If war does not give the conqueror the right of massacring the conquered, it does not give him the right of reducing them to slavery.... The right of making of the enemy a slave, does not then follow the right of killing him; it is then an iniquitous exchange to make him buy his life at the price of his liberty, over which one has no right whatsoever.
Montesquieu has also combated slavery; but he has done it under a form of irony, which gives still greater force to his eloquence.
“If I had to defend the right we have had to make slaves of the negroes, this is what I should say:
“The peoples of Europe having exterminated those of America, they were obliged to reduce to slavery those of Africa in order to use them to clear the lands.
“Sugar would be too dear if the plant that produces it were not cultivated by slaves.
“The people in question are black from head to foot, and they have so flat a nose that it is almost impossible to pity them.
“One cannot conceive that God, who is a being most wise, could have put a soul, and above all a good soul, in so black a body.
“It is impossible for us to suppose that these people are men; because if we supposed them to be men, one might begin to think we are not Christians ourselves.
“Narrow minds exaggerate too much the injustice done to Africans. For if it were as they say, would it not have come to the minds of the princes of Europe, who make so many useless contracts among each other, to make a general one in favor of mercy and of pity?”[38]
54. Servitude—Restrictions of the liberty to work—Oppression of children under age, etc.—Absolute slavery existed in antiquity, and has particularly reappeared since the discovery of America, owing to the difference of the races: the black race being, seemingly, particularly adapted to the cultivation of the torrid zones, and endowed with great physical vitality, became the serving-race par excellence: it has even been hunted down for purposes of procreation; hence that infamous traffic, called slave trade, and which is to-day interdicted by all civilized countries.