CHRISTIAN WRITERS

LVII. LACTANTIUS.

When we turn to the Christian writers, whom it is convenient to take by themselves, we pass into a different atmosphere. Of rhetoric there is plenty, for most of them had been subjected to the same literary influences as their Pagan contemporaries. But there is a marked difference of spirit, more especially in one respect very important from the point of view of the present inquiry. Christianity might counsel submission to the powers that be: it might recognize slavery as an institution: it might enjoin on the slave to render something beyond eye-service to his legal master. But it could never shake off the fundamental doctrine of the equal position of all men before their Almighty Ruler, and the prospect of coming life in another world, in which the standards and privileges dominating the present one would go for nothing. Therefore a Christian writer differed from the Pagan in his attitude towards the poor and oppressed. He could sympathize with them, not as a kindly though condescending patron, but as one conscious of no abiding superiority in himself. The warmth with which the Christian witnesses speak is genuine enough. The picture may be somewhat overdrawn or too highly coloured, and we must allow for some exaggeration, but in general it is surely true to fact.

First comes Lactantius, who has already[1729] been once quoted. Writing under Constantine, he speaks of the Diocletian or Galerian persecution as a contemporary. The passage[1730] to be cited here describes the appalling cruelty of the fiscal exactions ordered by Galerius to meet the pressing need of the government for more money. It was after the abdication of Diocletian and Maximian in 305. The troubles that ensued had no doubt helped to render financial necessities extreme. The remark, that he now practised against all men the lessons of cruelty learnt in tormenting the Christians, must refer to Galerius. The account of the census[1731], presumably that of 307, is as follows. ‘What brought disaster on the people and mourning on all alike, was the sudden letting loose of the census on the provinces and cities. Census-officers, sparing nothing, spread all over the land, and the scenes were such as when an enemy invades a country and enslaves the inhabitants. There was measuring of fields clod by clod, counting of vines and fruit trees, cataloguing of every sort of animals, recording of the human[1732] heads. In the municipalities (civitatibus) the common folk of town and country put on the same[1733] footing, everywhere the market-place crammed with the households assembled, every householder with his children and slaves. The sounds of scourging and torturing filled the air. Sons were being strung up to betray parents; all the most trusty slaves tortured to give evidence against their masters, and wives against husbands. If all these means had failed, men were tortured for evidence against themselves, and when they broke down under the stress of pain they were credited with admissions[1734] never made by them. No plea of age or infirmity availed them: informations were laid against the invalids and cripples: the ages of individuals were recorded by guess, years added to those of the young and subtracted from those of the old. All the world was filled with mourning and grief.’ In short, Romans and Roman subjects were dealt with as men of old dealt with conquered foes. ‘The next step was the paying[1735] of moneys for heads, a ransom for a life. But the whole business was not entrusted to the same body of officials (censitoribus); one batch was followed by others, who were expected to make further discoveries: a continual doubling of demands went on, not that they discovered more, but that they made additions arbitrarily, for fear they might seem to have been sent to no purpose. All the while the numbers of live stock were falling, and mankind dying; yet none the less tribute was being paid on behalf of the dead, for one had to pay for leave to live or even to die. The only survivors were the beggars from whom nothing could be wrung, immune for the time from wrongs of any sort by their pitiful destitution.’ He goes on to declare that, in order to prevent evasion of the census on pretence of indigence, a number of these poor wretches were taken out to sea and drowned.

In this picture[1736] we may reasonably detect high colouring and perhaps downright exaggeration. Probably the grouping together of horrors reported piecemeal from various quarters has given to the description as a whole a somewhat deceptive universality. That the imperial system, though gradually losing ground, held its own against unorganized barbarism for several more centuries, seems proof positive that no utter destruction of the economic fabric took place in the census to which Lactantius refers. But that the pressure exerted by the central power, and the responsive severity of officials, were extreme, and that the opportunities for extortion were seized and cruelly used, may fairly be taken for fact on his authority. This was not the beginning of sufferings to the unhappy tillers of the soil, nor was it the end. One census might be more ruinous to their wellbeing than another: it was always exhausting, and kept the farmers in terror. But they had not as yet reached the stage of thinking it better to bear the yoke of barbarian chieftains than to remain under the corrupt and senseless maladministration of imperial Rome.

LVIII. SULPICIUS SEVERUS.

The life and doings of the famous saint of Gaul, Martin of Tours, a Pannonian by birth, were chronicled by Sulpicius Severus, writing soon after 400, in an enthusiastic biography still in existence. In another work occurs a passage[1737] narrating one of his hero’s many miracles; and the story is too artlessly illustrative of the behaviour of the military and the state of things on the public roads, not to be mentioned here. Martin was travelling on his ecclesiastical duties, riding on an ass with friends in company. The rest being for a moment detained, Martin went on alone for a space. Just then a government car (fiscalis raeda) occupied by a party of soldiers was coming along the road. The mules drawing it shied at the unfamiliar figure of the saint in his rough and dark dress. They got entangled in their harness, and the difficulty of disentangling them infuriated the soldiers, who were in a hurry. Down they jumped and fell upon Martin with whips and staves. He said not a word, but took their blows with marvellous patience, and his apparent indifference only enraged them the more. His companions picked him up all battered and bloody, and were hastening to quit the scene of the assault, when the soldiers, on trying to make a fresh start, were the victims of a miracle. No amount of beating would induce the mules to stir. Supernatural influence was suspected and made certain by discovery of the saint’s identity. Abject repentance was followed by gracious forgiveness, and mules and soldiers resumed their journey. Now the point of interest to us is the matter-of-fact way in which this encounter is narrated. That a party of the military should bully peaceful civilians on the high road is too commonplace an event to evoke any special comment or censure. But it is clearly an edifying fact that violence offered to a holy man did not escape divine punishment. There is no suggestion that similar brutality to an ordinary rustic would have met with any punishment human or divine. Laws framed for the protection of provincials[1738] against illegal exactions and to prevent encroachments of the military[1739] remained on the statute-book, but in remote country parts they were dead letters. It is interesting to recall that Martin had in his youth served for some years as a soldier. As the son of a veteran, his enrolment[1740] came in the ordinary course. But, though he is said to have been efficient, he did not like the profession and got his discharge with relief. His life covered about the last three quarters of the fourth century.

LIX. SALVIAN.

The calamities that befel the Roman world in the fourth century led to much recrimination between Pagan and Christian, each blaming the other for misfortunes generally regarded as the signal expression of divine wrath. Symmachus had been answered by Ambrose, and Christian interpretation of the course of human history produced its classic in Augustine’s great work de civitate Dei early in the fifth century. About the same time Orosius wrote his earnest but grotesque historiae adversus paganos, an arbitrary and superficial distortion of history, interesting as a specimen of partisan composition. But it is not till the middle of the century that we come upon a Christian author who gives us a graphic picture of the sufferings of the people in a Province of the empire, and a working theory of their causes, strictly from a pious Christian’s point of view. This is Salvian, an elder of the Church at Massalia. His evidence is cited by all historians, and must be repeated here. The main thesis is that all the woes and calamities of the age are judgments of God provoked by the gross immorality[1741] of the Roman world. So far from imputing all vices and crimes to the Heathen and the Pagan, he regards them as shared by all men: but he draws a sharp line between those who sin in ignorance, knowing no better, and those who profess the principles of a pure Christianity and yet sin against the light that is in them. For the barbarians are either Heathen or Heretics (he is thinking of the Arians), while in the empire the Orthodox church prevails. And yet the barbarians prosper, while the empire decays. Why? simply because even in their religious darkness the barbarians are morally superior to the Romans. For our present purpose it is the economic and social phenomena as depicted by Salvian that are of interest, and I proceed to give an abstract of the passage[1742] in which he expounds his indictment of Roman administration and the corrupt influences by which it is perverted from the promotion of prosperity and happiness to a cause of misery and ruin.

