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288 at once to her side. For Laura, after long watching, had caught sight of Helen jumping the rope on the grassplot, and by means of coughing and waving her handkerchief from the window had attracted the notice of the child, who, coming to the paling, had received the message she forthwith bore to Cornelia, adding to it the information that Laura's eyes appeared to be almost as red as Cornelia's own.

Staying only to finish the volume, Cornelia repaired to comfort and console her friend, to whose chamber she found ready access in spite of some vague misgivings in Mrs. Jaynes's mind. But, shrewd as this lady was by nature, and apprehensive as she felt that some untoward accident would prevent the accomplishment of her cherished plans, she never dreamed of the momentous results that were to follow this interview, apparently so harmless, between Laura and her friend; nor would it be fitting to suffer an account of so important a conference to appear at the end of a chapter.

Romans had many virtues, and conspicuous amongst these was the virtue of impartiality. They treated everybody with equal inhumanity. They were as pitiless towards the humble as towards the proud. The quality of mercy was utterly unknown to them. Their motto,

Powell Buxton has happily translated, "They murdered all who resisted them, and enslaved the rest."

But it was as slaveholders that the Romans most clearly exhibited their impartiality. They were above those miserable subterfuges that are so common with Americans. They made slaves of all, of the high as well as the low,—of Thracians as well as Sardinians, of Greeks and Syrians as readily as of Scythians and Cappadocians.

The consequence of the modes by which the Romans obtained their bondmen,—by war, by purchase, and by kidnapping,—affecting as they did the most cultivated and the bravest races, necessarily made slavery a very dangerous institution. Greeks and Gauls, Thracians and Syrians, Germans and Spaniards were not likely to submit their necks readily to the yoke. They rose several times in great masses, and contended for years on equal terms with the legions. Some of their number exhibited the talents of statesmen and soldiers, at the head of armies more numerous than both those which fought at Cannæ. One of them showed himself to be a born soldier, and caused the greatest terror to be felt at Rome that had been known there since that day on which Hannibal rode up to the Colline Gate, and cast his javelin defiantly into that city which he himself never could enter.

The treatment of their slaves by the Romans was not unlike that which slaves now experience. Some masters were kind, and there are many facts which show that the relations between master and slave were occasionally of the most amiable nature. But these were exceptional cases, the general rule being cruelty, as it must be where so much power is lodged in the hands of one class of men, and the other has only a nominal protection from the law. Even where cruelty takes no other form than that involved in hard labor, the slave must