Note 275 — Chapter IV · AGRICULTURAL TRIBES.

Where commercial relations with foreign parts are maintained, it is otherwise. A slave-owner who receives large quantities of agricultural produce from his slaves can now exchange them for foreign merchandise. Retaining for himself as much food as he wants, he exchanges the rest for such objects as are either useful and agreeable in themselves, or give him distinction among his countrymen. The use of slave labour becomes thus practically unlimited. Kohler rightly remarks that only where the economic instinct is awake, can slavery attain to a full development, and Schmoller observes that, when the patriarchal family began to produce for the market, covetousness and pursuit of gain arose and the treatment of slaves became worse275.