SLAVERY
39
SLAVERY
for slaves at Algiers and Tunis in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries; and from its foundation
until the year 17S7 it redeemed 900,000 slaves.
The Order of Our Lady of Ransom (Mercedarians),
founded in the thirteenth century by St. Peter
Nolasco, and established more especially in France
and Spain, redeemed 490,736 slaves between the
years 1218 and 1632. To the three regular vows its
founder had added a fourth, "To become a hostage
in the hands of the infidels, if that is necessary for
the dehvcrance of Christ's faithful." Many Mer-
cedarians kept this vow even to martyrdom. An-
other order undertook not only to redeem captives,
but also to give them spiritual and material assistance.
St. Vincent of Paul had been a slave at Algiers in
160.5, and had witnessed the sufferings and perils
of Christian slaves. .\t the request of Louis XIV, he
sent them, in 1642, priests of the congregation which
he had founded. Many of these priests, indeed,
were invested with consular functions at Tunis and
at Algiers. From 1642 to 1660 they redeemed about
1200 slaves at an e.\pense of about 1,200,000 livres.
But their greatest achievements were in teaching
the Catechism and converting thousands, and in
preparing many of the captives to suffer the most
cruel martyrdom rather than deny the Faith. As
a Protestant historian ha-s recently said, none of the
expeditions sent against the Barbary States by the
Powers of Europe, or even America, equalled "the
moral effect produced by the ministry of consolation,
peace and abnegation, going even to the sacrifice of
liberty and life, which was exercised by the humble
sons of St. John of Matha, St. Peter Nolasco, and
St. Vincent of Paul" (Bonet-Maurj', "France,
christianisme et civilisation", 1907, p. 142).
A second revival of slavery took place after the discovery of the New World by the Spaniards in 1492. To give the history of it would be to exceed the limits of this article. It will be sufficient to recall the efforts of Las Casas in behalf of the abor- igines of .Vmerica and the protestations of popes both against the enslavement of those aborigines and the traffic in negro slaves. England, France, Portugal, and Spain, all participated in this nefarious traffic. England oidy made amends for its trans- gressions when, in 1S15, it took the initiative in the suppression of the slave-trade. In 1871 a wTiter had the temerity to assert that the Papacy had not yet been able "to make up its mind to condemn slavery" (Ernest Havet, "Le christianisme et ses origines", I, p. xxi). He forgot that, in 1462, Pius II declared slavery to be "a gre.at crime" (magnum sceliis); that, in 1.537, Paul III forbade the enslavement of the Indians; that Urban VIII forbade it in 1639, and Benedict XIV in 1741; that Pius VII demanded of the Congress of Vienna, in 1S15, the suppression of the slave-trade, and Gregory XVI condemned it in 1839; that, in the Bull of Canonization of the Jesuit Peter Claver, one of the most illustrious adversaries of slaverj', Pius IX branded the "supreme villainy" {summum ncfas) of the slave-traders. Everj'one knows of the beautiful letter which Leo XIll, in 1888, addressed to the Brazilian bishops, exhorting them to banish from their country the remnants of slavery' — a letter to which the bishops responded with their most energetic efforts, and some generous slave-owners by freeing their slaves in a body, as in the first ages of the Church.
In our own times the slave-trade still continued to devastate Africa, no longer for the profit of Christian states, from which all slavery had dis- appeared, but for the use of Mussulman countries. But a.s European penetration progresses in Africa, the missionaries, who arc always its precursors — Fathers of the Holy Ghost, Obl.a'tes, WTiite Fathers, Franciscans, Jesuits, Priests of the Mi.ssion of Lyons — labour in the Sudan, Guinea, on the Gabun, in the
region of the Great Lakes, redeeming slaves and
establishing "liberty villages." At the head of
this movement appear two men: Cardinal Lavigerie,
who in 1SS8 founded the Socictc Antiesdavagiste
and in 1889 promoted the Bnissels conference;
Leo XIII, who encouraged Lavigerie in all his projects
and, in 1890, by an Encyclical once more condemning
the slave-traders and " the accursed pest of servitude ",
ordered an annual collection to be made in all
Catholic churches for the benefit of the anti-slavery
work. Some modern wTiters, mostly of the Sociahst
School— Karl Marx, Engel, Ciccotti, and, in a meas-
ure, Seligm;m — attribute the now almost complete
disappearance of slaverj' to the evolution of interests
and to economic causes only. The foregoing exposi-
tion of the subject is an answer to their materialistic
conception of history, as showing that, if not the
only, at least the principal, cau.se of that disappear-
ance is Christianity acting through the authority of
its teaching and the influence of its charity.
