John Kells Ingram

“ As witness, the slave was still subject to the question; as criminal, he was punished with greater rigour than the freeman. If he accused his master of a crime, unless the charge was of treason, he was burnt. But he could maintain a legal claim to his own liberty, not now merely through an odsertor, but in person. A female slave was still held incapable of the offence of adultery; but Justinian visited with death alike the rape of a slave or freedwoman and that of a free maiden. ”

“ The prodigal, encroaching on his capital, diminishes, as far as in him lies, the amount of productive labour, and so the wealth of the country; nor is this result affected by his expenditure being on home-made, as distinct from foreign commodities. Every prodigal, therefore, is a public enemy; every frugal man a public benefactor. The only mode of increasing the annual produce of the land and labour is to increase either the number of productive labourers or the productive powers of those labourers. ”

“ Thus he cites the assertions that rent depends on the difference of fertility of the different portions of land in cultivation; that the labourer always receives precisely the necessaries, or what custom leads him to consider the necessaries, of life; that, as wealth and population advance, agricultural labour becomes less and less proportionately productive; and that therefore the share of the produce taken by the landlord and the labourer must constantly increase, whilst that taken by the capitalist must constantly diminish; and he denies the truth of all these propositions. ”

“ But it is not so well understood that slavery discharged important offices in the later social evolution—first, by enabling military action to prevail with the degree of intensity and continuity requisite for the system of incorporation by conquest which was its final destination; and, secondly, by forcing the captives, who with their descendants came to form the majority of the population in the conquering community, to an industrial life, in spite of the antipathy to regular and sustained labour which is deeply rooted in human nature. ”

“ If the ordinary price is more than this, the surplus part will naturally go to the rent of the land. If it is not more, though the commodity may be brought to market, it can afford no rent to the landlord. Whether the price is or is not more depends on the demand.” “Rent, therefore, enters into the price of commodities in a different way from wages and profits. High or low wages and profit are the causes of high or low price ; high or low rent is the effect of it.” ”

“ John Adams declared his abhorrence of the practice of slaveholding, and said that " every measure of prudence ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States." ”

“ The improvement in the productiveness of labour depends largely on its division; and he proceeds accordingly to give his unrivalled exposition of that principle, of the grounds on which it rests, and of its greater applicability to manufactures than to agriculture, in consequence of which the latter relatively lags behind in the course of economic development. The origin of the division of labour he finds in the propensity of human nature “to truck, barter or exchange one thing for another.” ”

“ Rent, wages and profits, as they are the elements of price, are also the constituents of income; and the three great orders of every civilized society, from whose revenues that of every other order is ultimately derived, are the landlords, the labourers and the capitalists. The relation of the interests of these three classes to those of society at large is different. The interest of the landlord always coincides with the general interest : whatever promotes or obstructs the one has the same effect on the other. ”

“ It is on the Wealth of Nations that Smith’s fame rests. But it must at once be said that it is plainly contrary to fact to represent him, as some have done, as the creator of political economy. The subject of social wealth had always in some degree, and increasingly in recent times, engaged the attention of philosophic minds. The study had even indisputably assumed a systematic character, and, from being an assemblage of fragmentary disquisitions on particular questions of national interest, had taken the form, notably in Turgot’s Reflexions, of an organized body of doctrine. ”

“ Towards the natural price as a centre the market-price, regulated by competition, constantly gravitates. Some commodities, however, are subject to a monopoly of production, whether from the peculiarities of a locality or from legal privilege: their price is always the highest that can be got; the natural price of other commodities is the lowest which can be taken for any length of time together. The three component parts or factors of price vary with the circumstances of the society. ”

“ Next comes the distinction of the gross national revenue from the net—the first being the whole produce of the land and labour of a country, the second what remains-after deducting the expense of maintaining the fixed capital of the country and that part of its circulating capital which consists of money. Money, “the great wheel of circulation,” is altogether different from the goods which are circulated by means of it; it is a costly instrument by means of which all that each individual receives is distributed to him ”

“ As regards the latter consideration, it is enough to say that nowhere has productive industry developed itself in the form of voluntary effort; in every country of which we have any knowledge it was imposed by the strong upon the weak, and was wrought into the habits of the people only by the stern discipline of constraint. From the former point of view the freeman, then essentially a warrior, and the slave were mutual auxiliaries, simultaneously exercising different and complementary functions—each necessary to the community. ”

“ There is in every society or neighbourhood, an ordinary or average rate of wages and profit in every different employment of labour and stock, regulated by principles to be explained hereafter, as also an ordinary or average rate of rent. These may be called the natural rates at the time when and the place where they prevail; and the natural price of a commodity is what is sufficient to pay for the rent of the land, the wages of the labour, and the profit of the stock necessary for bringing the commodity to market. ”

“ The execution of public works also came to be largely committed to them—as the construction of roads, the cleansing of the sewers and the maintenance of the aqueducts. Both kinds of functions were discharged by slaves, not only at Rome, but in the rural and provincial municipalities. The slaves of a private Roman were divided between the familia rustica and the familia urbana. At the head of the familia rustica was the villicus, himself a slave, with the wife who was given him at once to aid him and to bind him to his duties. ”

