[Footnote 2:  W.E.H.  Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1879), II, 43,44.]

When the American mining and plantation colonies were established, however, some phases of the most ancient labor problems recurred.  Natural resources invited industry in large units, but wage labor was not to be had.  The Spaniards found a temporary solution in impressing the tropical American aborigines, and the English in a recourse to indented white immigrants.  But both soon resorted predominantly for plantation purposes to the importation of Africans, for whom the ancient institution of slavery was revived.  Thus from purely economic considerations the sophisticated European colonists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved themselves and their descendants, with the connivance of their home governments, in the toils of a system which on the one hand had served their remote forbears with good effect, but which on the other hand civilized peoples had long and almost universally discarded as an incubus.  In these colonial beginnings the negroes were to be had so cheaply and slavery seemed such a simple and advantageous device when applied to them, that no qualms as to the future were felt.  At least no expressions of them appear in the records of thought extant for the first century and more of English colonial experience.  And when apprehensions did arise they were concerned with the dangers of servile revolt, not with any deleterious effects to arise from the economic nature of slavery in time of peace.

Now, slavery and indented servitude are analogous to serfdom in that they may yield to the employers all the proceeds of industry beyond what is required for the sustenance of the laborers; but they have this difference, immense for American purposes, that they permit labor to be territorially shifted, while serfdom keeps it locally fixed.  By choosing these facilitating forms of bondage instead of the one which would have attached the laborers to the soil, the founders of the colonial regime in industry doubtless thought they had avoided all economic handicaps in the premises.  Their device, however, was calculated to meet the needs of a situation where the choice was between bond labor and no labor.  As generations passed and workingmen multiplied in America, the system of indentures for white immigrants was automatically dissolved; but slavery for the bulk of the negroes persisted as an integral feature of economic life.  Whether this was conducive or injurious to the prosperity of employers and to the community’s welfare became at length a question to which students far and wide applied their faculties.  Some of the participants in the discussion considered the problem as one in pure theory; others examined not only the abstract ratio of slave and free labor efficiency but included in their view the factor of negro racial traits and the prospects and probable consequences of abolition under existing