Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: slave in the first place. And hence the masters held the power of life and death, the power to compel all degrees of suffering and all manner of degradation, the power to enforce unwilling and unmentionable debauchery. The innocence of childhood, the helplessness of those outworn with toil and with the years, the enforced nakedness and debauchery of women, every faculty and function of whose bodies were held as the property of others; strong men compelled to slay each other for the entertainment of seeing them die together —these were the toys with which brutality and lust amused themselves for forty centuries. 79. Products of Slave Labor.—The cities, palaces and pyramids of Egypt, the hanging gardens and the wide and endless walls of Babylon, the temples, the harbors, the ships and markets of Greece, the stone roads which traversed all lands of the then known world, the fortresses, the camps, the villas and the mines, the pavements, waterways, coliseums and the fields and the vineyards of Rome, and across the Mediterranean and in Spain, the works of Home's greatest rival, Carthage,—all were the products of the toil of slaves. 80. Slavery in the United States.—Something ought to be said about slavery and serfdom in the United States. The old slavery, which made slaves or serfs of many of the ancestry of the people who finally became the settlers of this country, had practically disappeared when the enslavement of the black man was undertaken in Europe. It was never able to make any headway in the old country, where wage labor could be secured on such terms as always made the labor ofthe black slave unprofitable. The cotton, sugar and tobacco plantations of the new world, however, furnished an opening where labor was so scarce and the profits were so great that the black slav...