CHAPTER THREE

Obviously, this was a polemical intervention, but one whose validity was confirmed by a rather authoritative witness. Although sharing the proud self-consciousness of his compatriots or the ruling class of his country, Adam Smith acknowledged the persistence in Great Britain of ‘vestiges of slavery’: a labour relationship not dissimilar from serfdom was in force in salt works and coalmines. Just as the adscripti glebae, still very numerous in Eastern Europe, were forcibly bound to the land to be cultivated and sold at the same time as it, so in the country that had left behind the ancien régime some decades earlier, the adscripti operi were in a sense an integral part of the opus or works (the salt work or mine) and, when this was sold, passed together with their family into the service of the new master. Hence it was not a question of actual slavery, of chattel slavery, which allowed individual members of a family to be put on the market like any other commodity. The adscripti operi could marry and lead a genuine family life; they could own a minimum of property; and, naturally, they did not risk being killed with impunity: ‘their lives are under the protection of the laws of the land’.¹ But it remained the case that in Scotland workers in coalmines and salt works were obliged to wear a collar on which the name of their master was inscribed.² In the wake of the great economist, Millar too could not but ‘regret … that any species of slavery should still remain in Great Britain’; and it was to be hoped that parliament would intervene to remedy the situation, finally sanctioning ‘the freedom of the labouring people’ in Scottish mines and salt works.³

Judging from Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, these were ‘the only vestiges of slavery which remain amongst us’.⁴ Does this mean that the other labour relations were based on freedom? Referring to England in the second half of the eighteenth century, Blackstone distinguished between three types of ‘servant’ in the strict sense (we ignore here personnel charged with overseeing and guarding the master’s property): ‘menial servants’ or ‘domestics’, ‘apprentices’, and finally ‘labourers’, who worked outside the master’s house. The most modern labour relation, least informed by feudal and servile echoes, would seem to be the last. In this connection, however, the great jurist indulged in celebrating ‘very good regulations’ on the basis of which, for example, ‘all persons who have no visible effects may be compelled to work’, while those who ‘leave or desert their work’ were punished. Over the domestic or apprentice, the master exercised a right of ‘corporal punishment’ that must not result in death or mutilation.⁵

But what happened if this limit was exceeded? We can infer Smith’s answer: ‘The master has a right to correct his servant moderately, and if he should die under his correction it is not murther, unless it was done with an offensive weapon or with forethought and without provocation.’ It is difficult to regard such servants as free men even if, according to the great economist, they enjoyed ‘almost the same privileges with their master, liberty, wages, etca’. In fact, what creates a radical difference is the power of correction exercised by the one over the other. The same Smith included menial servants, together with slaves proper, in the master’s extended family.⁶

Masters did not confine themselves to monitoring their servant’s industriousness. Let us attend to Hume’s evidence: ‘At present, all masters discourage the marrying of their male servants, and admit not by any means the marriage of the females, who are then supposed altogether incapacitated for their service.’⁷ The opportunity to have a family seems largely denied not only to the black slave, but also to the white domestic servant: the private lives of both were subject to the master’s power or will.

Finally, it is to be noted that comparable to menial servants were ‘apprentices’,⁸ whose condition, in England at any rate, had been regarded by Grotius as approximating closely enough to the slave’s. And such, basically, was also Blackstone’s opinion. He reiterated the slave’s obligation to provide service ‘for life’ with a rather eloquent argument: fundamentally, it was the same relationship that the apprentice had with his master, except that in the latter case there was a time limit (seven years and sometimes more).⁹

As has justly been observed, ‘[f]or most of human history the expression “free labor” was an oxymoron.’¹⁰

2. The unemployed, beggars and workhouses

As the controversy between the two sides of the Union became increasingly bitter, Calhoun positively contrasted the condition of American slaves with that of inmates of workhouses or poorhouses in England. The former were lovingly treated and cared for by the master or mistress during illness or old age, while the latter were reduced to a ‘forlorn and wretched condition’; the former continued to live among their family and friends, while the latter were uprooted from their environment and also separated from their loved ones.¹¹ The apologetic intention that governs the description or transfiguration of the institution of slavery is clear. Yet when it came to workhouses in England, Calhoun was not the only one to underscore the horror. In de Tocqueville’s view, they afforded ‘the most horrendous and repugnant [spectacle] of misery’: on the one hand, the infirm incapable of work and waiting to die; on the other, women and children massed pell-mell ‘like pigs in the mud of their sty; it is difficult not to trample over a semi-naked body’. Finally, there were the comparatively more ‘fortunate’—those in a position to work: they earned little or nothing and fed off the leftovers of stately homes.¹²

But however horrible, poverty and degradation were not the most significant aspect of workhouses. At the start of the eighteenth century, Defoe favourably mentioned the example of the workhouse in Bristol, which ‘has been such a Terror to the Beggars that none of [them] will come near the City’.¹³ In fact, the workhouse was subsequently described by Engels as a total institution: ‘Paupers wear the uniform of the house and are subject to the will of the director without any protection whatsoever’; so that ‘the “morally degenerate” parents cannot influence their children, families are separated; the man is sent to one wing, the woman to another, the children to a third’. Families were broken up, but for the rest all were amassed sometimes to the tune of twelve or sixteen in a single room. Any kind of violence was inflicted on them, not even sparing the elderly and children, and involving particular attention to women. In practice, the inmates of workhouses were treated as ‘objects of disgust and horror placed outside the law and the human community’. Thus was explained the fact, underscored by Engels, that in order to escape the ‘Poor Law Bastilles’ (as they were popularly renamed), ‘inmates of work houses often deliberately make themselves guilty of any crime whatsoever in order to go to prison’.¹⁴ In fact (add contemporary historians), ‘many indigents preferred to die of hunger and illness’ rather than subject themselves to a workhouse.¹⁵

