neither can the mind be disciplined into the habits required by
civilized society, nor the material world prepared to receive it.
There needs a rare concurrence of circumstances, and for that reason
often a vast length of time, to reconcile such a people to industry,
unless they are for a while compelled to it. Hence even personal
slavery, by giving a commencement to industrial life, and enforcing it
as the exclusive occupation of the most numerous portion of the
community, may accelerate the transition to a better freedom than that
of fighting and rapine. It is almost needless to say that this excuse
for slavery is only available in a very early state of society. A
civilized people have far other means of imparting civilization to
those under their influence; and slavery is, in all its details, so
repugnant to that government of law, which is the foundation of all
modern life, and so corrupting to the master-class when they have once
come under civilized influences, that its adoption under any
circumstances whatever in modern society is a relapse into worse than
barbarism.

At some period, however, of their history, almost every people, now
civilized, have consisted, in majority, of slaves. A people in that
condition require to raise them out of it a very different polity from
a nation of savages. If they are energetic by nature, and especially
if there be associated with them in. the same community an industrious
class who are neither slaves nor slave-owners (as was the case in
Greece), they need, probably, no more to insure their improvement than
to make them free: when freed, they may often be fit, like Roman
freedmen, to be admitted at once to the full rights of citizenship.
This, however, is not the normal condition of slavery, and is
generally a sign that it is becoming obsolete. A slave, properly so
called, is a being who has not learned to help himself. He is, no