“ The slave is a member of the family, and is treated with tenderness and affection. The Koran breathes a considerate and kindly spirit towards the class, and encourages manumission. The child of a slave girl by her master is born free, and the mother is usually raised to be a free wife. The traffic in slaves has been repeatedly declared by the Ottoman Porte to be illegal throughout its dominions, and a law for its suppression was published in 1889, but it cannot be said to be extinct, owing to the laxity and too often the complicity of the government officials. ”

“ As to the different employments of capital, the quantity of productive labour put in motion by an equal amount varies extremely according as that amount is employed— (1) in the improvement of lands, mines or fisheries, (2) in manufactures, (3) in wholesale or (4) retail trade. In agriculture “Nature labours along with man,” and not only the capital of the farmer is reproduced with his profits, but also the rent of the landlord. It is therefore the employment of a given capital which is most advantageous to society. ”

“ To sum up, it may be said that the Wealth of Nations certainly operated powerfully through the harmony of its critical side with the tendencies of the half -century which followed its publication to the assertion of personal freedom and "natural rights." It discredited the economic policy of the past, and promoted the overthrow of institutions which had come down from earlier times, but were unsuited to modern society. ”

“ The military vocation of Rome was now felt to have reached its normal limits; and the emperors, under- standing that, in the future, industrial activity must prevail, prepared the abolition of slavery as far as was then possible, by honouring the freedmen, by protecting the slave against his master, and by facilitating manumissions. ”

“ It is certainly desirable that habits of wasteful expenditure and frequent and wanton changes of fashion should be discouraged. But such action belongs more properly to the spiritual than to the temporal power. In ancient, especially Roman, life, when there was a confusion of the two powers in the state system, sumptuary legislation was more natural than in the modern world, in which those powers have been in general really, though imperfectly, separated. Political economists are practically unanimous in their reprobation of the policy of legislative compulsion in these matters. ”

“ By the original Roman law the master was clothed with absolute dominion over the slave, extending to the power of life and death, which is not surprising when we consider the nature of the patria Laws. potestas. The slave could not possess property of any kind; whatever he acquired was legally his master’s. He was, however, in practice permitted to enjoy and accumulate chance earnings or savings, or a share of what he produced, under the name of peculium. A master could not enter into a contract with his slave, nor could he accuse him of theft before the law ”

“ Parsimony is the source of the increase of capital ; by augmenting the fund devoted to the maintenance of productive hands, it puts in motion an additional quantity of industry, which adds to the value of the annual produce. What is annually saved is as regularly consumed as what is spent, but by a different set of persons, by productive labourers instead of idlers or unproductive labourers; and the former reproduce with a profit the value of their consumption. ”

“ Smith sets out from the thought that the annual labour of a nation is the source from which it derives its supply of the necessaries and conveniences of life. He does not of course contemplate labour as the only factor in production ”

“ We have so far dealt with the political results of ancient slavery, and have found it to have been in certain respects not only useful but indispensable. When we consider its moral effects, whilst endeavouring to avoid exaggeration, we must yet pronounce its influence to have been profoundly detrimental. ”

“ The example of Great Britain was gradually followed by the other European states, and some American ones had already taken action of the same kind. The immediate emancipation of the slaves in the French colonies was decreed by the provisional government of 1848. In 1858 it was enacted that every slave belonging to a Portuguese subject should be free in twenty years from that date, a system of tutelage being established in the meantime. This law came into operation on the 29th of April 1878, and the status of slavery was thenceforth illegal throughout the Portuguese possessions. ”

“ Roscher holds that the sumptuary legislation which regularly appears at the opening of this stage was then useful as promoting the reformation of habits. He remarks that the contemporary formation of strong governments, disposed from the consciousness of their strength to interfere with the lives of their subjects, tended to encourage such legislation, as did also the jealousy felt by the hitherto dominant ranks of the rising wealth of the citizen classes, who are apt to imitate the conduct of their superiors. ”

“ With the establishment of a British protectorate at Zanzibar, and of British and German protectorates on the mainland of East Africa and in the region of the head-waters of the Nile, the East African slave trade received its death-blow. Slavery itself has been abolished in the Zanzibar, British, German and Portuguese dominions, and had ceased in Madagascar even before its conquest by the French. The complete control of the seaboard by European powers has rendered the smuggling of slaves to Arabia and Persia a difficult and dangerous occupation. ”

“ It was in general cheaper to buy a slave than to rear one to the age of labour. (2) Sale of children by their free parents, which was tolerated, except in Attica, or their exposure, which was permitted, except at Thebes. The consequence of the latter was sometimes to subject them to a servitude worse than death, as is seen in the plays of Plautus and Terence, which, as is well known, depict Greek, not Roman, manners. Freemen, through indigence, sometimes sold themselves, and at Athens, up to the time of Solon, an insolvent debtor became the slave of his creditor. ”