We are put in mind of the suicide that slaves often resorted to in order to escape their condition. Examined carefully, the 1834 law that shut up anyone requiring assistance in a workhouse in a sense vindicates Calhoun and those who pointed to slavery as the only possible solution to the problem of poverty. Fighting for the new legislation, its inspirer, Nassau William Senior, denounced the fatal contradiction in the rules hitherto in force, which allowed the poor person to enjoy a minimum of assistance for continuing a normal life: ‘The labourer is to be a free agent, but without the hazards of free agency; to be free from the coercion, but to enjoy the assured existence of the slave.’ But ‘unit[ing] the irreconcilable advantages of freedom and servitude’ was utterly absurd: a choice was required.¹⁶ Arguing thus, the influential economist and liberal theorist, interlocutor and correspondent of Tocqueville, ended up recognizing the substantially slave-like character of the relations obtaining in workhouses.

We have mentioned the role played by Senior in the passing of the 1834 law. But what position did the liberal tradition as a whole adopt towards workhouses and, more generally, the policy of disciplining poverty? According to Locke, it was necessary to intervene thoroughly and drastically in an infected area of society that was constantly expanding. From the age of three, the children of families not in a position to feed them should be sent out to work.¹⁷ Moreover, it was necessary to intervene with their parents. To discourage the idleness and dissoluteness of vagrants, it was appropriate to proceed in areas frequented by them to ‘the suppressing of superfluous brandy shops and unnecessary alehouses’.¹⁸ Secondly, begging should be discouraged and restricted. Beggars were obliged to wear a ‘badge’; to oversee them, and prevent them practising their activity outside the permitted area and hours, a special body was provided, the ‘beadles of beggars’, who in their turn were to be controlled by ‘guardians’ so that they performed their task with the requisite diligence and severity. But the whole community was called upon to participate in the beggar hunt, starting with the inhabitants of the house where the wretches had requested charity.¹⁹

Draconian penalties awaited vagrants who managed to escape this comprehensive control. It was right that those caught asking for alms outside their parish and near a sea port should be pressed into the navy: they were to be ‘punished as deserters’—i.e. with the death penalty—‘if they go on shore without leave; or, when sent on shore, if they either go further, or stay longer, than they have leave’. The other illegal beggars were to be interned in a normal workhouse or house of correction. The master ‘shall have no other consideration nor allowance but what their labour shall produce; whom therefore he shall have power to employ according to his discretion’. Once again, this arbitrary power summons up the spectre of slavery. As is confirmed by a further detail: that ‘whoever shall counterfeit a pass shall lose his ears for the forgery for the first time that he is found guilty thereof; and the second time, that he shall be transported to the plantations, as in case of felony’.²⁰

Certainly, in the nineteenth century the situation was different. With the 1834 reform, arriving in the workhouses were those who sought to escape death from starvation in some way: the workhouses must be made as odious as possible in order to reduce the number of those who sought refuge in them to a minimum. In this philosophy, which began to take shape with Malthus,²¹ de Tocqueville likewise joined: ‘It is obvious that we must make assistance unpleasant, we must separate families, make the workhouse a prison and render our charity repugnant.’²²

In denouncing this institution, Calhoun referred exclusively to Europe. Yet it was present, in one form or another, in the United States. De Tocqueville referred to it, significantly, in the context of his analysis of the ‘prison system’. Who were the inmates? The answer was clear: ‘The indigent who cannot earn their living by honest work, and those who do not want to.’²³ It was therefore understandable that workhouses became particularly crowded at times of crisis:

The crime that led to internment was already identified with unemployment and poverty. Making the judicial decisions, for example in New York, was a functionary who could readily deprive of their liberty those who in his judgment ‘have no means of subsistence’.²⁵ Protests were understandable: the poor person thus confined ‘regards himself as unfortunate, not culpable; he challenges society’s right violently to force him to do fruitless work and to deal with him against his will’.²⁶

But let us return to England. John Stuart Mill was inclined to trivialize the horror of workhouses when he observed: ‘Even the labourer who loses his employment by idleness or negligence, has nothing worse to suffer, in the most unfavourable case, than the discipline of a workhouse’.²⁷ But the liberal philosopher’s opinion can be contrasted with that of modern scholars: once they had entered workhouses, the poor ‘ceased to be citizens in any true sense of the word’, because they lost ‘the civil right of personal liberty’.²⁸ And this was a radical loss: the ‘guardians’ of the workhouses had the discretional power of inflicting the corporal punishment deemed most fitting on inmates.²⁹

Bentham was decidedly enthusiastic. He tirelessly lauded the benefits of this institution, which he aimed further to perfect, locating the workhouse in a ‘panoptical’ building which allowed the director to exercise secret, total control—that is, to observe every single aspect of the behaviour of the unwitting inmates at any point in time:

