herded with criminals and driven to the mines, where they laboured night and day, ill or well, under the most unwholesome conditions, naked, guarded by merciless soldiers, flogged and treated with a cruelty that no slavery of which we have experience can measure.
When the Phœnicians established trading colonies in Spain, they are said to have compelled the inhabitants to work the mines, and when the natives were killed by the cruel labour, slaves were brought in from Africa. It is recorded that Hannibal won the good will of the Spaniards 200 years before our era by showing them how to work their mines, which probably means that he corrected these cruel conditions to some extent.
We may well imagine that the constant references in literature to money as the root of all evil are not confined to the moral effect upon its possessor, but embody, in part, the lesson of brutality and suffering which the unfortunate miner had to endure to win gold for his master. Even to this day mining appears to the uninitiated to be a hazardous, fearsome occupation, though to-day, in civilised countries, hundreds of thousands of men go daily to comfortable and intelligent work and return from it in safety. Instead of getting our metals by forced labour, it is acknowledged by all observers that men who have once learned this art will not leave it for farming or other pursuits.
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