The all-pervading canker is the oppression of the poor by the rich. The heavy burdens of taxation are thrown upon the poor. When any relief is granted, it is intercepted by the rich. Franks Huns Vandals and Goths will have none of these iniquities, and Romans living among those barbarians also escape them. Hence the stream of migration sets from us to them, not from them to us. Indeed our poor folk would migrate in a body, but for the difficulty of transferring their few goods their poor hovels and their families. This drives them to take another course. They put themselves under the guardianship and protection of more powerful persons, surrendering[1743] to the rich like prisoners of war, and so to speak passing under their full authority and control. But this protection is made a pretext for spoliation. For the first condition of protection is the assignation[1744] of practically their whole substance to their protectors: the children’s inheritance is sacrificed to pay for the protection of their parents. The bargain is cruel and one-sided, a monstrous and intolerable wrong. For most of these poor wretches, stripped of their little belongings and expelled from their little farms, though they have lost their property, have still to bear the tribute on the properties lost: the possession is withdrawn, but the assessment[1745] remains: the ownership is gone, but the burden of taxation is crushing them still. The effects of this evil are incalculable. The intruders (pervasores) are settled down (incubant) on their properties, while they, poor souls, are paying the tributes on the intruders’ behalf. And this condition passes on to their children. So they who have been despoiled by the intrusion[1746] of individuals are being done to death by the pressure of the state (publica adflictione), and their livelihood is taken from them by squeezing as their property was by robbery. Some, wiser or taught by necessity, losing their homes and little farms through intrusions or driven by the tax-gatherers to abandon them through inability to keep them, find their way to the estates of the powerful, and become[1747] serf-tenants (coloni) of the rich. Like fugitives from the enemy or the law, not able to retain their social birthright, they bow themselves[1748] to the mean lot of mere sojourners: cast out of property and position, they have nothing left to call their own, and are no longer their own masters. Nay, it is even worse. For though they are admitted (to the rich men’s estates) as strangers (advenae), residence operates to make them[1749] natives of the place. They are transformed as by a Circe’s cup. The lord of the place, who admitted them as outside[1750] aliens, begins to treat them as his own (proprios): and so men of unquestioned free birth are being turned into slaves. When we are putting our brethren into bondage, is it strange[1751] that the barbarians are making bondsmen of us?

This is something beyond[1752] mere partisan polemic. It finds the source of misery and weakness in moral decay. Highly coloured, the picture is surely none the less true. The degradation of the rustic population presents itself in two stages. First, the farmer, still owning his little farm (agellus, rescula), finds that, what with legal burdens and illegal extortions, his position is intolerable. So he seeks the protection[1753] of a powerful neighbour, who exploits his necessities. Apparently he acquires control of the poor man’s land, but contrives to do it in such a form as to leave him still liable to payment of the imperial dues. That this iniquity was forbidden[1754] by law mattered not: corrupt officials shut their eyes to the doings of the rich. From the curiales of the several communities no help was to be looked for. Salvian declares[1755] that they were tyrants to a man. And we must not forget that they themselves were forced into office and held responsible for paying in full the dues they were required to collect. The great machine ground all, and its cruel effects were passed on from stronger to weaker, till the peasant was reached and crushed by burdens that he could not transmit to others. The second stage is the inevitable sequel. The poor man’s lot is more intolerable than before. His lesson is learnt, and he takes the final step into the status of a rich man’s colonus. Henceforth his lord is liable[1756] for his dues, but he is himself the lord’s serf, bound to the soil on which his lord places him, nominally free, but unable to stir from the spot[1757] to which his labour gives a value. If he runs away, the hue and cry follows him, and he is brought ignominiously back to the servile punishment that awaits him—unless he can make his way to some barbarian tribe. Whether he would find himself so much better off in those surroundings as Salvian seems to imply, must be left doubtful. Any family that he might leave behind would remain in serfage under conditions hardly improved by his desertion.

LX. APOLLINARIS SIDONIUS.

The last of our array of witnesses is Apollinaris Sidonius[1758] (about 430-480), a writer whose life is singularly illustrative of the confused period in which the Roman empire was tottering and the series of luckless emperors was ended in the West. Britain had been finally lost in the time of Honorius. The Armorican provinces had rebelled, and even now the hold of Rome on them was slight and precarious. The rest of Gaul and much of Spain and Africa had been subject to barbarian inroads, and numbers of the invaders were settled in the country: for instance, the Western Goths were fully established in Aquitania. But the Roman civilization was by no means wiped out. Roman landlords still owned large estates: Romans of culture still peddled with a degenerate rhetoric and exchanged their compositions for mutual admiration. Panegyrics on shadowy emperors were still produced in verse and prose, and the modern reader may often be amazed to note the way in which the troubles of the time could be complacently ignored. Above all, there was the Church, closely connected with Rome, claiming to be Catholic and Orthodox, a stable organization, able to make itself respected by the barbarians. That the latter were Arian heretics was indeed a cause of friction, though the Arians were destined to go under. The conversion of the Franks under the Catholic form did not give Roman Christianity the upper hand till 496. But the power of bishops, ever growing[1759] since the days of Constantine, was throughout a powerful influence holding the various communities together, maintaining law and order, and doing much for the protection of their own people. A native of Lugudunum, the chief city of Gaul, Sidonius came of a noble and wealthy family, and his social position evidently helped him in his remarkable career. In 468 he was city prefect at Rome, barely eight years before Odovacar removed the last of the titular Western emperors. We find him anxiously concerned[1760] with the old food-question, like his predecessor Symmachus, and not less endeavouring to cooperate harmoniously with the praefectus annonae. For a hungry rabble, no doubt fewer in number, still hung about the Eternal city, though its services in the way of applause were no longer in appreciable demand.

From about 471 Sidonius was bishop[1761] of Arverni (Clermont in Auvergne), and performed his difficult duties with efficiency and dignity, a sincerely pious man with a good deal of the grand seigneur about him. Moving about on duty or seeking restful change, he was often visiting country houses, his own or those of friends, receiving or returning hospitality. His references to these visits lead to descriptions[1762] of many pleasant places, and pictures of life in the society of cultivated gentlemen to which he belonged. There is hardly any mention of the suffering farmers of whom Salvian speaks so eloquently. Yet I hesitate to charge Salvian with gross exaggeration and imaginative untruth. Not only do the two men look from different points of view. Sidonius is writing some twenty years later than Salvian, and much had happened in the meantime. The defeat of Attila in 451 by the armies of the Romans and Western Goths had not only saved Gaul from the Huns, but had greatly improved the relations between Goth and Roman. And it is to be noted that, in a passage[1763] mentioning the victory of the allies and the reception of Thorismund the Gothic king as a guest at Lugudunum, Sidonius praises his correspondent[1764] for his share in lightening the burdens of the landowners. Now Salvian knows nothing of the battle of 451, and indeed does not regard the Huns as being necessarily enemies of Rome. It seems certain that for the rustics things were changed for the better. Not that the farmer was his own master, but that the great Roman taxing-machine was no longer in effective action. A great part of Gaul had passed under Teutonic lords. If the subjects were exposed to their caprice, it was of a more personal character, varying with individuals and likely to be modified by their personal qualities. This was a very different thing from the pressure of the Roman official hierarchy, the lower grades of which were themselves squeezed to satisfy the demands of the higher, and not in a position to spare their victims, however merciful their own inclinations might be.

But though the establishment of barbarian kingdoms, once the raiding invasions were over, had its good side from the working farmer’s point of view, much of the old imperial system still lingered on. The power of the Catholic Church stood in the way of complete revolution, and the Church was already[1765] a landowner. Roman traditions died hard, and among them it is interesting to note the exertion of private interest on behalf of individuals and causes in which an honourable patron felt some concern. Thus we find Sidonius writing[1766] on behalf of a friend who wants to buy back an ancestral estate with which recent troubles have compelled him to part. Great stress is laid on the point that the man is not grasping at pecuniary profit but actuated by sentimental considerations: in short, the transaction proposed is not a commercial one. The person addressed is entreated to use his influence[1767] in the applicant’s favour; and we can only infer that he is asked to put pressure on the present owner to part with the property, probably to take for it less than the market price. Another letter[1768] is to a bishop, into whose district (territorium) the bearer, a deacon, fled for refuge to escape a Gothic raid. There he scratched a bit of church-land and sowed a little corn. He wants to get in his crop without deductions. The bishop is asked to treat him with the consideration usually shewn to the faithful[1769]; that is, not to require of him the season’s rent[1770]. If this favour is granted him, the squatter reckons that he will do as well as if he were farming in his own district, and will be duly grateful. Very likely a fair request, but Sidonius does not leave it to the mere sense of fairness in a brother bishop. To another bishop he writes a long letter[1771] of thanks for his thoughtful munificence. After the devastation of a Gothic raid, further damage had been suffered by fires among the crops. The ensuing distress affected many parts of Gaul, and to relieve it this worthy sent far and wide bountiful gifts of corn. The happy results of his action have earned the gratitude of numerous cities, and Sidonius is the mouthpiece of his own Arverni. The affair illustrates the beneficence of good ecclesiastics in troubled times. For Gaul was not enjoying tranquil repose. The barbarians were restless, and the relations[1772] between their kings and the failing empire were not always friendly. Religious differences too played a part in preventing the coalescence of Gallo-Roman and Teuton. The good bishop just referred to is praised by Sidonius as a successful converter of heretics.