Hence the contribution to the development of national wealth by workhouses, intended to operate as ‘industry-houses’, would be enormous. They were to be spread over the whole national territory, confining up to 500,000 detainees, and in any event ‘all persons, able-bodied or otherwise, having neither visible or assignable property, nor honest and sufficient means of livelihood’.³¹ Thanks to this gigantic concentration-camp universe, where people would be interned without having committed any crime and without any control by the judiciary, it would be possible to perform the miracle of transforming the ‘dross’ that was the ‘refuse of the population’ into money.³² And that was not all. Given the isolation it entailed, the workhouse made it possible to experiment, as we shall see, with producing a stock of especially industrious and conscientious labourers. Certainly, for such objectives to be achieved, rigorous discipline was required, which must be thoroughly internalized by the detainees in the workhouse:

4. The servant as soldier

As we can see, it was Bentham who compared the condition of a workhouse inmate with that of the soldier. But it is appropriate to take a step back. During his residence in London, Franklin, discomfited by his English interlocutors mocking the flag of liberty waved by colonists who were often slave-owners, replied by highlighting, among other things, the persistence in England of slave-like relations even within the armed forces.³⁴ The reference was above all to the navy. Let us attend to historians of our day: ‘the men of the fleet were so ill-paid, ill-fed, and ill-handled that it was impossible to obtain crews by free enlistment’. Many sought to escape this kind of sequestration, but Great Britain gave chase to them, without hesitating to search American ships and take by force deserters, including those who had become US citizens in the meantime. It was necessary to resort to drastic measures to ensure the functioning of ‘more than 700 warships in commission, with nearly 150,000 sailors and marines’.³⁵ And so, like Franklin before him, we have Calhoun denouncing ‘the slavery of impressed seamen’.³⁶

This was a common theme in the journalism of the time. In Britain itself, defenders of slavery stressed the analogy between this institution and being pressed into the navy. Both practices were justified by exceptional circumstances—namely, the need to maintain the colonies and the navy, respectively. On the other side, the abolitionist Sharp condemned both practices.³⁷ By contrast, William Wilberforce sought to make distinctions, and was accused of hypocrisy by his opponents:³⁸ the pious pastor was moved by the condition of black slaves, but was indifferent to the no less grievous suffering of the kind of white slaves on whom the British Empire’s military power and glory were based. The argument was far from trivial. Sailors were ‘seized by press gangs from the streets of London and Liverpool’; and at a popular level no institution was more hated than the press gang.³⁹ The conditions to which men were then subjected can be readily be inferred from Locke’s indirect comparison between the power of ‘the captain of a galley’ and that exercised by ‘a lord over his slave’.⁴⁰ The capture of sailors in popular districts had something in common with the capture of blacks in Africa.

And it was not only the navy. A contemporary scholar summarizes the condition of those military ‘captives in uniform’ who were soldiers, called upon to defend a rapidly expanding empire in every corner of the world:

For the rest, the way Locke described ‘the common practice of martial discipline’ is significant:

This above all calls to mind the ‘absolute power of life and death’ wielded by officers over their subordinates. It is the phrase Locke habitually used to define the essence of slavery. Is it a rhetorical exaggeration? Already in Grotius we find the observation that the condition of the slave is not very different from that of the soldier.⁴³ But let us concentrate on liberal England. The mortality rate of soldiers en route to India was comparable to that affecting black slaves during their deportation from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Moreover, British soldiers were subject to the punishment traditionally reserved for slaves—flogging—and, paradoxically, continued to be even when this form of discipline had been abolished for Indian troops.⁴⁴

Power relations in the army reproduced those existing in society. The figure of the soldier tended to coincide with that of the servant. At the start of the eighteenth century, Defoe observed: ‘any Man would carry a Musket rather than starve … ’tis Poverty makes Men Soldiers, and drives Crowds into the Armies’.⁴⁵ At the end of the century, Townsend reiterated that ‘distress and poverty’ alone could impel ‘the lower classes of the people to encounter all the horrors which await them on the tempestuous ocean, or in the field of battle’.⁴⁶ Or, to put the point this time with Mandeville, ‘[t]he Hardships and Fatigues of War that are personally suffer’d, fall upon them that bear the Brunt of every Thing’—namely, ‘the working slaving People’.⁴⁷ On the other side, the figure of the officer tended to coincide with that of the master, and the contempt officers/masters had for troops was professed and even ostentatious. Troops of the line (lamented an ordinary soldier) were ‘the lowest class of animals, and only fit to be ruled with the cat o’ nine tails’⁴⁸—that is, with the whip capable of inflicting the most sadistic punishments, those usually reserved for disobedient slaves.

