in Metallurgy, a term used by miners to express a spongy and semivitrified substance which is mixed with the ores of metals, to prevent their fusion. It is the scoria or scum separated from the surface of the former fusions of metals. To this is frequently added limestone, and sometimes a kind of coarse iron ore, in the running of the poorer gold ores.
SLAVERY is a word, of which, though generally understood, it is not easy to give a proper definition. An excellent moral writer has defined it to be "an obligation to labour for the benefit of the master, without the contract or consent of the servant." But may not he be properly called a slave, who has given up his freedom to discharge a debt which he could not otherwise pay, or who has thrown it away at a game of hazard? In many nations, debts have been legally discharged in this manner; and in some savage tribes, it is no uncommon thing for a man, after having lost at play all his other property, to stake, on a single throw of dice, himself, his wife, and his children. That persons who have thus lost their liberty are slaves, will hardly be denied; and surely the infatuated gambler is a slave by his own contract. The debtor, too, if he was aware of the law, and contracted debts larger than he could reasonably expect to be able to pay, may justly be considered as having come under an obligation to labour for the benefit of a master with his own consent; for every man is answerable for all the known consequences of his voluntary actions.
But this definition of slavery seems to be defective as well as inaccurate. A man may be under an obligation to labour through life for the benefit of a master, and yet that master have no right to dispose of him by sale, or in any other way to make him the property of a third person; but the word slave, as used amongst us, always denotes a person who may be bought and sold like a beast in the market.
As nothing can be more evident than that all men have, by the law of nature, an equal right to life, liberty, and the produce of their own labour, it is not easy to conceive what can have first led one part of them to imagine that they had a right to enslave another. Inequalities of rank are indeed inevitable in civil society; and from them results that servitude which is founded in contract, and is of temporary duration. He who has much property has many things to attend to, and must be disposed to hire persons to assist and serve him; whilst those who have little or no property must be equally willing to be hired for that purpose. And if the master be kind, and the servant faithful, they will both be happier in this connection than they could have been out of it. But from a state of servitude, where the slave is at the absolute disposal of his master in all things, and may be transferred without his own consent from one proprietor to another, like an ox or an ass, happiness must be for ever banished. How then came a traffic so unnatural and unjust as that of slaves, to be originally introduced into the world?
The common answer to this question is, that it took its rise amongst savages, who, in their frequent wars with each other, either massacred their captives in cold blood, or condemned them to perpetual slavery. In support of this opinion etymologists observe, that the Latin word servus, which signifies not a hired servant, but a slave, is derived from servare, to preserve; and that such men were called servi, because they were captives, whose lives were preserved on the condition of their becoming the property of the victor.
That slavery had its origin from war, we think extremely probable, nor are we inclined to controvert this etymology of the word servus; but the traffic in men prevailed almost universally, long before the Latin language or Roman name was heard of; and there is no good evidence that it began amongst savages. The word שׁבּי, in the Old Testament, which in our version is rendered servant, signifies literally a slave, either born in the family or bought with money, in contradistinction to שׁבּי, which denotes a hired servant; and as Noah makes use of the word שׁבּי in the curse which Prior to the deluge, it would appear that slavery had its origin before that event. If so, it may be plausibly conjectured that it began amongst those violent persons whom our translators have called giants, though the original word אָנֹכְיִים literally signifies assailters of others. Those wretches seem to have first seized upon women, whom they forcibly compelled to minister to their pleasures; and from this kind of violence the progress was natural to that by which they enslaved their weaker brethren amongst the men, obliging them to labour for their benefit, without allowing them fee or reward.
