Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/7

 chain of this long development, will show clearly how man in society has been the result of ages on ages of slow growth, in which the individual is lost in utter insignificance, and special inventions such as fire, the wheel, the mining, smelting, and working of metals, become manifestly but the inevitable results of the social state which produces them.

Leaving on one side the civilisations of Egypt and Eastern Asia, important as they are to a knowledge of our social growth—for only seventy generations of thirty years each take us back to a period when Britain was practically unknown, and Roman civilisation was in its infancy—it is sufficient to deal briefly with the decay of the Roman Empire, the feudal institutions which sprang up on its overthrow, and, more in detail, with the special circumstances which have influenced the progress of the people of Western Europe to the existing capitalist rule. The fact that the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome were supported by open and acknowledged slavery of the mass of the producing class, renders all comparison of democracy, in the modern sense, with the so-called democracies of Greek or Roman society utterly futile. The economical and social conditions are entirely different.

Those Greek republics, which have so often been the theme for adulation on the part of democratic orators, poets, and artists, were themselves but close oligarchies; and the slave-class below was the basis of the whole super-structure alike at Athens, Corinth, and Sparta. The very numbers of the slaves show how completely the social arrangement was accepted as inevitable; for at Athens there were at least 120,000 slaves to 20,000