5. The penal code, formation of a compulsory workforce, and the process of colonization

The problem of military recruitment is thus understandable: prisons were ‘rumag’d for Malefactors’; the profession of soldier (observed Defoe) above all devolved on ‘Men taken from the Gallows’.⁴⁹ Fortunately, there were plenty of them. From 1688 to 1820, the number of crimes carrying the death penalty increased from 50 to between 200 and 250, and they were almost always crimes against property. While attempted homicide was regarded as a petty crime until 1803, the theft of a shilling or handkerchief, or the illegal clipping of an ornamental bush, could entail hanging; and one could be consigned to the hangman even at the age of eleven.⁵⁰ In fact, in some cases, even young children ran this risk: in 1833 the death penalty was pronounced on a pickpocket of nine, although the sentence was subsequently commuted.⁵¹

Even more significant than the increase in penalties was the criminalization of behaviour that had hitherto been licit. The enclosure and private appropriation of common land underwent significant development; and the peasant or commoner who was late in appreciating the new situation became a thief, a criminal to be visited with all the force of the law. This might seem an arbitrary and brutal way to behave; but that is not what Locke thought. In legitimizing the colonists’ appropriation of land left uncultivated by the Indians, the Second Treatise of Government simultaneously adopted a clear position in favour of enclosure in England. ‘[I]n the beginning, all the world was America’;⁵² and common land was a kind of vestige of this original, wild state, which work, private appropriation and money had subsequently overcome. It was a process that manifested itself on a large scale across the Atlantic, but which was not unknown in England: ‘even amongst us, land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste’, until enclosure and private appropriation intervened positively.⁵³

Along with the despoliation of the Indians and English peasants, Locke also justified terroristic legislation in defence of property: it was ‘lawful for a man to kill a thief who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther than by the use of force, so to get him in his power as to take away his money, or what he pleases, from him’.⁵⁴ This was only a petty crime in appearance. In reality, the guilty party, if only momentarily, had deprived his victim of his ‘right to liberty’ and had made him a ‘slave’. At this point, no one could exclude the possibility that theft would not be followed by homicide, since it was precisely the power of life and death that defined the relationship of slavery. This was synonymous with a state of war, and hence there was no reason why the thief should not be done to death, whatever the extent of the theft.⁵⁵ What Locke seems to be saying is that at stake is not only the shilling or handkerchief or whatever other rather minor stolen good: private property as such and, over and above it, liberty were in danger. Thus, what legitimized the pickpocket’s killing or execution is the same liberal pathos that had presided over the condemnation of monarchical despotism as the source of political slavery.

In addition to common land, even birds and wild animals became objects of private appropriation by the landed aristocracy. In this instance, it was not possible to appeal to Locke. In fact, on the basis of his theory, not having been transformed by labour, birds and wild animals should have been regarded as common property. And yet, in accordance with legislation enacted after the Glorious Revolution, while the peasant slid into the condition of thief, the hunter was transformed into poacher; and here too the terrorism of the penal code was called on to compel respect for the incursion.⁵⁶

As with the slavery and trading of blacks, the vulgar historicist explanation does not stand up when it comes to the expansion in crimes against property and the increased severity of the penalties provided for them. It is misleading to refer to the spirit of the times. ‘It is very doubtful whether any other country possessed a criminal code with anything like so many capital provisions as there were in this single statute.’⁵⁷ The ruthless character of English legislation was already proverbial on its enactment. While Napoleon exercised his iron rule over France, a reformer like Sir Samuel Romilly felt compelled to offer a bitter observation: ‘there is probably no other country in the world in which so many and so great a variety of human actions are punishable with loss of life as in England’. ⁵⁸ Still at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hegel denounced the ‘draconian’ severity whereby ‘every thief in England [is] hanged’, in an absurd equation of life and property, of the two ‘qualitatively different’ crimes that were homicide and theft. The class origins of such ‘draconian’ severity were even identified: for peasants guilty of illegal hunting ‘the harshest and most disproportionate punishments’ were provided, because ‘those who made those laws and who are now sitting in the courts as magistrates and jurors’ were the aristocracy, the very class that held a monopoly on hunting.⁵⁹

The need to maintain law and order was only one aspect of the problem. Not infrequently, those sentenced to death (or even a long prison term) saw their sentence commuted to deportation to the colonies. Already in force for some time, from 1717 the practice of deportation assumed an official character and significant proportions.⁶⁰ So following the Glorious Revolution, we witness, on the one hand, the enactment of terroristic legislation and, on the other, the burgeoning phenomenon of deportation to remote colonies. Is there a link between the two events? It is difficult to deny that the formation of a large compulsory workforce through drastic harshening of the legal code ultimately made it possible to satisfy ‘the labor needs of the plantations’.⁶¹ On the other hand, underlying this practice was a specific theory. Locke repeatedly demanded penal slavery for those who made an attempt on another person’s life or property. Already in the state of nature, ‘[t]he damnified person has this power of appropriating to himself the goods or service of the offender’.⁶² Things were even clearer in the social state:

The theory of the colonial war as just war (on the part of Europeans) and the theory of penal slavery legitimized and galvanized the deportation, respectively, of the black slaves and white semi-slaves required by colonial development. On the eve of the American Revolution, in Maryland alone there were 20,000 servants of criminal origin. To put the point with Samuel Johnson, they were ‘a race of convicts, and ought to be content with anything we may allow them short of hanging’. And that is how an inexhaustible source of forced labour was fed.⁶⁴

