Slavery long existed among ourselves.  It existed when Caesar lauded.  It existed in Saxon times, when the household work was done by slaves.  The Saxons were notorious slave-dealers, and the Irish were their best customers.  The principal mart was at Bristol, from whence the Saxons exported large numbers of slaves into Ireland so that, according to Irish historians, there was scarcely a house in Ireland without a British slave in it.

When the Normans took possession of England, they continued slavery.  They made slaves of the Saxons themselves whom they decreed villeins and bondsmen.  Domesday Book shows that the toll of the market at Lewes in Sussex was a penny for a cow, and fourpence for a slave—­not a serf (adscriptus glebae), but an unconditional bondsman.  From that time slavery continued in various forms.  It is recorded of “the good old times,” that it was not till the reign of Henry IV. (1320—­1413) that villeins, farmers, and mechanics were permitted by law to put their children to school; and long after that, they dared not educate a son for the Church without a licence from the lord.[1] The Kings of England, in their contests with the feudal aristocracy, gradually relaxed the slave laws.  They granted charters founding Royal Burghs; and when the slaves fled into them, and were able to conceal themselves for a year and a day, they then became freemen of the burgh, and were declared by law to be free.

[Footnote 1:  Henry’s History of England, Book v., chap. 4]

The last serfs in England were emancipated in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; but the last serfs in Scotland, were not emancipated until the reign of George III, at the end of last century.  Before then, the colliers and salters belonged to the soil.  They were bought and sold with it.  They had no power to determine what their wages should be.  Like the slaves in the Southern States of America, they merely accepted such sustenance as was sufficient to maintain their muscles and sinews in working order.

They were never required to save for any purpose, for they had no right to their own savings.  They did not need to provide for to-morrow; their masters provided for them.  The habit of improvidence was thus formed; and it still continues.  The Scotch colliers, who were recently earning from ten to fourteen shillings a day, are the grandsons of men who were slaves down to the end of last century.  The preamble of an Act passed in 1799 (39th Geo. III., c. 56), runs as follows:  “Whereas, before the passing of an Act of the fifteenth of his present Majesty, many colliers, coal-bearers, and salters were bound for life to, and transferable with, the collieries and salt-works where they worked, but by the said Act their bondage was taken off and they were declared to be free, notwithstanding which many colliers and coalbearers and salters still continue in a state of bondage from not having complied with the provisions, or from having become subject to the penalties of that Act,” etc.  The new Act then proceeds to declare them free from servitude.  The slaves formerly earned only enough to keep them, and laid by nothing whatever for the future.  Hence we say that the improvidence of the colliers, as of the iron-workers, is but a survival of the system of slavery in our political constitution.