Slavery, in its strict sense, is the state where man is the property of other men, is a thing; where he is bought and sold, and where his work does not belong to him, but to his master. This state of things existed through all antiquity. Society, with the ancients, was divided into two great _classes_ (the term is here perfectly in its place), classes very unequal in numbers, where the more numerous were the property of the least numerous. The citizens, as they were called, or freemen, who constituted a part of the State, the Republic, had no need of working to make a living, because they owned living instruments of work--men. This state of things, you well know, did not only exist in antiquity; it was perpetuated till our days, and it is not very long since it still existed in some of the greatest societies of the world. We may consider it at present as wholly done away with. A notch higher, we find the state called _serfdom_, where man is not wholly interdicted to own property, and where he is allowed a family, which fact constitutes the superiority of serfdom over slavery. It is obvious that in a state of slavery, there can be no family: a man, the property of another, liable to be bought and sold, can have no family. Serfdom, which in the Middle Ages existed in all European societies, and but recently was abolished in Russia, allowed the individual a family, and in a certain measure even the right of property; but he was a part of the land on which he was born, and, like that land, belonged to a master, a _lord_.