6. Indentured servants

This labour force proved precious for the purposes of populating and exploiting colonies as they were conquered. Initially, the flow of indentured servants went in the direction of America. Subsequently, supplanted and rendered superfluous by the massive introduction of black slaves, and in any event after the achievement of independence by the United States, white semi-slaves were diverted towards Australia, where they made an even more significant contribution to the process of exploiting the new colony. What were the characteristics of this labour relationship? Let us start with the journey of relocation or deportation from Britain. The horrors and mortality rate call to mind the famous ‘middle passage’ to which black slaves were subjected. Sometimes not even half the ‘passengers’ survived the voyage. Among them were to be found children between the ages of one and seven; they rarely escaped death. A witness related having seen thirty-two children of tender years cast into the ocean in the course of a single voyage. Diseases continued to rage even after the crossing of the Atlantic; as a result, the new arrivals were often subjected to quarantine. There then intervened the moment of the market. In the papers commercial adverts of the following kind could be read: ‘Just arrived at Leedstown, the Ship Justitia with about one Hundred Healthy Servants. Men, Women and Boys, among which are many Tradesmen … The Sale will Commence on Tuesday, the 2nd of April’ (The Virginia Gazette, 28 March 1771). Husband and wife were often separated, and might be separated from their children, permanently or for a long period; children under the age of five were obliged to render service until they were twenty-one. Flogged by their masters in the event of indiscipline or disobedience, servants sometimes fled, and then a manhunt was unleashed. The local press provided an accurate physical description of the fugitives who, once taken, were punished and branded with the letter R (standing for ‘rogue’) or subjected to the excision of ears. Thus rendered immediately recognizable, they no longer had any escape.⁶⁵

What, then, was the difference compared with slaves proper? Sometimes white semi-slaves bemoaned their lot: ‘Many blacks are treated better.’ In fact, unlike real slaves, servants could turn to the judiciary and hope to be accepted into the community of the free, and were indeed admitted ‘assuming they survived their period of labor’.⁶⁶ It is true that death often intervened first. But we are dealing with a social relation that is different from hereditary racial slavery.

Was it a social relation marked by freedom? We have seen Locke on the one hand stress the contractual, and hence free, genesis of the figure of servant, and on the other let slip the admission that he was not really free. But on this point we should also attend to Sieyès’ opinion. Looking across the Atlantic, he argued thus:

Sieyès did not disguise the fact that what characterized the figure of the indentured servant was subservience, ‘servile engagement’ (engageance serve), or ‘legally regulated slavery’. However, especially after the outbreak of the French Revolution, apologetic concerns seem to have got the upper hand: in the new ideological and political climate, it was no longer possible to declare oneself in favour of an institution whose substantially slave-like character was acknowledged. And so we have Sieyès arguing against those for whom the indentured servant was a person who ‘loses some of his freedom’. No:

It is true that for the duration of the contract the servant could not exercise the liberty ceded by him. But it was a general rule that the liberty of an individual ‘never extends to the point of harming others’.⁶⁸

On the other hand, from the outset Sieyès upheld contractual servitude in the name of ‘natural liberty’, of the right possessed by every individual to draw up the contract that seemed most opportune to him. In other words, the key category of liberal thought (the category of contract), invoked by Grotius to legitimize slavery proper, was applied by Sieyès solely to the labour relation that binds the indentured servant to his master. This was not dissimilar from Locke, the difference being that the French author, prior to the Revolution at least, stressed the fundamentally slave-like character of the relationship. That is why he was concerned to stress the vigilance the law should be called on to exercise: public officials should control the master’s actions in order to prevent the ‘person’ of the servant ‘being harmed through unduly prolonged hire or during the hire’.⁶⁹ Sieyès seems to propose a kind of code for regulating this white semi-slavery, on the model of the Code noir with which, in theory, the masters of black slaves should comply.

7. ‘The extensive Herod-like kidnappings’

Among the compulsory labour force called on to ensure the development of the colonies were also youngsters of poor condition, deceived with honeyed words, abducted and deported across the Atlantic.⁷⁰ Alternatively, they arrived in America with their parents, who were often compelled to sell them, never seeing them again. The situation of children of popular extraction was not much better in England. Marx denounced ‘the extensive Herod-like kidnappings perpetrated in the early days of the factory system, when children were stolen from the work houses and orphanages, and capital thereby incorporated a mass of unresisting human material’.⁷¹ Going beyond the use of orphanages as a source of low-cost and more or less compulsory labour, we can make a general observation here. If, in the proto-liberal theory and practice of the time, the wage-labourer was (as we shall soon see) the instrumentum vocale Burke mentions, or the ‘bipedal machine’ referred to by Sieyès, his children were ultimately res nullius, destined to be used at the first opportunity precisely in their capacity as work tools and machines. Locke explicitly declared that poor children, who were to be sent to work from the age of three, must ‘be taken off their [parents’] hands’.⁷² Over a century later, Bentham’s attitude was not dissimilar. He invited people to look for inspiration to ‘manufactures where children, down to four years old, earn something, and where children a few years older earn a subsistence, and that a comfortable one’.⁷³ It was permissible and beneficial to ‘tak[e] the children out of the hands of their parents as much as possible, and even, if possible, altogether’. There should be no hesitation:

The children of the poor were at the complete disposal of society. We are reminded of the fate reserved for slaves across the Atlantic. To end their presence on American soil, suggested Jefferson, one might at a moderate price, and perhaps even gratis, acquire newborn blacks, place them ‘under the guardianship of the State’, subject them to work as soon as possible, and thus largely recover the expenses required for their deportation to San Domingo, which should be set in train when convenient. Certainly, ‘[t]he separation of infants from their mothers … would produce some scruples of humanity’, but there was no need to be so fussy.⁷⁵ While he was motivated by economic calculations, rather than worries about racial purity, Bentham would have liked to proceed perhaps even more ruthlessly with the children of the poor in England: ‘An inspection-house, to which a set of children had been consigned from their birth, might afford experiments enough … What say you to a foundling-hospital upon this principle?’⁷⁶

