Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/72

 state of the times. Nothing but monarchy was tolerable. The evils that followed servitude made Augustus emperor.

Thus slavery, by impoverishing the majority of the citizens, rendered the reform of Gracchus necessary to the preservation of the democracy, and at the same time rendered that reform impossible. In a word, slavery subverted the Roman democracy. The same cause, corrupting the citizens, occasioned the attempt of Sylla, which Pompey would have renewed, to found an aristocratic government, where there already existed an aristocratic class; a result which the combined interests of the slaves and the people defeated. Slavery was the moving cause of the third revolution; and monarchy was established by the common consent of the people, and to the sure benefit of the slave. In the emperor the slave would have a friend.

Slavery prepared one more revolution, before it expired. It introduced Oriental despotism into Europe; not by force of arms, but by the sure results of causes that were perpetually in action.

Slavery impoverished the soil of Italy. The careless culture wore out even the rich fields of Campania. Large districts were left waste; other large tracts were turned into pastures; and grazing was substituted for tillage. The average crops of Italy hardly ever returned fourfold increase. Nam frumenta majore quidem parte Italiae, quando cum quarto responderint, vix meminisse possunius. It is the confession of the eulogist and the teacher of agriculture. Italy was naturally a very fertile country; but slave labor could hardly wring from it a return one-half, or even one-third, so great as free labor gets from the hills and vales of New England. This impoverishment of the soil impoverished the spirit of its inhabitants. The owners of slaves, disdaining the use of the sickle and the plow, crept within the walls of Rome, abandoning the cares of agriculture to the vilest of their bondmen.

Slavery prepared the way for Oriental despotism by encouraging luxury. The genius of the Romans was inventive; but it was only to devise new pleasures of the senses. The retinue of servants was unexampled; and the caprices, to which men and women were subjected, were innumerable. The Roman writers are so full of it, that it is unnecessary to draw the picture, which would indeed represent humanity degraded by the subserviency of slaves, and by the artificial desires and vices of their masters. This detestable excess extended through the whole upper class. Women ceased to blush for vices which, in other times, render men infamous. Beneficium sexus sui vitiis perdidexunt, et quia foeminam exuerunt, damnatae sunt mortis virilibus. At Rome, the gout was a common disease in the circles of female dissoluteness and fashion. The rage of luxury extended also, in some sort, to the people. For them, tens of thousands of gladiators were sacrificed without concern; for them the enslaved Jews raised the gigantic walls of the Coliseum, the most splendid monument of human infamy; for them actual navies engaged in actual contests; and the sailors, as they prepared for battle, received only an, on their way to death.

In like manner, the effect of slavery became visible on public morals. Among the slaves there was no such thing as the sanctity of-marriage; dissoluteness was almost as general as the class. The slave was ready to assist in the corruption of his master's family. The virtues of self-denial were unknown. But the picture of Roman immorality is too gross to be exhibited. Its excess can be estimated from the extravagance of its remedy. When the Christian religion made its way through the oppressed classes of society, and gained strength by acquiring the affections of the miserable, whose woes it solaced, the abandoned manners of the cities could be forcibly reproved, only by the voice of fanaticism. When domestic life had almost ceased to exist, the universal lewdness could be checked only by the most exaggerated eulogies of absolute chastity. Convents and nunneries grew up, when more than half the world were excluded from the