The fine country houses with their vineyards and oliveyards and general atmosphere of comfort and plenty shew plainly that the invasions and raids had not desolated all the countryside. The first need of the invaders was food. Wanton destruction was not in their own interest, and the requisitioning of food-stuffs was probably their chief offence, naturally resented by those who had sown and reaped for their own consumption. If we admit this supposition, it follows that their operations, like those of other successful invaders, would be directed mainly to the lowland districts, where most of the food-stuffs were produced. Now the country houses of Sidonius and his friends were, at least most of them, situated in hilly country, often at a considerable distance from the main[1773] roads, among pleasant surroundings which these kindly and cultivated gentlemen were well qualified to enjoy. It is evident that some, perhaps many, of these snug retreats were not seriously[1774] molested, at all events in southern and south-eastern Gaul. Roughly speaking, the old and most thoroughly Romanized provinces, the chief cities of which were Lugudunum and Narbo, were still seats (indeed the chief seats) of Roman civilization. It was there that the culture of the age survived in literary effort sedulously feeding on the products and traditions of the past. Sidonius thinks it a pity[1775] that men of education and refinement should be disposed to bury their talents and capacity for public service in rural retreats, whether suburban or remote. The truth probably was that town life had ceased to be attractive to men unconcerned in trade and not warmly interested in religious partisanship. The lord of a country manor, surrounded by his dependants, could fill his store-rooms and granaries[1776] with the produce of their labour. He still had slaves[1777] to wait on him, sometimes even to work on the land. With reasonable kindliness and care on his part, he could be assured of comfort and respect, the head of a happy rustic community. The mansions of these gentry, sometimes architecturally[1778] fine buildings, were planted in spots chosen for local advantages, and the library was almost as normal a part of the establishment as the larder. Some of the owners of these places gave quite as much of their time and attention to literary trifling as to the management of their estates. The writing of letters, self-conscious and meant for publication, after the example of Pliny the younger, was a practice of Sidonius. The best specimen of this kind is perhaps the long epistle[1779] in which he describes minutely a place among the foot-hills of the Alps. Every attraction of nature seconded by art is particularized, down to the drowsy tinkling of the bells on the mountain flocks accompanied by the shepherd’s pipe. No doubt the effective agriculture[1780] of Gaul had little in common with these Arcadian scenes. The toiling coloni, serfs of a barbarian chief or a Roman noble, were all the while producing the food needed to support the population; and it is a convincing proof of the superficiality of Sidonius as an observer of his age that he practically ignores them.

To attempt a full description of society in Roman Gaul of the fifth century is quite beyond my scope. It has already been admirably done by Sir Samuel Dill. But there are a few points remaining to be discussed as relevant to my subject. That the decline of the middle class, and the passing of large areas of land into few hands, was a process forwarded by inability to pay debts incurred, is extremely probable. It had been going on for many centuries. But I do not see that the evidence of Sidonius suggests that this evil was in his time especially prevalent. The case cited[1781] is peculiar. The borrower is expressly stated not to have mortgaged any of his land. The loan was only secured by a written bond which fixed the interest[1782] at 12% per annum. This had been ten years in arrear, and the total debt was now doubled. The debtor fell ill, and pressure was put on him by officials employed to collect debts. I infer that the lack of real security prompted this dunning of a sick man, for fear the personal security might lapse by his death. Sidonius, a friend of the creditor, undertook to plead with him for at least some stay of action. This man had lately been ordained, and Sidonius (not yet himself in orders, I think,) was evidently surprised to note the simple religious life led by him in his country villa. And he needed little entreaty, but acted up to what he considered his duty to a brother Christian. He not only granted further time for payment, but remitted the whole of the accrued interest, claiming only the principal sum lent. Such conduct may have been, and probably was, exceptional; but I cannot argue from it that heartless usurers were eating up the small landowners of Gaul.

So too the case of the young man[1783] of good position who cast off a slave mistress and wedded a young lady of good family, reputation, and property, may have been exceptional. Sidonius takes it all very coolly, and mildly improves the occasion. A far more interesting affair is one in a lower station of life, of which I must say a few words. In a brief letter[1784] to his friend Pudens he says ‘The son of your nurse has raped my nurse’s daughter: it is a shocking business, and would have made bad blood between you and me, only that I saw at once you did not know what to do in the matter. You begin by clearing yourself of connivance, and then condescend to ask me to condone a fault committed in hot passion. This I grant, but only on these terms, that you release[1785] the ravisher from the status of a Sojourner, to which he belongs by birth; thus becoming his patron instead of his lord. The woman is free already. And to give her the position of a wedded wife, and not the plaything of caprice, there is but one way. Our scamp for whom you intercede must become your Client[1786] and cease to be a Tributary, thus acquiring the quality of an ordinary Commoner rather than that of a Serf.’ Sidonius is as usual ready to make the best[1787] of a bad job. From his proposal I draw the following conclusions. First, as to the nurses. The nutrix, like the Greek τροφός, held a position of trust and respect in the household, consecrated by immemorial tradition. No slave had a higher claim to manumission, if she desired it. It would seem that Sidonius’ ‘mammy’ was ending her days as a freedwoman, and hence her daughter was free. It looks as if the nurse of Pudens were still a slave, and her son an inquilinus on the estate of Pudens. He may very well have been tenant of a small holding, practically a serf-tenant. Pudens is still his dominus. His quality of inquilinus attaches to him in virtue of his origo; that is, he is registered in the census-books[1788] as a human unit belonging to a particular estate and taken into account in estimating taxation-units. Therefore he is tributarius[1789]. Sidonius proposes to divest him of the character of serf and make him an ordinary Roman citizen. The difference this would make is probably a purely legal one. Being at present a Serf, probably in strict law a slave also, his connexion with the girl is a contubernium. His manumission[1790] (for such it really is) will enable him to convert it into a matrimonium, carrying the usual legal responsibilities. The practical change in his economic position will probably be nil. He will still remain a dependent colonus, but he may perhaps enjoy the privilege of paying his own share[1791] of taxes. That Sidonius speaks of his present condition first as Inquilinate and then as Colonate, is one of many proofs that the two terms now connoted virtually[1792] the same thing. Such had already been stated as a fact in a law of Honorius, which was retained by Tribonian in the code of Justinian. Whether the inquilini were barbarian bondsmen (hörige), tenants bound to the soil like coloni but the personal property of their landlords, as Seeck holds; or usually descendants of coloni, as Weber thought; is more than I can venture to decide. I do not think that either hypothesis[1793] exhausts all the possibilities, and the point is not material to the present inquiry. In any case it can hardly be doubted that both classes consisted of men who worked with their own hands, only aided in some cases by slave labour which was far from easy to procure.

LXI. CONCLUDING CHAPTER.

After so long a discussion of the surviving evidence, it is time to sum up the results and see to what conclusions the inquiry leads us in respect of the farm life and labour of the Greco-Roman world. And first as to the figures of the picture, the characters with whose position and fortunes we are concerned. We find three classes, owner farmer labourer, clearly marked though not so as to be mutually exclusive. We can only begin with ownership in some form, however rudimentary; for the claim to resist encroachment on a more or less ill-defined area is a phenomenon of even the rude life of hunter-tribes. How private property grew out of common ownership is a question beyond the range of the present inquiry. It is enough that the owner, whether a clan or a family or an individual, has a recognized right to use the thing owned (here land) and to debar others from doing so. But it is clear that he may also be the actual manager of its use: he may even supply in person all the labour needed for turning it to account: in short, he may be his own farmer and his own labourer. And legend asserts or implies that such was the primitive condition of man when he passed from nomadic to settled existence. Differentiation of function is therefore a product of time and circumstance, a development varying in date and degree among various races and in various portions of the world. Once the stage of civilization is reached at which the regular cultivation of the same piece of land year by year is the normal means of sustaining human life, we meet the simplest economic figure, the peasant who supplies his own needs by his own methods, tilling the soil which in some sense he claims as his own. Whether it is his own permanently as an individual, or temporarily as a member of a village community, is a difference immaterial from the present point of view. Nor does it matter that his method of dealing with the land may be regulated by principles conventional in the society to which he belongs.

Delegation of management is a momentous step, destined to bring important unforeseen consequences. Many reasons may have rendered it necessary or at least convenient. It appears in two forms, the actual and relative dates of which are hardly to be determined with certainty. Either the owner keeps the profit of the undertaking and bears the loss, or some division of profit and loss between the owner and the manager is the condition of the arrangement between the two parties. Ownership is not abdicated: nor is it easy to see how, without a clear recognition of ownership, any system of delegation could arise. But on the first plan the owner owns not only the land but the service of his delegate. Whether the man be a client bound to his patron by social custom, or an agent earning a wage, or a slave the property of his master, he is merely a servant in charge. He can be superseded at any moment at the landowner’s will. The free tenant on the other hand is a creature of contract, and his existence presupposes a community in which the sanctity of deliberate bargains is considerably developed. Whether the tenant’s obligation consists in the payment of a fixed rent in money or kind, or in a share of produce varying with the season’s crop, does not matter. He is bound by special law, however rudimentary; and it is the interest of the community to see that such law is kept in force: for no one would enter into such bargains if their fulfilment were not reasonably assured. Whether a certain reluctance to enter into such a relation may perhaps account for the rare and doubtful appearance of tenancy in early Roman tradition, or whether it is to be set down simply to defects of record, I do not venture to decide. The landlord’s obligation is to allow his tenant the enjoyment and free use of a definite piece of land on certain terms for a stipulated period. Further stipulations, giving him the right to insist on proper cultivation and the return of the land in good condition at the end of the tenancy, were doubtless soon added at the dictation of experience. That tenant farmers with their families usually supplied labour as well as management, is surely not to be doubted. That, in the times when we begin to hear of this class as non-exceptional, they also employed slave labour, is attested: that we do not hear of them as engaging free wage-earners, may or may not be an accidental omission.

