Note 56 — Chapter I · DEFINITION AND DISTINCTION FROM KINDRED PHENOMENA.

Letourneau, after describing the state of the colonus, adds: “In a word, he was not an object of possession, a slave, but only a proletarian attached to the soil.” In another passage he remarks that slavery always undergoes some mitigation in the course of civilization: “Less and less is the person of the slave himself oppressed; one is contented with exploiting him, depriving him in a larger or smaller degree of the fruits of his labour, in a word the slave becomes a serf”56.