THE HONGKONG GOVERNMENT GAZETTE, 4TH FEBRUARY, 1880.
REPORT BY DR. EITEL.
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Slavery, as it existed in the West, in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in modern America, has always been an incident of race. Greek philosophers, in view of the intellectual inferiority of barba- rians, treated the enslavement of barbarians by Greeks as a matter of course. As to Roman slavery, it claimed no other justification than the right of conquest. The members of an inferior race, or the subjects of a weaker nation, were held in perpetual bondage by the members of another and stronger race who conquered in war, and who looked upon their captives and the descendants of their captives as their property, de jure gentium, as Justinian calls it. In course of time, however, an enlarged sense of equity and the development of that old Roman theory, the lex naturalis, refuted this notion of the Roman Law that victory gave the conqueror any further power over the defeated beyond disarming and disabling them as regards resumption of warfare. But with this advance of civilization came also an enlarged consciousness of the wide gulf separating civilized nations from barbarous tribes, white men and therefore free men from black races, supposed to be intended by nature for a position inferior to that of a free civilized white man. Slavery was thus not only continued but assumed a decper significance and seemingly greater justification as being founded on organic differences, implanted in men by nature, inborn and therefore indelible. Thus it was that modern slavery, whilst abandoning the justification established in Roman Law by
the so-called jus gentium of Justinian, adopted the argument first propounded by Greek philosophers, and slavery became thus a more enduring and systematic bondage than ever. For it was now defended even by Christian divines as in harmony with the divine purposes pro- phesied in Scripture regarding the descendants of Hain, and illustrated by the physical and intellectual inferiority of black races, for Science also lent its aid to rivet the chains of the Africans, as being but highly developed apes.
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Roman slavery received its fullest development when Roman civilization and Ronan jurispru dence was in its zenith. Thus also the absolute slavery in which the black races of Africa were held by white men in the West-Indies and in America, who treated them simply as a commercial article of export and import, was materially perfected by the rapid advance which civilization and science had made among the progressive Societies of Europe and America as compared with the retarded develop- ment of barbaric into civilized life, illustrated by the condition of the black races of Africa.
In fact this postulate of organic differences in men as the principal apparent justification of modern slavery, is possible only in Societies which in the evolution of their social and political organism from the family groups or village units of patriarchalism, summing up all the relations of persons in the relations of family, have reached that high stage of development which is characterized by a mature sense of personal rights and individual obligation giving to the individual the place of the family. That systematic reduction of men to chattelhood which converts the members of one race into a seemingly natural article of trade or into mere living implements of agriculture for the use of another race, is the privilege of a socially self-conscious generation which laboured hard to emerge from feudalism and despotism in gaining civil and political freedom and was able therefore to appreciate what the negation of liberty implies.
But although this modern slavery was thus the natural outcome of an abnormally rapid advance of civilization, it was an outrage upon the spirit of the old Roman lex naturalis which all along counter- acted the growing tendency of Roman Law to treat the slave as a mere article of property and which especially since the French Revolution developed with marvellous rapidity. Slavery was in truth an unnatural straining of the organic differences implanted in man and therefore bound to be rectified by a reaction. The great Colonial Emancipation initiated by Wilberforce, and the more recent abolition of slavery in the United States, represent thus but a necessary development of the social organism of the West. The natural law of reaction was set in motion by that hunitarianism which since the end of the last century began to permeate, like an electric current, the whole of the Western world. The result was a general growth of that ideal conception of nature which merges all distinctions of race in the higher synthesis of the universal brotherhood of man. Slavery has thus, happily, become an im- possibility among the enlightened nations of the West in whose laws and social relations the status of a slave has been more or less superseded by the contractual relation of master and servant.
Nevertheless it must not be forgotten that, whilst this higher conception of humanity, this apprecia- tion of the fundamental equality of all human beings with its consequence, the abolition of slavery, is the outcome of a long course of organic development through which the social life of the West has passed by the gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth of individual obligation, our present conceptions of humanity, of personal liberty and of slavery, are but transitions of progress and await further modifications and wider applications from the light of science and the spirit of equity. And further it should be remembered that, whilst the slave trade is successfully abolished in the West. slavery still lingers in many highly civilized countries. Even in the social organisms of the most advanced countries like England numerous relics of ancient patriarchalism, feudalism and despotism have survived which are out of harmony with the spirit of modern civilization. Take as an instance that relic of ancient patriarchalism, the absolute authority of husband and father, which still survives in the Law of England vesting parental rights in the father alone. Or take as another instance that relic of ancient feudalism, the European principle of feme covert, which absorbs the legal existence of