Labour, simply as labour, without regard to the possible profit or loss attending its results, was no more an object of desire, engaged in for its own sake, in ancient times than it is now. Domestication of animals, a step implying much attentive care and trouble, was a great advance in the direction of securing a margin of profit on which mankind could rely for sustenance and comfort. The best instance is perhaps that of the ox, whose services, early exploited to the full, were cheaply obtained at the cost of his rearing and keep. Hence he was kept. But in ages of conflict, when might was right, the difference[1794] between an ox-servant and a man-servant had in practice no existence, and the days of theory were as yet in the far future. A human enemy, captured and spared, could be put to use in the same way as a domesticated ox. His labour, minus the cost of his keep, left a margin of profit to his owner. At the moment of capture, his life was all he had: therefore his conqueror had deprived him of nothing, and the bargain was in his favour, though economically in his owner’s interest. No wonder then that our earliest records attest the presence of the slave. Even nomad tribes were attended by slaves[1795] in their migrations, nor indeed has this custom been wholly unknown in modern times. On the other hand it is remarkable how very little we hear of wage-earning labour in ancient agriculture. Nothing seems to imply that it was ever a normal resource of cultivation. When employed, it is almost always for special work at seasons of pressure, and it seems to have remained on this footing, with a general tendency to decline. In other words, the margin of profit on the results of wage-earning labour seemed to employers less than that on the results of slave labour, so far as ordinary routine was concerned. And we are not in a position to shew that in their given circumstances their judgment was wrong. But we need to form some notion of the position of the wage-earning labourer in a civilization still primitive.

The main point ever to be borne in mind is that the family household was a close union of persons bound together by ties of blood and religion under a recognized Head. A common interest in the family property carried with it the duty of common labour. The domestic stamp was on everything done and designed. Even the slave had a humble place in the family life, and family religion did not wholly ignore him. He was there, and was meant to stay there. Farm-work was the chief item in the duties of the household, and he bore, and was meant to bear, his full share of it. But the hired labourer stood in no such relation to the household union, however friendly his connexion with his employer might be. He did his work, took his wage, and went: no tie was severed by his going, and any other person of like capacity could fill his place if and when the need for help-service arose. In short, his labour was non-domestic, irregular, occasional: and therefore less likely to receive notice in such records as have come down to us. But if we conclude (as I am inclined to do) that wage-labour was not much employed on the land in early times, we must admit that this is rather an inference than an attested tradition.

The distinction between domestic regular service and non-domestic help-service is essential, and on a small holding from which a family raised its own sustenance the line of division was easy to draw. Later economic changes tended to obscure it, and we find Roman jurists[1796] of the Empire striving to discover a full and satisfactory answer to a much later question, namely the distinction between a domestic and a rustic slave. But by that time ‘domestic’ appears as ‘urban,’ for the effect of centuries has been to draw a really important line of division, not between slave and free but between two classes of slaves. There is however in the conditions of early slavery, when ‘domestic’ and ‘rustic’ were merely two aspects of the same thing, another point not to be overlooked, since it probably had no little influence on the development of human bondage. It is this. The human slave differs from the domesticated ox through possession of what we call reason. If he wished to escape, he was capable of forming deep-laid plans for that purpose. Now the captives in border wars would be members of neighbouring tribes. If enslaved, the fact of being still within easy reach of their kindred was a standing temptation to run away, sure as they would be of a welcome in their former homes. No kindness, no watchfulness, on the master’s part would suffice to deaden or defeat such an influence. To solve the problem thus created, a way was found by disposing of captives to aliens more remote and getting slaves brought from places still further away. This presupposes some commercial intercourse. In the early Greek tradition we meet with this slave-trade at work as a branch of maritime traffic chiefly in the hands of Phoenician seamen. In Italy we find a trace of it in the custom[1797] of selling ‘beyond Tiber,’ that is into alien Etruria. At what stage of civilization exactly this practice became established it is rash to guess: we cannot get behind it. The monstrous slave-markets of the historical periods shew that it developed into a normal institution of the ancient world. But it is not unreasonable to suppose that an alien from afar was less easily absorbed into his master’s family circle than a man of a neighbouring community though of another tribe. Are we to see in this the germ of a change by which the house-slave became less ‘domestic’ and tended to become a human chattel?

The exploitation of some men’s labour for the maintenance of others could and did take another form in ages of continual conflict. Successful invaders did not always drive out or destroy the earlier inhabitants of a conquered land. By retaining them as subjects to till the soil, and making the support of their rulers the first charge upon their produce, the conquerors provided for their own comfort and became a leisured noble class. In the Greek world we find such aristocracies of a permanently military character, as in Laconia and Thessaly. Colonial expansion reproduced the same or very similar phenomena abroad, as in the cases of Heraclea Pontica and Syracuse. The serfdom of such subject populations was a very different thing[1798] from slavery. It had nothing domestic about it. There is no reason to suppose that the serf was under any constraint beyond the regular performance of certain fixed duties, conditions imposed by the state on its subjects, not the personal orders of an individual owner. In some cases at least the serf seems to have enjoyed a measure of protection[1799] under public law. Whether the original Roman plebs stood on much the same footing as the Greek serfs is perhaps doubtful, but their condition presents certain analogies. The main truth is that the desire of conquerors to profit by the labour of the conquered was and is an appetite almost universal: moral revulsion against crude forms of this exploitation is of modern, chiefly English, origin; even now it is in no small degree a lesson from the economic experience of ages. But it is well to remember that we use ‘serfdom’ also as the name for the condition of rural peasantry in the later Roman Empire, and that this again is a different relation. For it is not a case of conquered people serving their conquerors. Rather is it an affliction of those who by blood or franchise represent the conquering people. Step by step they sink under the loss of effective freedom, though nominally free, bound down by economic and social forces; influences that operate with the slow certainty of fate until their triumph is finally registered by imperial law.

That the institution of Property is a matter of slow growth, is now generally admitted by sincere inquirers. It had reached a considerable stage of development when a clan or household (still more when an individual) was recognized as having an exclusive right to dispose of this or that material object presumably useful to others also. For instance, in the right of an owner to do as he would with an ox or a slave. Individual property in land was certainly a later development, the appropriation being effected by a combination of personal acquisitiveness with economic convenience. From my present point of view the chief interest of the property-question is in its connexion with debt-slavery. That farmers, exposed to the vicissitudes of seasons, are peculiarly liable to incur debts, is well known from experience ancient and modern. But ancient Law, if rudimentary, was also rigid; and tradition depicts for us the small peasant as a victim of the wealthy whose larger capital enabled them to outlast the pressure of bad times. How far the details of this picture are to be taken literally as evidence of solid fact has not unreasonably been doubted. But that a farmer in straits could pledge not only his land but his person as security for a debt seems hardly open to question. For we find the practice still existing in historical periods, and political pressure exerted to procure mitigation of the ancient severity. Now, if a man gave himself in bondage to a creditor until such time as his debt should be discharged, he became that creditor’s slave for a period that might only end with his own life. Here we have another way in which the man of property could get the disposal of regular labour without buying a slave in the market or turning to work himself. A later form of the practice, in which a debtor worked off his liability[1800] by service at an estimated rate, a method of liquidation by the accumulation of unpaid wages, seems to have been a compromise avoiding actual slavery. Evidently subsequent to the abolition of debt-slavery, it died out in Italy, perhaps partly owing to the troublesome friction that would surely arise in enforcing the obligation.

It is natural to ask, if we find small trace of eagerness to labour in person on the land, and ample tradition of readiness to devolve that labour on slaves and subjects, how comes it that we find agriculture in honour, traditionally regarded as the manual labour beyond all others not unworthy of a freeman? To reply that human life is supported by the produce of the land is no sufficient answer. To recognize the fact of necessity does not account for the sentiment of dignity. Now, in the formation of such unions as may fairly be called States, the commonest if not universal phenomenon is the connexion of full citizenship with ownership of land. Political movement towards democracy is most significantly expressed in the struggles of landless members of inferior right to gain political equality. Whether the claim is for allotments of land, carrying a share of voting-power, or for divorcing the voting-power from landholding, does not matter much here. At any rate it was the rule that no alien could own land within the territory of the state, and state and territory were coextensive. Only special treaties between states, or a solemn act of the sovran power in a state, could create exceptions to the rule. From this situation I would start in attempting to find some answer to the above question. In a village community I think it is generally agreed that all true members had a share of the produce, the great majority as cultivators, holding lots of land, not as tenants at will or by contract, but in their own right, though the parcels might be allotted differently from time to time. If a few craftsmen were left to specialize in necessary trades for the service of all, and drew their share in the form of sustenance provided by the cultivating members, the arrangement presented no insuperable difficulty on a small scale. But the tillers of the soil were the persons on whose exertions the life of the community primarily and obviously depended. The formation of a larger unit, a State, probably by some successful warrior chief, made a great change in the situation. A city stronghold established a centre of state life and government, and villages exchanged the privileges and perils of isolation for the position of local hamlets attached to the common centre of the state, and in this new connexion developing what we may fairly call political consciousness. Under the new dispensation, what with growth of markets, the invention of coined money, and greater general security, the movement towards individual property proceeded fast. Noble families engrossed much of the best land: and tradition[1801] credibly informs us that in one mode or other they imposed the labour of cultivation on the poorer citizens, of course on very onerous terms.

