Spoliation

“ They may even imagine that they owe all to spoliation—not only what is left to them, but what is taken from them, and what is lost in the process. Nay more, I affirm that, in course of time, and owing to the ingenious mechanism to which they become accustomed, many men become spoliators without knowing that they are so, or desiring to be so. ”

“ When Spoliation has once become the recognised means of existence of a body of men united and held together by social ties, they soon proceed to frame a law which sanctions it, and to adopt a system of morals which sanctifies it. ”

“ Almost always the few oppress the many, and in that case spoliation is none the less undermined, for, if it has force as an agent, as in war and slavery, it is natural that force in the end should be on the side of the greater number. And if deception is the agent, as with superstition and monopoly, it is natural that the many should ultimately become enlightened. ”

“ And such is the power of public opinion that it takes from spoliation all idea of injustice, and from the spoliator all sense of wrongdoing.
The public opinion which reacts against military spoliation makes itself felt, not in the conquering, but in the conquered, country, and exercises little influence. And yet it is not altogether inoperative, and makes itself the more felt in proportion as nations have more frequent intercourse, and understand each other better. ”

“ Let us try, then, to describe the beneficent force which tends gradually to surmount the mischievous and injurious force to which we have given the name of spoliation, and the presence of which is only too well explained by reasoning, and established by experience. ”

“ When does even a legate come among us, though he come only with a burdensome retinue and in all the haughtiness of power? We are handed over to prefects and centurions, and when they are glutted with our spoils and our blood, then they are changed, and new receptacles for plunder, new terms for spoliation, are discovered. ”

“ Just consider on what an immense scale, as we learn from history, spoliation has been exercised through the abuse and excess of the powers of government. Consider what services have been rendered to the people, and what services the public powers have exacted from them, among the Assyrians, the Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans, Persians, Turks, Chinese, Russians, English, Spaniards, Frenchmen. Imagination is startled at the enormous disproportion. ”

“ In an exchange between two services, one of them may be of bad quality; but here, the services received being stipulated for beforehand, spoliation must evidently recede before the advance of public enlightenment.
Next in order come abuses of public services—a vast field of spoliation, so vast that we can only glance at it.
Had man been created a solitary animal, each man would work for himself. Individual wealth would, in that case, be in proportion to the services rendered by each man to himself.
But, man being a sociable animal, services are exchanged for other services ”

“ Unfortunately, it not unfrequently happens that the nations which surround an aggressive and warlike people are themselves given to spoliation when they can accomplish it, and thus become imbued with the same prejudices. ”

“ The feudal idea, which views all rights as emanating from a head landlord, came in with the Conquest, was associated with foreign dominion, and has never to this day been recognised by the moral sentiments of the people. Originally the offspring not of industry but of spoliation, the right has not been allowed to purify itself by protracted possession, but has passed from the original spoliators to others by a series of fresh spoliations, so as to be always connected with the latest and most odious oppressions of foreign invaders. ”

“ He pitilessly despoils, fleeces, and ill-treats him to the extent of completely ruining and destroying those families, which are the only ones who cultivate the ground; it was a state of war continued in time of peace, and transformed into a regime of permanent spoliation and murder. ”

“ Let us steer clear of strong language, which may be misapplied; for spoliation, wrapt up in the sophistry which conceals it, may be in full operation unknown to the spoliator, and with the blind assent of his victim. Still, you are deprived of the just remuneration of your labour, and no one is concerned to do you justice. If all that was wanted to console you were ardent appeals to philanthropy, to impotent charity, to degrading almsgiving; or if the grand words, organization, communism, phalanstère,* were enough for you, truly they would not be spared. ”

“ To the shame of the more enlightened race, however, it must be said that its relations with its less civilized neighbor were marked by a policy of persistent abuse and a disregard of justice and treaty obligations which operated time and again to goad the red man into impotent warfare, and this, in turn, became the excuse for further spoliation. ”

“ It aims to extend among the oppressed masses enough good sense, enlightenment and just defiance, to render oppression both difficult and dangerous.
It may also be remarked that utilitarian morality is not without its influence upon the oppressor. An act of spoliation causes good and evil—evil for him who suffers it, good for him in whose favor it is exercised—else the act would not have been performed. But the good by no means compensates the evil. ”

“ The shame of the fact that the spoils system, of which all this is but the natural outgrowth, has prevailed among us for more than half a century, we cannot hide from the searching eyes of mankind—just as in times gone by we could not hide the hideous blot of slavery. ”

“ The possessors of power and wealth seek to perpetuate these advantages in their families, their clan, or their caste; and over almost all the earth they have established dynasties for governments, landed or moneyed feudalisms for lords, and entails for individual families.
That we may see how fearful a thing this spirit of oppression is, not only for its cruelties, but for the tenacity of its malignant life, let it be remembered that the world had existed almost six thousand years before the principles of human liberty, civil and ecclesiastical, were clearly and fully set forth even on paper. ”

“ And there is no difference, in principle—but only in degree—between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure. ”

“ If the plan of separation gives us the pastoral care of you, it remains to inquire whether we have done anything, as a conference, or as men, to forfeit your confidence and affection. We are not advised that even in the great excitement which has distressed you for some months past, any one has impeached our moral conduct, or charged us with unsoundness in doctrine, or corruption or tyranny in the administration of discipline. But we learn that the simple cause of the unhappy excitement among you is, that some suspect us, or affect to suspect us, of being abolitionists. ”

