section_path: Philosophy/Slavery and child labour
section_name: Slavery and child labour
paragraph_text: Slavery and child labour
  
  Locke's views on slavery were multifaceted. Although he wrote against slavery in general, Locke was an investor and beneficiary of the slave-trading Royal Africa Company. Also, while secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury, Locke participated in drafting the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which established a quasi-feudal aristocracy and gave Carolinian planters absolute power over their enslaved chattel property; the constitutions pledged that "every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves". Philosopher Martin Cohen notes that Locke, as secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations and a member of the Board of Trade, was "one of just half a dozen men who created and supervised both the colonies and their iniquitous systems of servitude". According to American historian James Farr, Locke never expressed any thoughts about his contradictory opinions of slavery, which Farr ascribes to his personal involvement in the slave trade. Locke's positions on slavery have been described as hypocritical, and laying the foundation for the Founding Fathers to hold similarly contradictory thoughts regarding freedom and slavery.
  
  But historian Holly Brewer has argued that Locke's role in the Constitution of Carolina has been exaggerated and that he was merely paid to revise and make copies of a document that had already been partially written before he became involved; she compares Locke's role to a lawyer writing a will. She states that Locke was paid in Royal African Company stock in lieu of money for his work as a secretary for a governmental sub-committee, and that he sold the stock after a few years. Brewer likewise argues that Locke actively worked to undermine slavery in Virginia while heading a Board of Trade created by William of Orange following the Glorious Revolution. He specifically attacked colonial policy granting land to slave owners and encouraged the baptism and Christian education of the children of enslaved Africans to undercut a major justification of slavery — that they were heathens who possessed no rights. In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke provided a justification for slavery that could never be met, thus rendering invalid all forms of slavery that existed. Moreover, because slavery is invalid, there is a moral injunction to try to throw off and escape from it.
  
  Locke also supported child labour, which was an intrinsic part of all pre-industrial societies. In his "Essay on the Poor Law", he discusses the education of the poor; he laments that "the children of labouring people are an ordinary burden to the parish, and are usually maintained in idleness, so that their labour also is generally lost to the public till they are 12 or 14 years old". Therefore, he suggests the setting up of "working schools" for poor children in each parish in England so that they will be "from infancy inured to work". He goes on to outline the economics of these schools, arguing not only that they will be profitable for the parish, but also that they will instil a good work ethic in the children.