At this point in the inquiry some help may be got from taking the military view. War, at least defensive war, was a possibility ever present. Kings, and the aristocracies that followed them, had as their prime function to secure the safety of the state. A sort of regular force was provided by the obligation of army service that rested upon all full citizens. The warrior nobles and their kinsmen formed a nucleus. But the free peasant farmers were indispensable in the ranks, and, as their farms usually lay near the frontier, they furnished a hardy and willing militia for border warfare. The craftsmen, smith potter cobbler etc, were now more concentrated in the city, and were always regarded as ill-fitted for service in the field. Naturally the classes that bore a direct part in defence of the state stood higher in general esteem. But to say this is not to say that bodily labour on the land was, as labour, honoured for its own sake. The honour belonged to those who, owning land, either worked it with their own hands or employed the labour of others. I can find no trace of traditional respect for the labourer as labourer until a much later age, when a dearth of free rustic labourers had begun to be felt. Then it appeared in the form of yearning[1802] for a vanished past, side by side with humanitarian views in relation to slavery. Meanwhile a stage had been traversed in which slavery was recognized as necessary in spite of its admitted evils, and therefore requiring justification; a movement most clearly illustrated by the special pleading of Aristotle. That great writer was fully alive to the manifold merits of the farmer class as citizens and producers, but his trust in the power of self-interest proves him a confirmed individualist. How to combine self-interest with patriotic devotion to the common welfare is the vital problem, even now only solved ideally on paper. That coldly-reasoned conclusions of thinkers were really the foundation of the esteem in which we find the working farmer held, I cannot believe. Much more likely is it that it sprang mainly from immemorial tradition of a time when ownership and cultivation went together, and that theory merely absorbed and revived what was still an indistinct impression in the minds of men.

The Greeks had a significant word, ἀυτουργός, the usage of which may serve to illustrate my meaning. That it connotes the fact of a man’s bearing a personal part in this or that work is clear on the face of it. That no other person also bears a part, is sometimes implied by the context, but it is not necessarily contained in the word itself. To put it differently, he does his own work, not necessarily all his own work. I note two points in connexion with it that seem to me important. First, it is so often used as descriptive of rustic labour that it seems to have carried with it associations of farm-life: most of the other uses are almost metaphorical, some distinctly so. Secondly, I have never found it applied to the case of a slave. Why? I think, because it conveyed the further notion of working not only yourself but for yourself. If in some passages it is not quite certain that an owner (rather than a tenant) is referred to, surely this extension of meaning is not such as to cause surprise. It is not enough to suggest serious doubt that the common and full sense of the word was that a man did work with his own hands on his own account on his own land. This was the character to which immemorial tradition pointed; and, whenever tenancy under landlords began, the word fitted the working tenant-farmer well enough. The Romans had the tradition in the most definite form, though Latin furnished no equivalent word. Their literature, moralizing by examples and unapt for theory, used it as material for centuries. But neither in the Greek world nor in Italy can I detect any reason for believing that the peasant farmer, idealized by later ages, is rightly to be conceived as a person unwilling to employ slave labour—if and when he could get it. The tradition, in which rustic slaves appear from very early times, seems to me far more credible than late legends of a primitive golden age in which there were no slaves at all. That a man, to be enslaved, must first have been free, is a piece of speculation with which I am not here concerned.

Tradition then, looking back to times when landowner and citizen were normally but different sides of the same character, both terms alike implying the duty of fighting for the state, idealized and glorified this character with great but pardonable exaggeration of virtues probably not merely fictitious. The peasant citizen and producer was its hero. As the devolution of bodily labour upon slaves or hirelings became more common with the increase of commerce and urban life, and the solid worth of a patriot peasantry became more evident in the hour of its decay, men turned with regret to the past. And the contrast of the real present with an idealized past naturally found a significant difference in the greater or less willingness of men to work with their own hands, particularly on the land. But it was the labour of free citizens, each bearing an active part in the common responsibilities of the state and enjoying its common protection, that was glorified, not labour as in itself meritorious or healthy. The wholesomeness of rustic toil was not ignored, but to urge it as a motive for bodily exertion was a notion developed by town-bred thinkers. That it coloured later tradition is not wonderful: its recognition is most clearly expressed in the admission of superior ‘corporal soundness’ in the sparely-fed and hard-worked slave or wage-earner. But labour as labour was never, so far as I can learn, dignified and respected in Greco-Roman civilization. Poverty, not choice, might compel a man to do all his own work; but, if he could and did employ hired or slave labour also, then he was an ἀυτουργός none the less. This I hold to be an underlying fact that Roman tradition in particular is calculated to obscure. It was voluntary labour, performed in a citizen’s own interest and therefore a service to the state, that received sentimental esteem.

The power of military influences in ancient states is often cited as a sufficient explanation of the social fact that non-military bodily labour was generally regarded with more or less contempt. The army being the state in arms, the inferiority of those who did not form part of it though able-bodied was manifest to all. This is true as far as it goes, but there was something more behind. Why does not the same phenomenon appear in modern states with conscript armies, such as France or Italy or above all Switzerland? I think the true answer is only to be found by noting a difference between ancient and modern views as to the nature and limits of voluntary action. It is only of states in which membership is fairly to be called citizenship that I am speaking; and as usual it is Greek conditions and Greek words that supply distinct evidence. Not that the Roman conditions were materially different, but they were perhaps less clearly conceived, and the record is less authentic and clear. Now, beyond the loyal obedience due from citizen to state, any sort of constraint determining the action of one free man by the will of others was feared and resented to a degree of which we cannot easily form an adequate notion. In the gradual emancipation of the commons from the dominion of privileged nobles, the long struggle gave a passionate intensity to the natural appetite for freedom. And the essence of freedom was the power of self-disposal. This power was liable to be lost permanently by sale into slavery, but also from time to time by the effect of temporary engagements. The most obvious instance of the latter condition was the bondage created by unpaid debt. Hence the persistent and eventually successful fight to make it illegal to take a borrower’s person as security for his debt. But, suppose the debt cancelled by the seizure of his goods, the man was left a pauper. His only resource was to work for wages, and this placed him for the time of his engagement at the full disposal[1803] of his employer. If he was not a master’s slave for good and all, he would be passing from master to master, ever freshly reminded of the fact that his daily necessities subjected him to the will of others, nullifying his freeman’s power of self-disposal. If he worked side by side with slaves, there was a further grievance. For the slave, in whom his owner had sunk capital, had to be kept fed and housed to retard his depreciation: the free labourer depended[1804] on his wage, liable to fail. The situation, thus crudely stated, was intolerable. In practice it was met, first by devotion to handicrafts as a means of livelihood in which the winning of custom by skill relieved the worker from direct dependence on a single master; but also by allotments of land in annexed territory, and sometimes (as at Athens) by multiplication of paid state-employments.

Of ordinary artisans, as distinct from artists, it may be said that their position varied according as their special trades were more or less esteemed by contemporary sentiment. The successful could and did employ[1805] helpers, usually slaves. In urban populations they were an important element, particularly in those where military considerations were not predominant. The accumulation of capital, and the introduction of industries on a larger scale in factory-workshops with staffs of slaves, may have affected some trades to their disadvantage, but on the whole the small-scale craftsmen seem generally[1806] to have held their ground. Unskilled labour on the other hand was generally despised. It was as a matter of course chiefly performed by slaves. If a citizen was compelled by want to hire out his bodily strength, this was not voluntary: complete submission to another’s will, even for a short time, made the relation on his part virtually servile. Accordingly philosophers, when they came to discuss such topics, came to the conclusion that the need of such unskilled labour proved slavery to be ‘according to nature,’ a necessary appliance of human society. When the Stoic defined a slave as a lifelong hireling, he gave sharp expression to what had long been felt as a true analogy. For, if the slave was a lifelong hireling, the hireling must be a temporary slave. Romans could borrow the thought, but with them practice had preceded theory.

