The philanthropy of the age is moving heaven and earth to the overthrow of the institution of slavery. But slavery has no scientific definition. It is thought to consist in the feature of chattelism; but an ingenious lawyer would run his pen through every statute upon slavery in existence, and expunge that fiction of the law, and yet leave slavery, for all practical purposes, precisely what it is now. It needs only to appropriate the services of the man by operation of law, instead of the man himself. The only distinction, then, left between his condition and that of the laborer who is robbed by the operation of a false commercial principle, would be in the fact of the oppression being more tangible and undisguisedly degrading to his manhood. If, in any transaction, I get from you some portion of your earnings without an equivalent, I begin to make you my slave--to confiscate you to my uses; if I get a larger portion of your services without an equivalent, I make you still further my slave; and, finally, if I obtain the whole of your services without an equivalent--except the means of keeping you in working condition for my own sake, I make you completely my slave. Slavery is merely one development of a general system of human oppression, for which we have no comprehensive term in English, but which the French Socialists denominate _exploitation_--the abstraction, directly or indirectly, from the working classes of the fruits of their labor. In the case of the slave, the instrument of that abstraction is force and legal enactments. In the case of the laborer, generally, it is speculation in the large sense, or _profit-making_. The slaveholder will be found, therefore, upon a scientific analysis, to hold the same relation to the trader which the freebooter holds to the blackleg. It is a question of taste which to admire most, the dare-devil boldness of the one, or the oily and intriguing propensities and performances of the other. CHAPTER IV. INTERNATIONAL EXPLOITATION. As individuals possessing skill or capital exploitate, or compel other individuals in the same community to work for them for nothing, or for undue consideration, precisely in the same way do nations possessed of those advantages exploitate other nations with whom they trade, who are without them.