own.  But this was counterbalanced by the stimulus which the profits of slave catching gave to wars and raids with all their attendant injuries.  Any benefit to the slave, indeed, was purely incidental.  The reason for the institution’s existence was the advantage which accrued to the masters.  So positive and pronounced was this reckoned to be, that such highly enlightened people as the Greeks and Romans maintained it in the palmiest days of their supremacies.

[Footnote 1:  This thought was expressed, perhaps for the first time, in T.R.  Dew’s essay on slavery (1832); it is elaborated in Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation (Parsons tr., New York, 1903), pp. 278, 279.]

Western Europe in primitive times was no exception.  Slavery in a more or less fully typical form was widespread.  When the migrations ended in the middle ages, however, the rise of feudalism gave the people a thorough territorial regimentation.  The dearth of commerce whether in goods or in men led gradually to the conversion of the unfree laborers from slaves into serfs or villeins attached for generations to the lands on which they wrought.  Finally, the people multiplied so greatly and the landless were so pressed for livelihood that at the beginning of modern times European society found the removal of bonds conducive to the common advantage.  Serfs freed from their inherited obligations could now seek employment wherever they would, and landowners, now no longer lords, might employ whom they pleased.  Bondmen gave place to hirelings and peasant proprietors, status gave place to contract, industrial society was enabled to make redistributions and readjustments at will, as it had never been before.  In view of the prevailing traits and the density of the population a general return whether to slavery or serfdom was economically unthinkable.  An intelligent Scotch philanthropist, Fletcher of Saltoun, it is true, proposed at the end of the seventeenth century that the indigent and their children be bound as slaves to selected masters as a means of relieving the terrible distresses of unemployment in his times;[2] but his project appears to have received no public sanction whatever.  The fact that he published such a plan is more a curious antiquarian item than one of significance in the history of slavery.  Not even the thin edge of a wedge could possibly be inserted which might open a way to restore what everyone was on virtually all counts glad to be free of.