“The simple wish to use the bodily powers of another person, as a means of ministering to one’s own ease or pleasure, is doubtless the foundation of slavery.”

And thus Professor W. G. Sumner (Yale University):[[342]]

“The desire to get ease or other good by the labor of another and the incidental gratification to vanity seem to be the fundamental principles of slavery, when philosophically regarded, after the rule of one man over others has become established.... It appears that slavery began historically with the war captive, if he or she was not put to death, as he was liable to be by the laws of war.... It seems to be established that it [slavery] began where the economic system was such that there was gain in making a slave of a war captive, instead of killing him.... The defeated [in war] were forced to it [slavery] and learned to submit to it.... It seemed to be good fun, as well as wise policy, to make the members of a rival out-group do these tasks, after defeating them in war.... Inasmuch as slavery springs from greed and vanity, it appeals to primary motives and is at once entwined with selfishness and other fundamental vices.... It rises to an interest which overrules everything else.... The motive of slavery is base and cruel from the beginning.... The interests normally control life.... Slavery is an instinct which is sure to break over all restraints and correctives.... It is a kind of pitfall for civilization.”

Here are a few lines from Professors Ely and Wicker (University of Wisconsin, Department of Economics):[[343]]

“It follows from the need of larger territories [in the hunting stage] that war becomes an economic necessity wherever there is not an abundance of unoccupied land. This same condition of things gives us one of the causes of cannibalism. The pressure of increasing numbers bringing people continually to the verge of starvation, they fall, little by little, into the custom of eating enemies, taken in war.... Captives later came to be recognized as of use in serving their captors, and thus slavery succeeds cannibalism....

“The Origin of a Working Class. Perhaps the most important result of the change which produced the agricultural stage was the growth of slavery as an institution. As we have said, slavery had its beginnings in the preceding periods [hunting and pastoral], but it is only in the agricultural stage that it becomes an important, almost a fundamental, economic institution. Tending the herds did not call for persistent labor, but the prose of tilling the soil is undisguised work, and primitive men were not fond of work.... It is not strange then that they should have saved the lives of men conquered in battle with the design of putting upon them the tasks of tilling the soil.”

On the origin of slavery the eminent French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde, writes:[[344]]

“What do all our modern inventions amount to in comparison with this capital invention of domestication. This was the first decisive victory over animality. Now, of all historic events the greatest and most surprising is, unquestionably, the one which alone made history possible, the triumph of man over surrounding fauna [animals of the region].... To us the trained horse that is docile under the bit is merely a certain muscular force under our control.... The idea of reducing men to slavery, instead of killing and eating them, must have arisen after the idea of training animals instead of feeding on them, for the same reason that war against wild beasts must have preceded that against alien tribes. When man enslaved and domesticated his own kind, he substituted the idea of human beasts of burden for that of human prey.”

And this from Wallis:[[345]]

“But whatever its merits, the consideration of slavery introduces a much larger subject—the place of class relations in social development as a whole. In its material aspect, property in men is an institution by means of which one class of people appropriates the labor product of another class without economic repayment. This relation is brought about [also] by other institutions than slavery. For instance, if a class engross the land of a country and force the remainder of the population to pay rent, either in kind or in money, for the use of the soil, such a procedure issues, like slavery, in the absorption of labor products by an upper class without economic repayment.