“Ready obedience to a terrestrial ruler is naturally accompanied by
ready obedience to a supposed celestial ruler; ... Examination
discloses a relation between ecclesiastical and political
governments ... and in societies which have developed a highly
coercive secular rule there habitually exists a high coercive
religious rule....
“The Clergy were not the men who urged the abolition of slavery, nor
the men who condemned regulations which raised the price of bread to
maintain rents. Ministers of religion do not _as a body_ denounce
the unjust aggression we continually commit on weaker societies.”
Dr. Ward writes:[347]
“Passing over robbery and theft, which, though prevalent everywhere,
are not recognized by society, let us consider war for a moment as a
non-industrial mode of acquisition. In modern times, most wars have
some pretext besides that of aggrandizing the victorious parties
engaged in them, although in nearly all cases this latter is the
real casus belli [justification of war]. This shows that the world
is so far advanced as to be ashamed of its motives for its conduct,
but not enough so to affect that conduct materially. In olden times
no secret was made of the object of military expeditions as the
acquisition of the wealth of the conquered people.... We may regard
war, then, strictly considered, as a mode of acquisition.... War,
then, when waged for conquest, is simply robbery on so large a scale
that in the crude conceptions of men it arouses the sentiments of
honor.”
In Dealy and Ward’s _Text Book of Sociology_, pp. 86–88, is this
luminous passage:
“The stage of race antagonism is reached and the era of war begins.
The chase for animal food is converted into a chase for human flesh,
and anthropophagous [cannibal] races arise, spreading terror in all
directions.... The use of the bodies of the weaker races for food
was, of course, the simplest form of exploitation to suggest itself.
But this stage was succeeded by that social assimilation through
conquest and subjugation. The profound inequality produced by
subjugation was turned to account through other forms of
exploitation. The women and the warriors were enslaved, and the
system of caste that arose converted the conquered race into a
virtually servile class, while this service and the exemptions it
entailed converted the leaders of the conquering race into a leisure
class.
“Such was the origin of slavery, an economic institution which is
found in the earlier stages of all the historical races.”
The next selected paragraph is from Professor Simon Patten (University
of Pennsylvania), Ex-President of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science:[348]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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