#2 Old 07-18-2001, 02:16 PM CalMeacham CalMeacham is online now Guest Join Date: May 2000 My personal opinion -- not long. A friend once asked me why slavery disappeared and my immediate answer was --- Steam. Stem power, and later on, gasoline engines and electricity, provided the mechanical energy thateliminated the need for human muscle. Compassion and Empathy have, after all, been with the human race for as long as weve been around (although not everyone paid attention to the implications), but slavery was practiced all over the world for a LONG time. Even in places where you wouldnt have expected it (I think Mark Twain probably got it right with slavery in 6th century Britain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court.) It wasnt until Steam came along that slavery vanished. Now you could get rid of your slaves and still be economically competitive. Keeping slaves is an ugly business, even if you have a geart of flint. Each slave is expensive. They have to be housed and fed. Periodically there are slave uprisings. One of the most telling documents about slavery, and the most surprising, is Federck Douglass autobiography. One of the things that upset him about slavery, on an intellectual level, was how inefficient it was. And he had been a slave, himself. It took too many people to perform a chore that they werent motivated to perform in the first place, and they usually had an overseer looking on. So it makes sense that, as soon as an alternative system became available, people would abandon slavery for the new possibilities opened by the machine age. Slavery would have been gone by the turn of the century at the latest, impelled not only by machines, but by the social influence of Europe and Canada. Peobably it would be gone before then. If this is true, its ironic that the South put so much effort into a War that (although fought at least in part for other reasons) had slavery at its root. __________________ My name is Michael Jackson, King of Pop Look on my works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 21:30:43 +0000
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