We shall see that Bentham also envisaged experiments of a eugenic character. But for now we can reach a conclusion by attending to an English economist (Edward G. Wakefield), who in 1834 published a successful book devoted to the contrast between America and England: ‘it is the whole press of England, not I, that calls English children [of popular extraction] slaves’. The majority were compelled to work such long hours that they inadvertently fell asleep, only to be awoken and forced back to work with beatings and torments of every kind. As to foundlings, they were dispensed with rapidly enough: adverts were affixed to the doors of workhouses promoting their sale. In London the price of male and female children put on the market thus was significantly below that of black slaves in America; in rural regions, such commodities were even cheaper.⁷⁷

8. Hundreds or thousands of wretches ‘daily hanged for trifles’

Bearing down on this mass of wretches was legislation that was certainly not marked by the protection of civil liberties. One thinks of the blank warrants that allowed the police to arrest or search a person at will. Abolished by the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, this ‘intolerable tool of oppression’ (to adopt the description of it given by the French liberal Laboulaye in 1866)⁷⁸ long continued to survive in England. Smith himself tended if not to justify it, in any case to trivialize it. He was astonished that the ‘common people’, rather than fighting for the free circulation and buying and selling of labour power, exhibited all its indignation ‘against general warrants, an abusive practice undoubtedly, but such a one as was not likely to occasion any general oppression’.⁷⁹

The death penalty was imposed with great facility but also with some discretion. With the passing in 1723 of the Black Act—the ‘blacks’ were alleged deer rustlers—in some cases it was not necessary to resort to a formal process to provide for the death sentence, which consigned to the hangman even those who had in some way aided a thief (or alleged thief) to escape justice.⁸⁰

Without betraying any disquiet, Mandeville recognized that ‘the Lives of Hundreds, if not Thousands, of Necessitous Wretches, that are daily hanged for Trifles’ were being snuffed out;⁸¹ execution often became a mass spectacle with pedagogical purposes.⁸² The British liberal called upon magistrates not to be inhibited either by misplaced ‘compassion’ or by undue doubts and scruples. Certainly, thieves might have committed theft under the spur of necessity: ‘what they can get Honestly is not sufficient to keep them’. Yet ‘the Peace of the Society’ required that the guilty be hanged. Yes, ‘the Evidences perhaps want clearness or are otherwise insufficient’; and there was a risk that an innocent person might be put to death. But however ‘terrible’ that would be, the aim must be achieved that ‘not one Guilty Person [be] suffered to escape with Impunity’. It would be a serious thing if overly scrupulous judges prioritized their ‘Conscience’ over the ‘Advantage to a Nation’.⁸³ The courts of the property-owner judges were called upon to operate as a kind of committee of public safety.

We can then conclude that, setting aside the colonies in their entirety (including Ireland), in Britain itself full enjoyment of a private sphere of liberty guaranteed by the law—the ‘modern’ or ‘negative’ liberty that Constant and Berlin, respectively, refer to⁸⁴—was the privilege of a small minority. The mass of people was subject to regulation and coercion that extended far beyond the workplace (or the place of punishment that was the prison, but also the workhouse and the army). While Locke proposed regulating the consumption of alcohol by the popular classes, Mandeville believed that, at least on Sunday, ‘every Amusement Abroad that might allure or draw them from’ attending church should be ‘prohibited’.⁸⁵ On the subject of alcohol, Burke argued differently: while it had no nutritional properties, it could alleviate hunger pangs in the poor person; moreover, ‘at all times, and in all countries’, alcohol, together with ‘opium’ and ‘tobacco’, had been turned to for the ‘moral consolations’ men sometimes needed.⁸⁶ Now, even more than the disciplining of workers and vagrants as in Locke and Mandeville, the problem was that of dulling the consciousness and suffering of the starving in general. What remained constant was the tendency to govern the existence of the popular classes even in its smallest details. The reference to opium added a touch of cynicism. Reports by government committees of inquiry would subsequently denounce the catastrophe: in the poorest districts, opium consumption was spreading, and was becoming a means of feeding or a substitute for it. It was sometimes given to infants, who ‘ “shrank up into little old men”, or “wizened like little monkeys” ’.⁸⁷

This detailed regulation obviously also included religious indoctrination. In Locke’s view, for poor children to start work from the age of three was a beneficial measure not only economically, but also morally: ‘Another advantage … of bringing poor children … to a working-school is that by this means they may be obliged to come constantly to church every Sunday along with their school-masters or dames, whereby they may be brought into some sense of religion’.⁸⁸ In his turn, Mandeville demanded that Sunday attendance of church become ‘a Duty’ for the poor and illiterate. Appealing to spontaneous religious feelings was insufficient: ‘It is a Duty incumbent on all Magistrates to take particular Care’ of what happened on Sundays. ‘The Poor more especially and their Children should be made to go to Church on it both in the Fore and Afternoon’. Positive results would not be wanting: ‘Where this Care is taken by the Magistrates as far as it lies in their Power, Ministers of the Gospel may instill into the smallest Capacities’ devotion and the virtue of obedience.⁸⁹