“ But the spoils system has inflicted upon the American people injuries far greater than these.
The spoils system, that practice which turns public offices, high and low, from public trusts into objects of prey and booty for the victorious party, may without extravagance of language be called one of the greatest criminals in our history, if not the greatest. In the whole catalogue of our ills there is none more dangerous to the vitality of our free institutions. ”

“ Whether you examine the conduct of the nation at large, or that of its chiefs and leaders, your feelings revolt at the one, and your integrity despises the other. You see the idols erected by Folly, degraded by Caprice;—the authority obtained by Intrigue, bartered by Profligacy;—and the perfidy and corruption of one side so balanced by the barbarity and levity of the other, that the mind, unable to decide on the preference of contending vices, is obliged to find repose, though with regret and disgust, in acknowledging the general depravity. ”

“ The compulsion which would force him to labor even for his own benefit only in one direction, or in one place, would be almost as oppressive and nearly as great an invasion of his liberty as the compulsion which would force him to labor for the benefit or pleasure of another, and would equally constitute an element of servitude. ”

“ Marriage under conditions arbitrarily fixed by an external agency is slavery; and if we allow the right of an external agency—be it State, family, or community—to place marriage in so degrading a position, we necessarily deny the freedom of the individual in this most intimate of [Pg 121] relationships, and put ourselves in the position of petitioners for privilege when we sue for an improvement in the rules to which we have subjected ourselves. ”

“ Intermarriage with the inferior race, whether bond or free, was prohibited by religion as a sin, by public opinion as a shame, and by law as a crime. But neither law, gospel, nor public opinion could prevent that amalgamation which, according to all experience, inevitably and extensively takes place whenever two races come into that close juxtaposition which domestic slavery of necessity implies. ”

“ But we find laws correcting abuses of quite a different nature; abuses that grow out of the perverse nature of man towards his fellow-man of equal grade, touching their mutual rights in property:
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his man-servant (וְעַבְדּ֤וֹwĕʿabdô ve abeddo, male slave) , nor his maid-servant (וַֽאֲמָתוֹwaʾămāhô va amatho, female slave) , nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.” ”

“ Such men, however, while resisting its temptations and debasing influences, have by no means been exempt from the harassing and distracting effects of the spoils system, and, I am sure, they are among the foremost to condemn it and to favor its abolition. ”

“ The nineteenth declares that the separation of married parties, by the sale of one who is a slave, does not affect the marriage. They must be admonished, if they cannot be reunited, to remain continent. ”

“ The spoils system is therefore not only not a stimulus of true public spirit, but in spreading the mercenary tendency among the people it has served to baffle and discourage true public spirit by the offensive infusion in political life of the mercenary element. ”

“ The parent sends away his children, but sends them to prosper, and to press them again to his heart with a joy enhanced by separation. Are such the separations which slavery makes? And can he, who has scattered other families, ask God to bless his own? ”

“ Polygamy.Polygamy and servile concubinage are still the privilege, or the curse, of Islam; the worm at its root, the secret of its fall. By these the unity of the household is fatally broken, and the purity and virtue weakened of the family tie: the vigour of the dominant classes is sapped; the body politic becomes weak and languid, excepting for intrigue; and the throne itself liable to fall a prey to doubtful or contested succession. Female slavery.As to slavery, and more especially female slavery, we look too exclusively at its effect on the wretched subject of the institution. ”

“ Take the single case of polygamy. Admitting that the patriarchs held slaves, the argument in favour of polygamy, from their conduct, would be, in all its main features, the same as that which I suggested, in the commencement of this chapter, as employed in favour of slavery. The argument would be this:—That they were good men, the ‘friends of God,’ and that what such men practised freely cannot be wrong; that God permitted this; that he nowhere forbade it; that he did not record his disapprobation of the practice ”

“ Look at that awful despotism, that you may understand what a savage, scaly, bloody-mouthed beast was welcomed into the church and baptized [Pg 142] with a Christian baptism, if we may believe the advocates of human bondage.
1. “The (Roman) slave had no protection against the avarice, rage, or lust of the master, whose authority was founded in absolute property; and the bondman was viewed less as a human being subject to arbitrary dominion, than as an inferior animal, dependent wholly on the will of his overseer. ”

“ Men who had earlier been obscured by their respective families, clans, and brotherhoods, now severed themselves for all public purposes from these associations, recognizing only the authority of a state which threw open its privileges to all alike. ”

“ We may be only two or three, but we are a fighting colony. I am by way of being a cleric, but I don’t always cut my linguistic coat to suit my cloth, and my word at this hour is, Damn the bestial ecclesiastical bigotry which seeks to tie the bodies of men and women together when their souls are sundered! Here is a man reported within this last fortnight as having been arrested the day after his marriage at a registrar’s office, and as having been since then condemned to penal servitude for life. ”

“ And this corruption of blood, which the law of slavery works, does not stop with the first, nor with the second generation,—not with the tenth nor the ten thousandth; but by the theory of the law, goes on forever. Bills of attainder, during the history of the worst periods of the world, have applied to individuals only, or at most to a family. ”

“ To show how fundamental is the distinction between bondage of the primitive type and the bondage of serfdom, it needs but to add that, while the one can and does exist among savages and pastoral tribes, the other becomes possible only after the agricultural stage is reached; for only then can there occur the bodily annexation of one society by another, and only then can there be any tying to the soil. ”