After the deluge the first dealer in slaves seems to have been Nimrod. "He began," we are told, "to be a mighty slaved one in the earth, and was a mighty hunter before the Lord." Captives. He could not, however, be the first hunter of wild beasts; nor is it probable that his dexterity in the chase, which was then the universal employment, could have been so far superior to that of all his contemporaries, as to entitle him to the appellation of "the mighty hunter before the Lord." Hence most commentators have concluded, that he was a hunter of men; an opinion which they think receives some countenance from the import of his name, the word Nimrod signifying a rebel. Whatever be in this, there can be little doubt that he became a mighty one by violence; for it appears from Scripture, that he invaded the territories of Ashur the son of Shem, who had settled in Shinar; and, obliging him to remove into Assyria, he seized upon Babylon, and made it the capital of the first kingdom in the world. As he had great projects in view, it seems to be in a high degree probable that he made bond-servants of the captives whom he took in his wars, and employed them in building or repairing the metropolis of his kingdom; and hence may perhaps be dated the origin of post-diluvian slavery.
That it began thus early can hardly be questioned; for we know that it prevailed universally in the age of Abraham, the days of who was born within seventy years after the death of Abraham. That patriarch had three hundred and eighteen servants or slaves, born in his own house, and trained to arms, with whom he pursued and conquered the four kings who had taken captive his brother's son. And it appears from the conversation which took place between him and the king of Sodom after the battle, that both believed the conqueror had a right to consider his prisoners as part of his spoil. "Give me," says the king, "the persons, and take the goods to thyself." It is indeed evident from numberless passages
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1 The Roman orator's definition of slavery. Parad. V. is as accurate as any that we have seen. "Servitus est obedientia fracti animi et subjecti arbitrioarentis suos;" whether the unhappy person fell into that state with or without his own contract or consent.
2 Gen. vi. 4. of scripture, that the domestics whom our translators call servants, were in those days universally considered as the most valuable part of their master's property, and clasped with his flocks and herds.
That the practice of buying and selling servants thus early begun amongst the patriarchs descended to their posterity, is known to every attentive reader of the Bible. It was expressly authorised by the Jewish law, in which are many directions how such servants were to be treated. They were to be bought only of the heathen; for if an Israelite grew poor and sold himself either to discharge a debt, or to procure the means of subsistence, he was to be treated not as a slave but as a hired servant, and restored to freedom at the year of Jubilee. Unlimited as the power thus given to the Hebrews over their bond-servants of heathen extraction appears to have been, they were strictly prohibited from acquiring such property by any other means than fair purchase. "He that stealeth a man and selleth him," said their great lawgiver, "shall surely be put to death."
Whilst slavery, in a mild form, was permitted amongst the people of God, a much worse kind of it prevailed amongst the heathen nations of antiquity. With other abominable customs, the traffic in men quickly spread from Chaldea into Egypt, Arabia, and over all the east, and by degrees found its way into every known region under heaven.
Of this hateful commerce we shall not attempt to trace the progress through every age and country, but shall content ourselves with taking a transient view of it amongst the Greeks and Romans, and a few other nations, in whose customs and manners our readers must be interested.
One can hardly read a book of the Iliad or Odyssey, without perceiving that, in the age of Homer, all prisoners of war were liable to be treated as slaves. So universally was this cruel treatment of captives admitted to be the right of the conqueror, that the poet introduces Hector, in the very act of taking a tender and perhaps last farewell of his wife, when it was surely his business to afford her every consolation in his power, telling her, as a thing of course which could not be concealed, that, on the conquest of Troy, she would be compelled
To bear the victor's hard commands, or bring The weight of water from Hypperia's spring.
At that early period, the Phoenicians, and probably the Greeks themselves, had such an established commerce in slaves, that, not satisfied with reducing to bondage their prisoners of war, they scrupled not, for supplying their foreign markets, to kidnap persons who had never kindled their resentment. In the fourteenth book of the Odyssey, Ulysses represents himself as having narrowly escaped a snare of this kind laid for him by a false Phoenician, who had doomed the hero to Lybian slavery; and as the whole narrative, in which this circumstance is told, is an artful fiction, intended to have the appearance of truth to an Ithacan peasant, the practice of kidnapping slaves could not then have appeared incredible to any inhabitant of that island.
