It is quite curious to observe how strong a faith our projector has in his theory of a sufficient price, and how singular a bias this has exerted on his mind in some other matters of speculation. He finds that slavery, both in olden and modern times, has been all owing to "cheapness of land." Could he have fixed his sufficient price upon the arable land in Chaldea, or about the cities of Athens and Rome, neither the patriarchs, nor the Greeks, nor the Romans, would have known the institution of slavery. "Slavery is evidently," he says, "a make-shift for hiring; a proceeding to which recourse is had only where hiring is impossible, or difficult. Slave labour is, on the whole, much more costly than the labour of hired freemen; and slavery is also full of moral and political evils, from which the method of hired labour is exempt. Slavery, _therefore_, is not preferred to the method of hiring: the method of hiring would be preferred if there was a choice."--(P. 324.) Most logical "_therefore_!" The mode of hiring is preferred by those to whom experience has taught all this; but slavery, so far from being the "make-shift," is the first expedient. It is the first rude method which unscrupulous power adopts to engross the produce of the earth. The stronger make the weaker labour for them. "It happens," he continues, "wherever population is scanty in proportion to land." It happens wherever people prefer idleness to work, and have been able to coerce others to labour for them, whether land has been plentiful or not. Was it abundance of land, or the military spirit, that produced the amiable relationship between the Spartan and the Helot?--or was there any need of a "sufficient price" to limit the supply of good land in Egypt, which lay rigidly enough defined between the high and low margin of a river? Or could any governor, with his tariff of prices, have performed this duty more effectually than the Nile and the desert had done between them? But the most amusing instance is still to follow. "It was the cheapness of land that caused Las Casas (the Clarkson or Wilberforce of his time, as respects the Red Indians of America) to invent the African slave-trade. It was the cheapness of land that brought African slaves to Antigua and Barbadoes."--(P. 328.) It was the cheapness of land! If land had been dearer, the Spaniards would have worked for themselves, and not have asked the Red Indians for their assistance! If land had been dearer in Antigua and Barbadoes, the climate would have lost its influence on European frames, and Englishmen would have laboured in their own sugar plantations!