In making comparisons between wage-earning ancient and modern we come upon a difficulty which it is hardly possible to set aside or overcome. A slave could be hired from his owner, just as a freeman could be hired from himself. The difference between the two cases would be clearly marked[1807] in the modern world, and language would leave no room for misunderstanding. But many passages in ancient writers leave it quite uncertain whether the hirelings referred to are free or slave. The point is an important one, particularly to inquirers who attempt to estimate the relative economic efficiency of free and slave labour. For the immediate interest of the freeman is to get a maximum of wage for a minimum of work: the ultimate interest of the hired slave was often to improve his own prospect of manumission. The custom was to allow the slave to retain a small portion of his wage. Now this stimulus to exertion was manifestly to the interest of the employer, who may even have made it a part of his bargain with the owner. The slave, alive to the chance of laying up a little store for the eventual purchase of his freedom, was induced to work well in order to be kept employed on these terms. The owner drew a steady income from his capital sunk in slaves, and the system was thus convenient to all parties. We may add that, by causing a slave to take thought for his own future, this plan encouraged him to take reasonable care of his own health, and so far retarded his progressive deterioration as an investment; while his owner stood to recover the slave’s hoarded wage-portion in the form of redemption-money on manumission of his worn-out slave. There is reason to think that slave labour under these conditions was often more efficient than free. Unhappily we have no direct discussion of the question from ancient observers, who did not take this point of view, though well aware of the influence of prospective manumission in producing contentment.

But how far was this comparatively genial arrangement applicable to the ruder forms of unskilled labour? Take for instance mining. Freemen would have none of it, and the inhuman practices of exploiters were notorious. Yet hired slaves were freely employed. Owners knew that their slaves were likely to waste rapidly under the methods in use, and at Athens a common stipulation was that on the expiry of a contract the gang hired should be returned in equal number, the employer making good the losses certain to occur in their ranks. Here we have the mere human chattel, hopeless and helpless, never likely to receive anything but his keep, as an engine receives its fuel and oil, but differing in this, that he was liable to cruel punishment. Such labourers could not work for a freedom that they had no prospect of living to enjoy. And how about the case of agriculture? That freemen did work for wages on farms we know, but we hear very little of them, and that little almost entirely as helpers at certain seasons. So far as I have been able to learn, free wage-labour did not really compete with slave labour in agriculture: moreover the hired man might be a hired slave, while migratory harvesters, probably freemen, appear at least in some cases as gangs hired for the job under a ganger of their own, responsible to the employer for their conduct and efficiency. Most significant is the almost complete absence of evidence that rustic slaves had any prospect of manumission. In former chapters I have commented on this fact and noted the few faint indications of such an arrangement. At all events the crude plantation-system, while it lasted, was a work-to-death system, though worn-out survivors may have had a better lot than miners, if allowed to exist as old retainers on the estate. But cultivation by slave labour for the purpose of raising an income for the landlord was, even in its later improved organization, a system implying brutal callousness, if not downright cruelty. Slave stewards and overseers, at the mercy of the master themselves, were naturally less concerned to spare the common hands than to escape the master’s wrath. When writers on agriculture urge that on all grounds it is wise to keep punishments down to a minimum, the point of their advice is surely a censure of contemporary practice.

Now in modern times, humanitarian considerations being assumed, the prevailing point of view has been more and more a strictly economic and industrial one. It has been assumed that the freedom of an individual consists first and foremost in the freedom to dispose of his own labour on the best available terms. And this freedom rests on freedom to move from place to place in search of the best labour-market from time to time. But the movement and the bargaining have been regarded as strictly voluntary, as in a certain sense they are. The power to migrate or emigrate with the view of ‘bettering himself’ is conferred on the wage-earner by modern facilities for travel, and new countries readily absorb additional labour. But experience has shewn that free bargaining for wages is not seldom illusory, since the man of capital can bide his time, while the poor man cannot. Still, when every allowance has been made on this score, it is true that the modern labourer, through freedom of movement, has far more power of self-disposal than the wage-earner of the Greco-Roman world. That his position is strengthened and assured by the possession of political power, is not without ancient analogies: but a difference in degree if not in kind is created by the wide extension of the franchise in modern states, and its complete separation in principle from the ownership of land. That is, the basis of citizenship is domicile: for citizen parentage is not required, but easily supplemented[1808] by legal nationalization. Moreover, religion is no longer a necessary family inheritance, but the choice of individuals who can generally gratify their preferential sentiments in surroundings other than their birthplace. Compare this position with the narrow franchises of antiquity and their ineffectiveness on any large scale, their normally hereditary character, the local and domestic limitation of religious ties, the restricted facilities for travel, not to mention its ever-present perils. Remember that to reside in another state as an alien did not, in default of special treaty or act of legislative grace, give the resident any claim to civic rights in his place of residence, while misfortune might at any time reduce him to slavery in a foreign land. Surely under such conditions the limits of purely voluntary action were narrow indeed. The lure of the wage and the fear of unemployment are often a severe form of pressure, but they are, as fetters on freedom, a mere nothing in comparison with this.

Considerations such as those set forth in the preceding paragraphs shew that in treating of ancient agriculture and farm-labour we are apparently faced by a curious paradox. Cultivation of land (including the keeping of live stock) is an honourable pursuit. That good health, sustenance, even comfort and profit, are its natural attendants, is not doubted. But the position of the labouring hands is painful and mean, so much so that a common punishment for urban house-slaves was to send them to work on a farm. The rustic slave’s lot differed for the better from that of the mine-slave in the healthier nature of the occupation, but in little else. And this degradation inevitably reacted on the estimate of rustic wage-earners, whenever employed. There may have been less repugnance to work side by side with slaves than has been felt in modern times, when a marked colour-line implied the disgrace of a ‘white’ man doing ‘niggers’ work.’ But it is not to be doubted that in agriculture as in other occupations the presence of slavery did degrade labour, at all events so soon as agriculture put on anything of an industrial character. The really ‘respectable’ person was the man who directed the operations, the γεωργός, agricola, or colonus (in the original sense): he was the man who worked the land and made it yield crops, whether he took part in the actual digging and ploughing or not. The larger the scale, the more he confined himself to direction, necessarily; but he was the producer, a pillar of public economy, none the less. He had provided the labour, bought or hired; in effect, the labour was his own. With the toiling yeoman farmer of tradition he had this in common, that both worked for themselves, not for another. And this position, attractive in all societies, was marked out with peculiar distinctness through the institution of slavery underlying the social fabric. Exploitation of man by man, the first beginnings of which elude our search and are only ascertained by inference, suggests some sort of superiority in the upper party. At all events the master, the man who has the upper hand, gets the credit of achievement, and in agriculture as elsewhere the subordinate operative is inevitably forgotten. It is from this point of view that we must regard the fine Roman legends of sturdy farmer-citizens, the fathers of the Republic. They are idylls conveying truth, dressed up by the imagination of a later age: and have their place in the region where history and poetry meet and blend. We must not gather from them that slavery was exceptional or a fact of no importance. Tradition habitually ignores what is normal and therefore assumed. The fairer inference is that, as I have already remarked, slavery was in those early days still a family institution, not an industrial system.

Some help towards the understanding of the different position of manual labour in ancient times as compared with modern may be got by considering Abolitionism. That a slave is a man, and as such not to be wholly ignored in respect of the claims of common humanity; that slave-labour is listless and ineffective, giving poor returns in proportion to the strength employed; these conclusions, moral and economic, were reached by the thinkers of the ancient world while their civilization was in full bloom. Why then do we find no movement corresponding to the Abolitionism of modern times? Two things were obviously necessary for such a movement; the motive to inspire it, and the force to give effect to it. Let men once be convinced that slavery is both wrong and unprofitable, and let them have the power to insist on putting an end to it, Abolitionism in some form or other is the necessary result.

Now in speaking of ancient conditions we must never lose sight of the fact that in its origin slavery was a favour. By the undissembled rule of force the conquered only retained his life through the mercy of the conqueror. By a contract tacit or expressed he was pledged for life to the service and profit of his master. And the master could, if his interest pointed that way, make over his rights to a third party. Hence the growth of a slave-market, and the relation of master and slave no longer was normally that of individual conqueror and conquered. But the original notion was by no means extinct, and it continued to colour the current view of slavery as ‘natural,’ a thing of course, an unquestioned social fact. Nor was there anything in the condition of the slave to arouse a feeling of horror, so long as patriarchal rule prevailed. If the Head of the family possessed absolute power over the slave, his power over members of the family in general was in kind the same. The bondman, a humble dependant rather than a mere chattel, was in a sense also a member of the family and under the protection of the household gods. What was there for an observer, let him be ever so kind-hearted, to object to? Accordingly, as the state developed, it too kept slaves of its own, employing them in mean functions for which it was needful to have a staff always at hand. In short, the institution was taken for granted, and growing intercourse with foreigners only served to reveal its universal prevalence.

