Articles de cette rubrique

• XV.1 On civil slavery

  6 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  Slavery, properly speaking, is the institution of a right that makes one man so beholden to another man that that man is the absolute master of his life and property. It is not good by its nature ; it is useful neither to the master nor to the slave : to the slave, because he can do nothing out (…)

• XV.2 The origin of the right of slavery in Roman jurisconsults

  6 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  One would never believe it had been pity that had established slavery, and that it went about it in three ways.
  The law of nations has held that prisoners were slaves, so they would not be killed. The Romans’ civil law allowed debtors, whom their creditors could mistreat, to sell themselves. (…)

• XV.3 Another origin of the right of slavery

  6 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  I would as soon say that the right of slavery comes from the contempt that one nation conceives for another, based on their difference of customs.
  Lopez de Gomara says that “near St. Martha the Spaniards found baskets in which the inhabitants kept comestibles : there were crabs, snails, (…)

• XV.4 Another origin of the right of slavery

  6 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  I would as soon say that religion gives to those who profess it a right to enslave those who do not so as to favor its propagation more effectively.
  It was this manner of thinking that encouraged the destroyers of America in their crimes. It was on this notion that they based the right to (…)

• XV.5 On the slavery of Negroes

  6 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  If I had to defend the right we have had to make slaves of Negroes, here is what I would say :
  The peoples of Europe having exterminated those of America, they had to make slaves of the peoples of Africa in order to use them to clear all that land.
  Sugar would be too dear if we did not have (…)

• XV.6 The true origin of the right of slavery

  6 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  It is time to seek the true origin of the right of slavery. It must be based on the nature of things : let us see whether there are cases where it derives from that.
  In every despotic government it is very easy to sell oneself ; there political slavery obliterates, as it were, civil liberty. (…)

• XV.7 Another origin of the right of slavery

  6 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  Here is another origin of the right of slavery, and even of the cruel kind of slavery we see among men.
  There are countries where heat enervates the body, and so saps courage that men are motivated to a hard duty only by fear of punishment ; slavery therefore clashes less with reason ; and the (…)

• XV.8 Needlessness of slavery here

  6 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  We must then limit natural slavery to certain specific countries of the earth. In all the others it seems to me that however hard the labors society demands, they can all be done with free men.
  What makes me think so is that before Christianity had abolished civil servitude in Europe, work in (…)

• XV.9 Different kinds of slavery

  6 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  There are two kinds of servitude, real and personal. The real kind is that which attaches the slave to the land. Such were the slaves of the Germans, as Tacitus reports. They had no domestic function ; they returned to their master a certain quantity of wheat, livestock, or raw materials : the (…)

• XV.10 What the laws must do with respect to slavery

  6 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  But whatever be the nature of the slavery, civil laws must try to free it from abuses, on the one hand, and dangers on the other.