Economists of later times have nearly all been too much absorbed in current problems to give attention to a discarded institution.  Most of them have ignored the subject of slavery altogether, and the concern of the rest with it has been merely incidental.  Nicholson, for example, alludes to it as[21] “one of the earliest and one of the most enduring forms of poverty,” and again as “the original and universal form of bankruptcy.”  Smart deals with it only as concerns the care of workingmen’s children:  “The one good thing in slavery was the interest of the master in the future of his workers.  The children of the slaves were the master’s property.  They were always at least a valuable asset....  But there is no such continuity in the relation between the employer [of free labor] and his human cattle.  The best-intentioned employer cannot be expected to be much concerned about the efficient upkeep of the workman’s child when the child is free to go where he likes....  The child’s future is bound up with the father’s wage.  The wage may be enough, even when low, to support the father’s efficiency, but it is not necessarily enough to keep up the efficiency of the young laborer on which the future depends."[22] Loria deals more extensively with slavery as affected by the valuation of labor,[23] and Gibson[24] examines elaborately the nature of hypothetically absolute slavery in analyzing the earnings of labor.  The contributions of both Loria and Gibson will be used below.  The economic bearings of the institution in history still await satisfactory analysis.

[Footnote 21:  J.S.  Nicholson, Principles of Political Economy (New York, 1898), I, 221, 391.]

[Footnote 22:  William Smart, The Distribution of Income (London, 1899), pp. 296, 297.]

[Footnote 23:  Achille Loria, La Costitutione Economica Odierna (Turin, 1899), chap. 6, part 2.]

[Footnote 24:  Arthur H. Gibson, Human Economics (London, 1909).]

CHAPTER XIX

BUS

An expert accountant has well defined the property of a master in his slave as an annuity extending throughout the slave’s working life and amounting to the annual surplus which the labor of the slave produced over and above the cost of his maintenance.[1] Before any profit accrued to the master in any year, however, various deductions had to be subtracted from this surplus.  These included interest on the slave’s cost, regardless of whether he had been reared by his owner or had been bought for a price; amortization of the capital investment; insurance against the slave’s premature death or disability and against his escape from service; insurance also for his support when incapacitated whether by illness, accident or old age; taxes; and wages of superintendence.  None of these charges would any sound method of accounting permit the master to escape.

[Footnote 1:  Arthur H. Gibson, Human Economics (London, 1909), p. 202.  The substance of the present paragraph and the three following ones is mostly in close accord with Gibson’s analysis.]