How came it then that in course of time humanitarian scruples arose, and questioners were found to argue that the system was ‘unnatural’ and wrong? The answer must be sought in the application of an originally domestic institution to industrial ends. Once the stage was reached at which the products of labour were habitually put on the market, and the producer got his living by their regular sale, it was soon discovered that to produce and deal on a larger scale was more economical, and therefore more profitable, than on a smaller one. In the handicrafts this was so obvious that slave assistants were commonly kept by tradesmen: it was important to be sure of having the necessary help when wanted. The same was the case in the professions based on special training: the surgeon, the architect, the surveyor, the banker, employed slave subordinates, and had often been slaves themselves. In all these departments, not to mention domestic service, the position of the slave was affected by two important considerations. First, he was one of a few, and under immediate observation, so that escape from servitude was practically impossible. Secondly, there was a reasonable chance of earning manumission by long faithful service. But there were occupations in which it was far more difficult to reconcile the interests of the slave with those of the master. Such were the exploitation of mines and quarries, in which labour was simply applied in the form of brute force under direction. The direction, usually entrusted to slave or freedman overseers, was generally unsympathetic, sometimes cruel; for the overseer’s first thought was to please his master, even if he could only do so by working the slaves to death. The extension of agriculture as a means of profit rather than subsistence created conditions of the same kind in this occupation. It was here that the monstrous abuses incidental to slavery were most strikingly displayed. For, while quarries and mines were only worked in a few localities, the plan of working great landed estates by the labour of slave-gangs was applicable to vast areas of the best soil. And in Africa Sicily and Italy we find it so applied for the profit of the nobles and capitalists of a conquering race.

The evils of this system may be set down to the account of obsequious stewards heartlessly wringing profit for their masters out of human flesh and blood. But we must not ignore two considerations which suggest that the root of the evil lay not in the caprice or greed of individuals but in the attempt to carry on rural industry by slave labour at all. In the country, opportunities of escape were many; the slave-prison and the fetters could hardly be dispensed with if you meant to keep your farm-hands at disposal. And manumission, as a means of encouraging good service, was evidently not of much avail in country places. For after long years of exhausting labour the worn-out slave would be unable to earn a living by hard bodily work; and he knew no other. He had been bought as a flesh-and-blood machine; as such, to manumit him while still efficient would be a sacrifice of sunk capital for which nobody was prepared. It seems that the ordinary practice was to keep him at work till he could work no longer, and then to let him linger on the estate as an invalid retainer, feeding on what he could get and decaying in peace. But the industrializing of agriculture, heartlessly selfish in its aims, tempted landlords to shirk the unprofitable maintenance of spent labourers. When a slave was no longer worth his keep, it might pay to sell him at once for what he would fetch. There was thus a mouth less to be fed, and the problem of how to turn the remnant of his strength to account was shifted on to his new owner. This plan, approved by the elder Cato as a detail of farm-economy, marks the change of relations between master and slave in rustic life. The old domestic relation has disappeared in the brutal exploitation of a human animal for immediate profit. The crudely industrial system reproduced on great estates the horrid phenomena of the quarry and the mine.

That humane and thoughtful men should be disgusted with such doings was inevitable, and disgust was soon reinforced by reasonable alarm. For tillage was not the sole occupation of rustic enterprise. It was found that in many districts grazing paid better than tillage, and the two could be worked together remuneratively on a large scale. The charge of flocks and herds, shifting their pasture according to seasons, led to employment of able-bodied slaves in a duty responsible and at the same time removed from immediate control for months together. These slave herdsmen, hardy and used to a free life in wild uplands, had to face wolves and robbers, and therefore to bear arms. We need not dwell on the danger from such a class menacing the peace of a country unprotected by rural police. It was real enough. Being slaves, they had nothing but their lives to lose, and their lives it was their owners’ interest to protect. Meanwhile the unescorted traveller was at their mercy, and any peasants within reach would pay blackmail to escape their raids. Yet nothing was done to get rid of the nuisance and peril of this state of things. Servile risings were clumsily put down with appalling bloodshed, and left to recur. Meanwhile the free population of the countryside diminished, and prosperity could not be restored by new slave-gangs. Such was notoriously the condition of a great part of rural Italy under the later Republic, and contemporary evidence clearly shews that the improvement effected under the Empire was slight.

Now, when experience had proved the blighting influence of slavery, why was there no movement to do away with the system altogether? Truth is, there was at present no basis to start from. The moral enthusiasm, often sincere, that has inspired such movements in modern times, had no effective existence. Moral considerations were almost entirely confined to a section of rich or cultivated society. It was not expected that the common herd should rise above the meanest motives of crude self-interest. The artisan, who either employed, or hoped soon to employ, a slave or two, was not likely to condemn slavery: the parasitic loafer was not likely to welcome a mass of new competitors for the doles and bribes that he undeservedly enjoyed. During the last century of the Roman Republic no opposition to slavery as an institution could have arisen from the urban populace. And the wealthier classes were interested in slavery. Religion did not touch the question. A few scrupulous and thoughtful men might have supported an anti-slavery movement, had there been one; but we have not the smallest reason to think that any individual ever dreamt of starting humanitarian propaganda on his own account and at his own risk. There was no place in the ancient world for the reformer of this type. Even those leaders whose policy offered advantages to the free masses, such as the Gracchi or some Spartan kings, did not so fare in their enterprises as to encourage imitation. As for appealing to the slaves themselves, it was only desperate adventurers who did so, and that only to use their force in promoting criminal designs. Such cases only served to justify the cruel execution of cruel laws for protecting masters and the state in general from the imminent slave-peril. If we turn from the city, in which what passed for politics ran its troubled and futile course, to the countryside, we are at once in a scene from which all political life had departed. The farmer-citizens grew fewer and fewer, and the great majority of them were virtually disfranchised by distance. Nor were they likely to favour any movement that seemed to be for the benefit of slaves.

The establishment of the Empire did not, indeed could not, produce any material change in the way of arousing effective sentiment hostile to slavery. But it did much to promote internal order and far-reaching peace. Under the new model of government the corrupt circles of nobles and greedy capitalists were no longer in absolute control of the civilized world, and it might seem that there was now some chance of dealing with the canker of slavery. But no such movement was the result. Old notions remained in full vigour. Augustus had his hands too full, and the need of conciliating private interests was too pressing, for him to disturb them, even had he been minded to do so. And who else could take the initiative? But the fate of two moral influences is worth noting. Stoicism, the creed of not a few ardent spirits, might profess to rise superior to worldly distinctions and advantages and assert the potential dignity of man even in the humblest condition of life. But it was always a creed of the few: its aloofness, tending to a certain arrogance, made it unfitted[1809] to lead a great reform: it neither would nor could furnish the machinery of zealous propaganda. In the earlier Empire we find it politically allied with malcontent cliques in which smouldering resentment at the restraints on ‘freedom’ expressed itself by idealizing the Republic and hoping for a reaction. Thus it lost itself in impracticable dreams, and the hand of emperors under provocation sometimes fell heavily on its most virtuous men. The spread of Christianity came later, and was not diverted from its aims by a social affinity with the upper classes. Slaves bore no small part in its expansion to the West, and it was free to operate steadily as a humanitarian influence. But its claim to universality naturally exposed it to grave suspicion in a world that knew religion only as an affair of each several community, with a sort of overlordship vested in the conquering gods of Rome. Though it was a Church and not a philosophic system, though meant for all mankind and not for a cultivated few, it could only win its way by accepting civilization[1810] in the main as it stood. Therefore it was compelled to accept slavery as an institution, and to content itself with inculcating humanity on masters and conscientious devotion to duty on slaves. If Abolitionism was to spring from this seed, a long time had to be spent in waiting for the harvest.

Yet the establishment of the Empire did lead to effects that in their turn served as contributory causes undermining the old slave-system, particularly[1811] in agriculture. In a more peaceful age fewer slaves were brought to market, and this meant higher prices and put a premium on the economical employment of bought labour. To meet the situation, agricultural policy was developed on two lines, each of which was the improvement or extension of an existing practice. One was the more scientific organization of the labour-staff, so as to get better results from an equal amount of labour. The other was a more frequent resort to the plan of letting farms to tenants, whenever that arrangement seemed favourable to the landlord’s interest. Of these developments we have direct information from Columella, who still prefers the former plan wherever feasible. But it was with the system of tenancies on various conditions that the future really lay. I have endeavoured above to sketch the process[1812] by which tenants were gradually reduced to a condition of dependency on their landlords, and the difficulty of finding and keeping good tenants that was the other side of the movement. A very significant detail is the fact that slaves were put into farms[1813] as tenants: that this was no unusual practice is clear from the way in which the classical jurists refer to it as a matter of course. And so things slowly moved on, with ups and downs, the tenants slave or free becoming more and more bondsmen of the land, liable to task-services and not free to move at will. Thus by usage, and eventually by law, a system of serfdom was established, while personal slavery declined.

