Slavery

The fact, that slavery was tolerated in the colonies, is no evidence of its legality;

It would spare no vestige of that system of human slavery, which now claims to exist by authority of law.

Neither the statute, nor any right of property acquired under it, (in the individual slaves thereafterwards brought from Africa,) would therefore avail anything for the legality of slavery in this country now;

And it would be an evident contradiction in economists to assert, that cultivation by personal slavery is unthrifty, but that the subjection of capital to legislative dislocation, will make it more productive.

Are slaves free, because their labour is made more productive, (if such be the fact,) by the intelligence of their masters?

although it is notorious that mechanicks, white or black, freemen or slaves, earn much higher daily wages than agricultural labourers can gain;

But the Jus Gentium (the law of the civilized world) admits the institution of Slavery.

Roman slavery cannot be judged solely either by the dismal picture Edition:

Another institution, slavery, placed one subject over another in the position of despotic sovereign.

in the South, on the other hand, the maintenance of slavery developed into a fixed policy, and before the War of Secession the “peculiar institution” had become the foundation-stone of the social system.

Again, then, the man who argued about slavery disputed what the full title of possession might be.

Do not, then, suppose that Ares, who is a god and strong, was thus fettered by bonds fine and invisible, but that you, who are the weakest of all creatures, could never be caught by unseen bonds, but only if they were well wrought of iron and bronze.

but the slave-women, on the contrary, some destroy the child before birth, some afterward, if they can do it secretly—sometimes even with the connivance of the men—that they may not have the trouble of being forced to rear children in addition to their slavery.

I do not question the received opinion that Christianity greatly mitigated and did much to abolish personal and predial slavery in the West, but the Continental lawyers of whom I spoke considerably antedate its influence, and take far too little account of the prodigious effects subsequently produced by the practical equality of all men within the pale of the Catholic priesthood.

If he justifies slavery, it is not without ingenuity;

Do you not even see this, how our ancestors took away from masters all that was odious, from slaves all that was insulting?

As often as it comes into your mind how much you are allowed against a slave, let it come into your mind that your own master is allowed just as much against you.

No slavery is more shameful than the voluntary.

Slavery is in the natural order of the castes, not in the reverse order, for a Kṣatriya, Vaiśya, and Śūdra who renounce their independence.

A free woman married by a slave also attains the state of slavery, because her husband is her lord, and the lord is dependent on his master.

One who is kept without wages is freed from slavery by giving a pair of oxen.

One maintained during a famine is released from slavery by giving a pair of oxen.

Of these, the first four are not released from slavery, except by the grace of the master;

Slavery is not ordained in the reverse order of the classes, except for one who has abandoned his own duty.

Slavery is still a natural and beneficent industrial system among some peoples;

In the days of slavery it would have been quite as accurate to say that the natural relation between master and workman was one of coercion.

The worst slavery, therefore, is the slavery endured by the incontinent?

Possibly, in fact, to do what is best appears to you to be freedom, and so you think that to have masters who will prevent such activity is bondage?

What sort of masters are they, in your opinion, who prevent the best and enforce the worst?