Such were the manners of the Greeks in the heroic age; nor were they much improved in this respect at periods of greater refinement. Philip of Macedonia, having conquered the Thebans, not only sold his captives, but even took money for permitting the dead to be buried; and Alexander, who had more generosity than his father, afterwards razed the city of Thebes, and sold the inhabitants, men, women, and children, for slaves. This cruel treatment of a brave people may indeed be supposed to have proceeded, in the first instance, from the avarice of the conqueror; and in the second, from the momentary resentment of a man who was savage and generous by turns, and who had no command of his passions. We shall not positively assign it to other causes; but from the manner in which the Spartans behaved to their slaves, there is little reason to imagine that, had they received from the Thebans the same provocation with Alexander, they would have treated their captives with greater lenity.
It has been said, that in Athens and Rome slaves were better treated than in Sparta. But in the former city their treatment cannot have been good, or their lives comfortable, when the Athenians relished that tragedy of Euripides in which Hecuba, the wife of Priam, is introduced as lamenting that she was chained like a dog at Agamemnon's gate. Of the estimation in which slaves were held in Rome, we may form a tolerable notion from the well-known fact, that one of those unhappy beings was often chained at the gate of a great man's house, to give admittance to the guests invited to a feast. In the early periods of the commonwealth it was customary, in certain sacred shows exhibited on solemn occasions, to drag through the circus a slave, who had been scourged to death, holding in his hand a fork in the form of a gibbet. But we need not multiply proofs of the cruelty of the Romans to their slaves. If the inhuman combats of the gladiators admit of any apology on account of the martial spirit with which they were thought to inspire the spectators, the conduct of Vedius Pollio must have proceeded from the most wanton and brutal cruelty. This man, who flourished not in the earliest periods of the republic, when the Romans were little better than a savage banditti, but in the polished age of Augustus, frequently threw these slaves as gave him the slightest offence into his fishponds to fatten his lampreys; and yet he was suffered to die in peace. The emperor, indeed, upon coming to the knowledge of his cruelty, ordered his lampreys to be destroyed, and his ponds to be filled up; but we do not recollect that any other punishment was inflicted on the savage master.
The origin of slavery in Rome was the same as in every other country. Prisoners of war were of course reduced to that state, as if they had been criminals. The dictator Slav Camillus, one of the most accomplished generals of the republic, sold his Etrurian captives to pay the Roman ladies for the jewels which they had presented to Apollo. Fabius, whose cautious conduct saved his country when Hannibal was victorious in Italy, having subdued Tarentum, reduced thirty thousand of the citizens to slavery, and sold them to the highest bidder. Coriolanus, when driven from Rome, and fighting for the Volsci, scuffled not to make slaves of his own countrymen; and Julius Caesar, among whose faults wanton cruelty has never been reckoned, sold at one time fifty-three thousand captives for slaves. Nor did the slaves in Rome consist only of foreigners taken in war. By one of the laws of the twelve tables, creditors were empowered to seize their insolvent debtors, and keep them in their houses till, by their services or labour, they had discharged the sum they owed. The children of slaves were the property not of the commonwealth, or of their own parents, but of their masters; and thus was slavery perpetuated in the families of such unhappy men as fell into that state, whether through the chance of war or the cruelty of a sordid creditor. The consequence was, that the number of bondmen belonging to the rich patricians was almost incredible. Caius Cecilius Isidorus, who died about seven years before the Christian era, left to his heirs four thousand one hundred and sixteen slaves; and Augustus once put twenty thousand of his own slaves on board the corn ships.
Though many laws were enacted by Augustus and other patriotic emperors to diminish the power of creditors over their insolvent debtors; though the influence of the mild spirit of Christianity tended much to meliorate the condition of slaves even under Pagan masters; and though the emperor Hadrian made it capital to kill a slave without just reason, yet this infamous commerce prevailed univers-