Controlled in their private life, the popular classes were even more so in the public existence which, amid a host of difficulties, they sought: ‘Between 1793 & 1820, more than 60 acts directed at repression of working-class collective action were passed by Parliament.’⁹⁰ More even than trade-union activity in the strict sense—that is, action aimed at raising wages and improving working conditions—the very attempt by servants to escape their isolation and communicate with one another was viewed with dismay. They (thundered Mandeville in alarm) ‘assemble when they please with Impunity’. They even developed relations of mutual solidarity; they sought to aid a colleague dismissed or flogged by his master. Simply by virtue of not confining themselves to the vertical, subaltern relationship with their superiors, but seeking to develop horizontal relations with one another, servants were to be considered culpable of unacceptable subversion: they were ‘daily incroaching upon Masters and Mistresses, and endeavouring to be more upon the Level with them’; they had already raised ‘the low Dignity of their Condition … from the Original Meanness which the publick Welfare requires it should always remain in’. Exceeding every limit, the servant posed as a gentleman; this was the ‘comedy’ of the ‘Gentleman Footman’, a comedy which in fact, in the absence of timely intervention, might turn into a ‘tragedy’ for the whole nation.⁹¹

Particularly significant in this context was the position taken by Adam Smith. He acknowledged that ‘[w]e have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it.’ Besides, ‘[t]he masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily … Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate’, or ‘to sink the wages of labour even below this rate’.⁹² Hence even were masters and workers to be treated identically in legislative terms, the former would always enjoy an advantageous situation. But they were also favoured by the precarious living conditions of the opposing party:

All this did not prevent Smith from recommending that the government act severely against working-class combinations. Certainly, ‘[p]eople of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices’. However, it was ‘impossible to prevent such meetings, by any law which … would be consistent with liberty and justice’. But the government must forestall any working-class gathering, even the most casual and seemingly innocuous. For example, the requirement of bureaucratic registration for those who practice a specific profession ended up ‘connect[ing] individuals who might never otherwise be known to one another’. Utterly intolerable was any ‘regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage’.⁹⁴ Consequently, not only trade-union activity, but even a mutual aid society was to be considered illegal. Smith recognized that he was dealing with ‘desperate men’, who risked dying of starvation. And yet this consideration took second place to the need to avoid meetings, ‘conversations’ or gatherings that tended to be synonymous with a ‘conspiracy against the public’.

In order to criminalize at birth any popular association, the dominant class in England resorted to yet more summary methods, which can be described in Constant’s words: ‘the horrendous expedient of sending spies to incite ignorant minds and suggest rebellion to them, so as then to be able to denounce them’. Results were not wanting: ‘The wretches captivated those who had the misfortune to listen to them and probably also accused those they did not succeed in captivating.’ And justice came crashing down on both.⁹⁵

9. A whole with singular characteristics

We have seen Mandeville call on judges to be summary in condemning to death those guilty or suspected of theft and pilferage, even at the cost of striking down some innocents. The priority was the need to safeguard ‘the peace of the society’ or ‘advantage to a nation’. Blackstone acknowledged that press-ganging men into the navy seemed dubious and detrimental to liberty. It was ‘only defensible for public necessity, to which all private considerations must give way’.⁹⁶ In his turn, Locke repeatedly called on people not to lose sight of ‘the public good’, ‘the good of the nation’, ‘the public weal’, or ‘the preservation of the whole’, ‘the whole commonwealth’.⁹⁷

What is so passionately invoked here is a Whole demanding the sacrifice, permanent not temporary, of the overwhelming majority of the population, whose condition was all the more tragic because any prospect of improvement seemed pretty remote. In fact, even to entertain projects tending towards such improvement was synonymous not only with abstract utopianism, but also and above all with dangerous subversion. According to Townsend, the ‘stock of human happiness is … much increased’ by the presence of ‘the poor’, who were compelled to perform the most arduous and painful work. The poor fully deserved their fate, were by definition wastrels and vagrants. But it would be a disaster for society if, by some chance, they were to mend their ways: ‘The fleets and armies of a state would soon be in want of soldiers and of sailors, if sobriety and diligence universally prevailed’;⁹⁸ and the country’s economy would find itself in difficulties. Mandeville reached the same conclusion: ‘To make the society … happy … it is requisite that great numbers … should be ignorant as well as poor’; ‘the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor’.⁹⁹ And let us now read Arthur Young: ‘every one but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious’,¹⁰⁰ and would not produce the ‘wealth of nations’ referred to by Smith. Later, in France, Destutt de Tracy arrived at the same conclusion: ‘In poor nations the people are comfortable, in rich nations they are generally poor.’¹⁰¹ Why was the proposition, in its various forms, that society’s happiness and wealth depended on the hardship and deprivation of the poor, who formed a large majority of the population, not perceived as contradictory? It is Locke who explains the logic of this Whole with special characteristics: slaves ‘cannot … be considered as any part of civil society, the chief end whereof is the preservation of property’.¹⁰² And this was also Algernon Sidney’s opinion: ‘a kingdom or city … is composed of freemen and equals: Servants may be in it, but are not members of it.’ Indeed, ‘no man, whilst he is a servant, can be a member of a commonwealth’; he is not even a member of the people, because ‘the people’ comprises ‘all the freemen’.¹⁰³ The poor were the servile caste required by society; they were the subterranean foundation of the social edifice, those whom Nietzsche defined as ‘the blind moles of culture’. With society and civilization, the poor and the moles continued to have a relationship of estrangement.¹⁰⁴

