TRADERS AND SETTLERS 27

modern currency. If they failed in this payment
they lost their recently acquired liberty and re-
turned to the status of slaves. Meanwhile, their
children, already born or yet to be born, remained
under obligation to serve the Company.

Apparently the Dutch were conscious of no sense
of wrong-doing in the importation of the blacks.
A chief justice of the King's Bench in England
expressed the opinion that it was right that pagans
should be slaves to Christians, because the former
were bondsmen of Satan while the latter were
servants of God. Even this casuist, however,
found difficulty in explaining why it was just that
one born of free and Christian parents should
remain enslaved. But granting that the problems
which the settlers were creating in these early days
were bound to cause much trouble later both to
themselves and to the whole country, there is no
doubt that slave labor contributed to the advance-
ment of agriculture and the other enterprises of
the colony. Free labor was scarce and expensive,
owing both to the cost of importing it from Europe
and to the allurements of the fur trade, which
drew off the boer-knecht from farming. Slave labor
was therefore of the highest value in exploiting
the resources of the new country.