the permanently unstable equilibrium of the slaveholding enterprise, and its inevitable ruin.”  The decline of earnings and of slave prices promotes a more drastic oppression, as in Roman Sicily, to reduce the slave’s peculium and continue the prevention of his self-purchase.  When this device is about to fail of its purpose the masters may foil the intention of the slaves by changing them into serfs, attaching the lands to the laborers as an additional thing to be purchased as a condition of freedom.  The value of the man may now be permitted to fall to its natural level.  Finally, when the growth of population has made land so dear that common laborers in freedom cannot save enough to buy farms, the occasion for slavery and serfdom lapses.  Laborers may now be freed to become a wage-earning proletariat, to take their own risks.  An automatic coercion replaces the systematic; the labor stimulus is intensified, but the stress of the employer is diminished.  The laborer does not escape from coercion, but merely exchanges one of its forms for another.[85]

[Footnote 85:  Achille Loria, The Economic Synthesis, M. Eden Paul tr.  (London, 1914), PP. 23-26, 91-99.]

Now Loria falls into various fallacies in other parts of his book, as when he says that southern lands are generally more fertile than northern and holds that alone, to the exclusion of climate and racial qualities, responsible for the greater prevalence of slavery ancient and modern in southerly latitudes; or when he follows Cairnes in asserting that upon the American slave plantations “the only form of culture practised was spade culture, merely agglomerating upon a single area of land a number of isolated laborers”; or when he contends that either slavery or serfdom since based on force and fraud “destroys the possibility of fiduciary credit by cancelling the conditions [of trust and confidence] which alone can foster it.” [86] Such errors disturb one’s faith.  In the presentation of his main argument, furthermore, he not only exaggerates the cleavage between capitalists and laborers, the class consciousness of the two groups and the rationality of capitalistic purpose, but he falls into calamitous ambiguity and confusion.  The central phenomenon of slavery, says he, is speculation or the overvaluation of the slave.  He thereupon assumes that speculation always means overvaluation, ignoring its downward possibility, and he accounts for the asserted universal and continuously increasing overvaluation by reference to the desire of masters to prevent slaves from buying their freedom.  Here he ignores essential historic facts.  In American law a slave’s peculium had no recognition; and the proportion of slaves, furthermore, who showed any firm disposition to accumulate savings for the purpose of buying their freedom was very small.  Where such efforts were made, however, they were likely to be aided by the masters through facilities for cash earnings, price concessions and honest accounting of instalments, notwithstanding the lack of legal requirements in the premises.  Loria’s explanation of the “central phenomenon” is therefore hardly tenable.