It is common to hear it called 'slavery under a different form,' 'another name for slavery,'-- 'modified slavery,' 'but little better than slavery.' Nor is the practical operation of the system upon the _master_ much less exceptionable.

It takes out of his hand the power of coercing labor, and provides no other stimulus.

Thus it subjects him to the necessity either of resorting to empty threats, which must result only in incessant disputes, or of condescending to persuade and entreat, against which his habits at once rebel, or of complaining to a third party--an alternative more revolting if possible, than the former, since it involves the acknowledgment of a higher power than his own.

It sets up over his actions a foreign judge, at whose bar he is alike amenable (in theory) with his apprentice, before whose tribunal he may be dragged at any moment by his apprentice, and from whose lips he may receive the humiliating sentence of punishment in the presence of his apprentice.

It introduces between him and his laborers, mutual repellancies and estrangement; it encourages the former to exercise an authority which he would not venture to assume under a system of perfect freedom; it emboldens the latter to display an insolence which he would not have dreamed of in a state of slavery, and thus begetting in the one, the imperiousness of the slaveholder _without his power_, and in the other, the independence of the freeman _without his immunities_, it perpetuates a scene of angry collision, jealousy and hatred.
It does not even serve for the master the unworthy purpose for which it was mainly devised, viz., that of an additional compensation.