Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/68

 Thus the institution of slavery had been the ultimate cause of two political revolu- tious. The indigence to which it reduced the commons, had led the Gracchi to appear as the advocates of reform, and had encouraged Marius to become their military leader. In the murder of the former, the senate had displayed their success in exciting mobs ; and in resistance to the latter, they had roused up a defender of their usurpations. The slaves, also, who had found in Eunus an insurgent leader, were now near obtaining a liberator. The aristocracy was satisfied with its triumphs ; the impoverished majority, now accustomed to their abjectness, made only the additional demand of amusements at the public expense ; and were also ignobly satisfied. The slaves alone murmured, and in Spartacus, one of their number, they found a man of genius and courage, capa- ble of becoming their leader. Roman legislation had done nothing for them ; the legis- lation of their masters had not assuaged one pain, nor interposed the shield of the law against cruelty. The slaves determined upon a general insurrection, to be followed by emigration. The cry went forth from the plains of Lombardy, and reached the rich fields of Campania, and was echoed through every valley among the Appennines. The gladiators burst the prisons of their keepers ; the field-servant threw down his manure- basket ; Syrian and Scythian, the thrall from Macedonia and from Carthage, the wretches from South Gaul, the Spaniard, the African, awoke to resistance. The barbarian, who had been purchased to shed his blood in the arena, remembered his hut on the Danube ; the Greek, not yet indifferent to freedom, panted for release. It was an insurrec- tion, as solemn in its object, as it was fearful in its extent. Rome was on the brink of ruin. Spartacus pointed to the Alps ; beyond their heights were fields, where the fugitives might plant their colony ; there they might revive the practice of freedom ; there the oppressed might found a new state on the basis of benevolence, and in the spirit of justice. A common interest would unite the bondmen of the most remote lineage, the most various color, in a firm and happy republic. Already the armies of four Roman generals had been defeated ; already the immense emigration was on its way to the Alps.

If the mass of slaves could, at any moment, on breaking their fetters, find themselves capable of establishing a liberal government, if they could at once, on being emancipa- ted or on emancipating themselves, appear possessed of civic virtue, slavery would be deprived of more than half its horrors. But the circumstance which more than any other renders the institution execrable, is this : that while it binds the body, it corrupts the mind. The outrages which men commit, when they first regain their freedom, furnish the strongest argument against the system of bondage. The horrible inhumanity of civil war, and slave insurrection, are the topics of the loudest appeal against the con- dition, which can render human nature capable of committing such crimes. Idleness and treachery and theft, are the vices of slavery. The followers of Spartacus, when the pinnacles of the Alps were almost within their sight, turned aside to plunder ; and the Roman army, which could not conquer in open battle the defenders of their personal freedom, was able to gain the advantage, where the fugitive slave was changed from a defender of liberty into a plunderer.

The struggle took place [sic]pricisely at a moment when the Roman State was most en- dangered by foreign enemies. But for the difficulties in the way of communication, which rendered a close coalition between remote armies impossible, the Roman State could have sunk beneath the storm ; and from the shattered planks of its noble ruins the slaves alone would have been able to build themselves a little bark of hope, to escape from the desolation. Slaves would have occupied by right of conquest the heri- tage of the Cæsars. They finally became lords ; but it was in a surer, and to human nature and Roman pride, in a more humiliating manner.

The suppression of the great insurrection of Spartacus brings us to the age of the