W.iLLON, Hist, de I'esclavage dans VantiquiU (Paris, 1879)- Kahn, L'csctatage selon la Bible et le Talmud (Paris 1867) ' Pavt, Affranckissement des esclaces (Paris, 1875); Allard, Les escUives chritieiis depuis les premiers temps de VEgtise jusgu'A la fin de la domination romaine en Occident (Paris, 1900); Idem Esclmes, serfs e,t mainmortables (Paris. 1884) ; Idem, La philosophi'e antique et Vesclavage in Etudes d'huitoire et d'archeologie (Paris 1S99); Idem in Diet, de Vapologttique, fasc. V (Paris, 1910), s. v. Esclavage; Harnack, Mission u. Ausbreilung des Christenluma tn den ersten drei Jakrhunderten, I (Leipzig, 1906) ; BiOT, De I'abo- lition de Vesclavage ancien en Occident (Paris. 1840); Yanoski. De I abolition de Vesclavage ancien au moyen dge (Paris, I860) • CocHl.N, L'aboUlion de Vesclavage (Paris. 1861); Brownlow,' Lectures on Slavery and Serfdom in Europe (London and New York, 1892); Fournier, Les affranchissements du V' au XIII' Slide in Rev. Hist.. XXXI (Paris. 1883); Cibrario, Delia Schiavitu e del Servaggio (Milan, 1868); Ciccotti, « tramonto delta Schiavua (Milan, 1899) ; Talamo, /( concetto delta Schiavitii da Anslotele ai dottori scolaslici (Rome, 1908); Brandi, /( Papato e la Schiavitit (Rome, 1903); Deslandreu, L'ordre des Trini- taires pour le rachat des captifs (Paris, 1903); Abelly. Vie de S. Vincent de Paul, I. V (Paris 1836); Bonet-Maurt. France, christianisme et civilisation (Paris, 1907); Piolet, Les missions cath. fran(aises au XIX' siicle, V, Afrique (Paris, 1902); Klein, Le cardinal Lavigerie et sesceuvres d' Afrique (Paris. 1898).
Paul Allard.
Slavery, Ethical Aspect of.— In Greek and Ro- man civilization slavery on an extensive scale formed an essential clement of the social structure; and con- sequently the ethical speculators, no less than the practical statesmen, regarded it as a just and indis- pensable institution. The Greek, however, assumed that the slave population should be recruited nor- mally only from the barbarian or lower races. The Roman laws, in the hej'day of the empire, treated the slave as a mere chattel. The master possessed over him the power of life and death; the slave c«uld not contract a legal marriage, or any other kind of con- tract; in fact he possessed no civil rights; in the eyes of the law he was not a "person". Nevertheless the settlement of natural justice asserted itself sufficiently to condemn, or at least to disapprove, the conduct of masters who treated their slaves with signal in- humanity.
Christianity found slavery in po.ssession throughout the Roman world; and when Christianity obtained power it could not and did not attempt summar- ily to abolish the institution. From the begin- ning, however, as is shown elsewh(Te in this article, the Church exerted a steiidy powerful pres.sure for the immediate amelionition <if the condition of the in- dividual .slave, and for the ultimate abolition of a sy,s- tem which, even in its iiiildosl form, could with diffi- culty be reconciled with the spiril of the Go,spel and the doctrine that all men arc brothers in that Divine .sonship which knows no distinction of bond and free. From the beginning the Christian morali.st did not condemn slavery as in se, or essentially, .against the natural law or natural justice. The fact that slavery, tempered with many humane restrictions, was per- mitted under the Mo.saic law would have sufficed to prevent the institution from being condemned by
