Chapter 1: About Civil Slavery

Slavery, properly speaking, is the establishment of a right which renders one man so much subject to another man that the latter is the absolute master of the former's life and property. It is not good by its nature. It is useful neither for the master nor for the slave, because, in the case of the latter, he is unable to achieve anything through virtue and, in the case of the former, he contracts from his slaves all sorts of bad habits which imperceptibly habituate him to fail in all the moral virtues, as he becomes proud, hasty, severe, angry, sensuous, and cruel.

In despotic countries, where one is already subjected to political slavery, civil slavery is more tolerable than elsewhere. There, each person must be sufficiently content to have his subsistence and life. Thus, the slave's condition is hardly more burdensome than the subject's condition.

But, under monarchical government, in which it is of sovereign importance neither to humble nor to cheapen human nature, there must not be any slaves. Under democracy, in which everybody is equal, and under aristocracy, in which the laws ought to strive that everybody be as equal as the government's nature may permit, slaves are contrary to the constitution's spirit. They serve only to impart to citizens an authority and luxury which they ought not to have.

Chapter 2: An Origin of the Right of Slavery Among the Roman Jurisconsults

One would never believe that it was pity which had established slavery, and that, to that end it pursued three approaches (a).

The law of nations intended that prisoners would be slaves, in order that one might not kill them. Roman civil law permitted debtors, whose creditors were able to mistreat them, to sell themselves. And natural law intended that the children, whom a slave father could no longer feed, would be in slavery like their father.

These reasons of the jurisconsults are not thoughtful. [1] It is false that it were allowed to kill in war, apart from the case of necessity. But, from the moment that one man has enslaved another one is unable to say that he would have been under the necessity to kill him, since he did not do so.