The Hireling and the Slave [pp. 208-218]

THIE HIRELING AND THE SLAVE.
equally condemned by public opinion; and as to the courts
of law being open to the pauper hireling, we may remember
the reply of Sheridan to a similar remark,-yes, and so are
the London hotels-justice and a good dinner, with champagne, are equally within his reach. If, in consequence of
the evils incident to hireling labor-because there are severe,
heartless, grinding employers and miserable starving hirelings, it were proposed to abolish hireling labor, it would be
quite as just and logical as the argument to abolish slavery
because there are sufferings among slaves, and hard hearts
among masters. The cruelty or suffering is no more a necessary part of the one system than of the other. Notwithstanding its abuses and miseries, the hireling system works
beneficially with white laborers; and so also, notwithstanding hard masters, slavery, among a Christian people, is advantageous to the negro. To attempt to establish the hireling system with Africans, would be as wCise as to endeavor
to bestow the constitutional government of England on Ashantee or Dahomey. In both cases there would be an equal
amount of abstract truth and practical absurdity.
Slavery is that system of labor which exchanges subsistence for work, which secures a life-maintenance from the
master to the slave, and gives a life-labor from the slave to
the master. The slave is an apprentice for life, and owes his
labor to his master; the master owes support, during life, to
the slave. Slavery is the negro system of labor. He is lazy
and improvident. Slavery makes all work, and it ensures
homes, food and clothing for all. It permits no idleness,
and it provides for sickness, infancy and old age. It allows
no tramping or skulking, and it knows no pauperism.
This is the whole system substantially. All cruelty is an
abuse; does not belong to the institution; is now punished
and may be in time prevented. The abuses of slavery are as
open to all reforming influences as those of any other civil,
social, or political condition. The improvement in the treatment of the slave is as marked as in that of any other laboring class in the world. If it be true of the English soldier
or sailor, that his condition has been ameliorated in the last
fifty years, it is quite as true of the negro.
If slavery is subject to abuses, it has its advantages also.
It establishes more permanent and, therefbre, kinder relations between capital and labor. It removes what Stuart
Mill calls " the widening and embittering feud between the
class of labor and the class of capital." It draws the relation closer between master and servant. There is no such
thing, with slavery, as a laborer for whom nobody cares or
209