Looked at from an Abolitionist point of view, we are here dealing with a sheer evasion of the slavery-question. But this was inevitable. The imperial government, which alone had the power necessary for attempting solutions of grave problems, was doomed to become more and more mechanical. Under great strains in the third century it lost its vital forces to such a degree that it was powerless for internal betterment. The later despotic Empire, seeing the failure of past policy, could find no better way than to do as before[1814], only more mechanically and more thoroughly. What little of freedom of movement and of self-disposal still remained to the toiling classes accordingly disappeared. Once a certain number had been slaves; now none were practically free. Diminution of personal slavery had not increased personal freedom. The attempt to confine all labour to fixed grooves and rigid rules was a last desperate effort to control and employ the resources of ancient civilization, in the hope of thus finding means sufficient to endure the ever-growing strain upon the empire. This system might serve its purpose for the moment, but it was a vain device, killing enterprise and working out its own ruin through its own stagnation. In agriculture, on which the whole fabric rested, its effects were particularly ruinous: for in no occupation is there greater need of constant forethought and loving care, which the prospect of private advantage alone can guarantee. All these phenomena may assure us that as yet there was no clear understanding of the value of free self-disposal as the economic basis of society. From the moral point of view no genuine progress was to be looked for in a stagnant age. The transition from normal slavery to gild-bondage and normal land-serfdom does not seem to have been affected by the spiritual levelling of Christianity. But that as she gained power, the Church did something to mitigate[1815] the hardness of the time, is not to be doubted.

I need not dwell at length on the contrast presented by modern anti-slavery movements. The influence of religion, personal and humanitarian, is alone enough to account for the new spirit aroused and organized by Clarkson and Wilberforce. To put down the slave-trade because it was wrong was a momentous step, and emancipation its inevitable corollary, costly though it might be. That the reform was carried out two generations before the handworking masses of England gained political power is a most notable fact. For it is not possible to connect the achievement with the natural jealousy of free labour objecting to competition of slave labour. In the United States the motives for Abolition were necessarily more mixed, but sincere fanatics, religious and violent, were the leaders of the crusade. But the repugnance of free labour to the recognition of slavery in any part of the Republic (and it was this sentiment that furnished the necessary voting-power) was not so purely philanthropic. Students of American history are well aware of the moral change brought about by a single mechanical invention in the southern states. The economic advantages of the cotton-gin made slavery so profitable that existing tendencies towards emancipation died out in the South. A new life was given to a confessed evil, and the developed plantation-system, industrialized for the profit of a few, went down the road of fate to end in tragedy. The result of the great civil war at all events settled one question. Henceforth labour was to stand on a footing of self-disposal and wage-earning, with freedom to improve its conditions on those lines. The solution, obtained at an awful cost, was final for the time: what will be its ultimate outcome is at present (1919) a matter of some doubt, for reasons not to be discussed here.

The fact that Abolitionism is a phenomenon of the modern[1816] world, and not of the ancient, will not seem insignificant to those who have read widely in the ancient writers and remarked how very little we hear of free wage-earning labour. If we deduct the references to independent artisans practising trades on a small scale (and their cases are not relevant here), what we hear of mere wage-earners is very little indeed. And of this little again only a part concerns agriculture. I take it that we may fairly draw one conclusion from this: the wishes of the free wage-earning class, whatever their numbers may have been, were practically of no account in the ancient world. From first to last the primitive law of superior force, the ‘good old rule’ of which slavery was a product, was tacitly accepted. Civilization might undergo changes of character, periods of peace might alternate with periods of war: still bondage and labour were closely connected in men’s minds, and honest labour as such commanded no respect. How could it? Of a golden age, in which all men were free and slavery unknown, we have nothing that can be called evidence. The curtain rises on a world in which one man is at the full disposal of another. What is at first a small domestic matter contains the germ of later developments; and in the case of agriculture we see clearly how demands of an industrial nature transformed single bond-service into the wholesale and brutal exploitation of human chattels in slave-gangs. We have no good reason to believe that men ever in the ancient world abstained from employing slave labour out of humanitarian scruples. Scarcity of slaves, or lack of means to buy them, were certainly the main restrictive influences. The institution was always there, ready for extension and adaptation as changing conditions might suggest. If ancient civilization did not rest on a basis of slavery, on what did it rest? Assuredly not on free self-disposal. The man free to dispose of himself claimed the right to dispose of others, up to the limits of his own power and will. In this there is nothing wonderful. We need not flatter ourselves that the rule of force is now extinct. True, personal bondage to individuals is forbidden by law, but effective freedom of self-disposal, perhaps an impossible dream, is not yet realized: only its absence is dissembled under modern forms.

When I say that ancient civilization rested on a basis of slavery, the condition present to my mind is this. A social and political structure requires for its stability a reasonably sound economic foundation. This foundation is found in the assured and regular use of natural resources. And this use implies the constant presence of an obedient labour-force that can be set to work and kept working as and when needed. This force is now more and more supplied by machinery, the drudge that cannot strike. Antiquity made the slave its quasi-mechanical drudge: the more or less of slavery at a given moment simply depended on circumstances.

In returning to my original questions, whether the growth of Greco-Roman civilization was in fact achieved through the system of slavery, and whether it could conceivably have been accomplished without slavery, I have I think given my answer to the first, that is, so far as agriculture is concerned. And agriculture was the vital industry, on which the whole fabric principally rested. As to the second question, I can give no satisfactory answer. For my part, I agree with those who hold that, in the conditions of antiquity as depicted in our traditions and inferred by modern inquirers, slavery in some form and degree was an indispensable condition of progress. States, organizations of a lasting kind, had to be established by force. Captive labour, added to the resources of conquerors, seems to be a powerful means of increasing their economic strength and abridging the wasteful periods of conflict. But, once the stage had been reached at which a state was sufficiently stable and strong to provide for order within and to repel invaders, a slave-system became a canker, economic, social, ultimately political. I believe that the maladies from which the old Greco-Roman civilization suffered, and which in the end brought about its decay and fall, were indirectly or directly due to this taint more than to any other cause. I know of no case ancient or modern in which a people have attained to a sound and lasting prosperity by exploiting the servitude of other men. Serfdom or slavery, it matters not. So far as human experience has gone, it appears that all such conditions are eventually ruinous[1817] to the rulers.

For it is not merely the degradation of manual labour that results from slavery. The deadening of inventive genius and economic improvements is fatally promoted through the tendency to remedy all shortcomings by simply using up more flesh and blood. Man abdicates a most important function of his reason, and accepts a mere superiority of animal over animal. This is surely not following the true law of his development. It is from this point of view that the great scientific inventions of modern times present an encouraging spectacle, as the earlier abuses of their exploitation are gradually overcome, and the operative citizen vindicates his claims as a human being. That ancient slavery did in some ways act for good by guaranteeing leisure to classes some of whom employed it well, may be freely admitted. But I do not think we can sincerely extend the admission to include the case of Politics, whatever Greek philosophers may have thought. Nor can we without reservations apply it in the field of Art. On the other hand Literature surely owed much to the artificial leisure created by slavery. Even in its most natural utterances Greco-Roman literature is the voice of classes privileged because free, not restrained by the cramping influences of workaday life and needs. Its partisan spirit is the spirit of the upper strata of society, ignoring the feelings, and often the existence, of the unfree toilers below. In the main aristocratic, it tells us next to nothing of the real sentiments of even the free masses, particularly on the labour-questions that have now for some time increasingly occupied the public mind. That we are, for good or for evil, viewing all matters of human interest on a different plane from that of the ‘classic’ writers, is a consideration that students of the Past are in duty bound never to forget.

But, when we are told[1818] that ancient civilization in its early stages (as seen in the Homeric poems etc) may fairly be labelled as Medieval, while it may be called Modern when in its full bloom, we shall do well to pause before accepting a dogma that may imply more than we are prepared to grant. That mankind had to make a fresh start in the Middle Ages, ancient civilization having run its course and failed, is a proposition dangerously true. If it implies that the ‘free’ labour of modern times is not a direct development from ancient slavery, so far good. If we are to hold that ancient slave labour and modern free labour, when and so far as each is a factor of economic importance, are practically identical phenomena of capitalism eager to make a profit out of cheap labour, we may ask—is the parallelism so exact as it is thus represented to be? When we are told that the capitalist would nowadays prefer to employ slave labour if it were to be had, and that the legal form in which labour is supplied is a secondary consideration from the economic point of view, we begin to hesitate: is this really true? Was not the ineffectiveness of slave labour detected in ancient times? Was it not proved to demonstration in America, as attested by the evidence of both Northern and Southern witnesses? To reply that what capital wants is not mere slave labour but efficient slave labour, would be no answer. Capital is not, and never was, blind to the inefficiency of slave labour as compared with free labour. In the pursuit of profit it needs a supply of labour at its immediate and certain disposal; therefore it takes what it can get. In the ancient world the unquestioned institution of slavery offered a source of supply, not ideal, but such as could be relied on. Therefore capital employed slavery to extend its operations, simply turning existing conditions to account. And the admission, that the most flourishing period of Greco-Roman civilization was also the period in which slavery reached its greatest development, is surely a virtual denial that the basis of that civilization was free labour. That is, free wage-earning labour. For the independent farmer or artisan had nothing to do with the matter: he worked for himself, not for another, and was on a different plane from either wage-earner or slave. If he did not employ either wage-earner or slave, it was because he found such help too costly or a doubtful boon.