But if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen.The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any.A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible.Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.In ancient Italy, how much the cultivation of corn degenerated, how unprofitable it became to the master when it fell under the management of slaves, is remarked by both Pliny and Columella.In the time of Aristotle it had not been much better in ancient Greece.Speaking of the ideal republic described in the laws of Plato, to maintain five thousand idle men (the number of warriors supposed necessary for its defence) together with their women and servants, would require, he says, a territory of boundless extent and fertility, like the plains of Babylon.
The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors.Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen.The planting of sugar and tobacco can afford the expense of slave-cultivation.The raising of corn, it seems, in the present times, cannot.In the English colonies, of which the principal produce is corn, the far greater part of the work is done by freemen.The late resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to set at liberty all their negro slaves may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great.Had they made any considerable part of their property, such a resolution could never have been agreed to.In our sugar colonies, on the contrary, the whole work is done by slaves, and in our tobacco colonies a very great part of it.The profits of a sugar-plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America; and the profits of a tobacco plantation, though inferior to those of sugar, are superior to those of corn, as has already been observed.Both can afford the expense of slave-cultivation, but sugar can afford it still better than tobacco.The number of negroes accordingly is much greater, in proportion to that of whites, in our sugar than in our tobacco colonies.
To the slave cultivators of ancient times gradually succeeded a species of farmers known at present in France by the name of metayers.They are called in Latin, Coloni partiarii.
They have been so long in disuse in England that at present Iknow no English name for them.The proprietor furnished them with the seed, cattle, and instruments of husbandry, the whole stock, in short, necessary for cultivating the farm.The produce was divided equally between the proprietor and the farmer, after setting aside what was judged necessary for keeping up the stock, which was restored to the proprietor when the farmer either quitted, or was turned out of the farm.
Land occupied by such tenants is properly cultivated at the expense of the proprietor as much as that occupied by slaves.
There is, however, one very essential difference between them.
Such tenants, being freemen, are capable of acquiring property, and having a certain proportion of the produce of the land, they have a plain interest that the whole produce should be as great as possible, in order that their own proportion may be so.Aslave, on the contrary, who can acquire nothing but his maintenance, consults his own ease by making the land produce as little as possible over and above that maintenance.It is probable that it was partly upon account of this advantage, and partly upon account of the encroachments which the sovereign, always jealous of the great lords, gradually encouraged their villains to make upon their authority, and which seem at last to have been such as rendered this species of servitude altogether inconvenient, that tenure in villanage gradually wore out through the greater part of Europe.The time and manner, however, in which so important a revolution was brought about is one of the most obscure points in modern history.The Church of Rome claims great merit in it; and it is certain that so early as the twelfth century, Alexander III published a bull for the general emancipation of slaves.It seems, however, to have been rather a pious exhortation than a law to which exact obedience was required from the faithful.Slavery continued to take place almost universally for several centuries afterwards, till it was gradually abolished by the joint operation of the two interests above mentioned, that of the proprietor on the one hand, and that of the sovereign on the other.A villain enfranchised, and at the same time allowed to continue in possession of the land, having no stock of his own, could cultivate it only by means of what the landlord advanced to him, and must, therefore, have been what the French called a metayer.