10. Wage-labour and the categories of slavery

Some decades after Franklin, in transition from the first to the second great controversy in the liberal party, the governor of South Carolina, James Henry Hammond, likewise applied himself to emphasizing how much quasi-slavery persisted in Britain. He sent an open letter to Thomas Clarkson, the venerable patriarch of English abolitionism, putting his finger on the sore point of the workers’ condition in the country that boasted of having abolished slavery in its colonies:

Obviously, reactions in Britain were indignant, insisting on the characteristic feature of the freeman that applied to even the most wretched wage-labourer. However, in defining him, the liberal tradition frequently had recourse to the same categories as were used in classical antiquity and across the Atlantic in relation to the black slave.

In Locke’s view, not genuinely capable of intellectual and moral life was ‘the greatest part of Mankind, who are given up to Labour, and enslaved to the necessity of their mean Condition; whose Lives are worn out, only in the Provisions for Living’. Wholly absorbed in ‘still[ing] the Croaking of their own Bellies, or the Cries of their Children’, such people had no possibility of thinking about other things:

Locke had no hesitation in asserting that ‘there is a greater distance between some Men, and others, in this respect, than between some Men and some Beasts’. To appreciate this, it was enough to contrast ‘Westminster-hall’ and the ‘Exchange’ with ‘Alms-Houses’ and ‘Bedlam’.¹⁰⁶ The boundary separating the human world from the animal world was imperceptible and evanescent: ‘if we compare the Understanding and Abilities of some Men, and some Brutes, we shall find so little difference, that ‘twill be hard to say, that that of the Man is either clearer or larger.’¹⁰⁷

Similarly, Mandeville, condemning the spread of education to popular strata, compared the wage-labourer to a ‘horse’: ‘No Creatures submit contentedly to their Equals, and should a Horse know as much as a Man, I should not desire to be his Rider.’¹⁰⁸ This was a metaphor that reappeared on the occasion of his polemic against the excessive generosity displayed by the rich master to the servant in England: ‘A Man may have Five and Twenty Horses in his Stables without being guilty of Folly, if it suits with the rest of his Circumstances, but if he keeps but one, and overfeeds it to shew his Wealth, he is a Fool for his Pains.’¹⁰⁹

It was not only English liberalism that argued in these terms. In fact, the process of de-humanization possibly reached its peak in Sieyès:

On other occasions, the process of de-humanization occurred in a different fashion. Adopting the distinction, peculiar to classical antiquity, between the various instruments of labour, Burke subsumed the wage-labourer under the category of instrumentum vocale.¹¹¹ Similarly, Sieyès referred to the ‘majority of men’ defined, above all in private notes predating 1789, as ‘work machines’ (machines de travail), ‘instruments of labour’ (instruments de labeur), ‘human instruments of production’ (instruments humains de la production), or ‘bipedal tools’ (instruments bipèdes).¹¹²

Traces of this process of de-humanization can even be found in Smith. By dint of the duress and monotony of his work, a wage-labourer ‘generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’, incapable of participating ‘in any rational conversation’ or ‘conceiving any generous … sentiment’.¹¹³

As across the Atlantic with black slaves and slaves in general, so in Europe the dominant class was separated from white servants by a gulf that had ethnic and racial connotations. In Locke’s view, ‘a day-labourer [is] no more capable of reasoning than almost a perfect natural [i.e., an ignorant aborigine]’: neither had yet reached the level of ‘rational creatures and Christians’.¹¹⁴ In his turn, Sieyès was of the opinion that the ‘human instruments of production’ pertained to a ‘people’ different from (and inferior to) that comprising ‘the heads of production’ or ‘intelligent persons’, ‘respectable folk’.¹¹⁵

A further reason intervened to render the gulf separating the community of the free from servants and slaves unbridgeable. The latter were considered incapable of fully appreciating the humiliations, the frustrations, the sufferings, the pain, as well as all the other feelings characteristic of man’s spiritual existence. We have seen how Mandeville argued in relation to the mass of wretches in Europe. They were forced to suffer hardship and privations and often ended up on the gallows ‘for trifles’, which they made themselves guilty of in an attempt to escape hunger. However,

On careful examination, the ‘greatest King’ could envy ‘the Peace of Mind’ of ‘the meanest and most unciviliz’d Peasant’ and his ‘Tranquillity of … Soul’.¹¹⁶ In no less emphatic terms, the Virginian theorist we have already encountered, Thomas R. Dew, expressed himself on the subject of slaves: ‘we have no doubts that they form the happiest portion of our society. A merrier being does not exist on the face of the globe, than the negro slave of the United States’.¹¹⁷

Not only is it very difficult to define the condition of white servants in Europe as free, but the image of them transmitted by the liberal thought of the time is not much different from the image of the black slave in the southern United States. So was the governor of South Carolina right to mock the abolitionists’ hypocrisy and credulity? That would be a hasty conclusion. In any event, we are obliged to reflect further on the characteristics of the society that was being formed either side of the Atlantic and on the categories best suited to understanding it.