I'm still reading and re-reading Simkhovitch's "Rome's Fall Reconsidered". At one point he writes: "Varro had advised against the use of slaves for work in marshy lands, and advocated taking chances with the health of hired freemen" because of the spread of malaria. It's better for a free man to get malaria than for a slave to get it -- better for Varro's readers, the owners of the slaves.
As for myself, I think it is sad that we still have to dwell on the evils of slavery. I think we need to focus today on the evils inherent in the idea that property is sacred. For if we do not cut short the concentration of wealth that arises because we honor the "property is sacred" principle, it will soon be too late to prevent the return of slavery on a massive scale.
2 comments:
Arnold J. Toynbee:
"Of the penalizations imposed not by accident of nature but by the hand of man, the most obvious, the most universal and the most severe has been enslavement."
Toynbee again:
"As for ourselves, our tobacco-smoking commemorates our extermination of the red-skinned aborigines of North America, our coffee-drinking and tea-drinking and polo-playing and pyjama-wearing and Turkish baths commemorate the enthronement of the Frankish man-of-business in the seat of the Ottoman Qaysar-i-Rum and of the Mughal Qaysar-i-Hind, and our jazzing commemorates the enslavement of the African Negro and his transportation across the Atlantic to labour on American soil in plantations which had taken the place of the hunting-grounds of the vanished Red Indians."
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