have set free the mental power which has rolled back the veil of
ignorance which hid all but a small portion of the globe from men's
knowledge; which has measured the orbits of the circling spheres and
bids us see moving, pulsing life in a drop of water; which has opened to
us the antechamber of nature's mysteries and read the secrets of a
long-buried past; which has harnessed in our service physical forces
beside which man's efforts are puny; and increased productive power by a
thousand great inventions.

In that spirit of fatalism to which I have alluded as pervading current
literature, it is the fashion to speak even of war and slavery as means
of human progress. But war, which is the opposite of association, can
aid progress only when it prevents further war or breaks down
antisocial barriers which are themselves passive war.

As for slavery, I cannot see how it could ever have aided in
establishing freedom, and freedom, the synonym of equality is, from the
very rudest state in which man can be imagined, the stimulus and
condition of progress. Auguste Comte's idea that the institution of
slavery destroyed cannibalism is as fanciful as Elia's humorous notion
of the way mankind acquired a taste for roast pig. It assumes that a
propensity that has never been found developed in man save as the result
of the most unnatural conditions--the direst want or the most
brutalizing superstitions[46]--is an original impulse, and that he, even
in his lowest state the highest of all animals, has natural appetites
which the nobler brutes do not show. And so of the idea that slavery
began civilization by giving slave owners leisure for improvement.

Slavery never did and never could aid improvement. Whether the community
consist of a single master and a single slave, or of thousands of