Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/187

181 slaves, still these colonists were not free; they could not marry free citizens, and marriages with members of their own class were not regarded as valid, but as mere concubinages like those of the slaves. The colonists were the prototypes of the medieval serfs.

The ancient slavery had lost its vitality. Neither in the country in large scale agriculture, nor in the manufactories of the towns did it yield any more returns—the market for its products had disappeared. And small scale production and artisanship, to which the gigantic production of the flourishing time of the empire «was now reduced, did not leave any room for numerous slaves. Only house and luxury slaves of the rich were still retained by society. But this declining slavery was as yet sufficiently strong to brand productive labor as slave work, as below the dignity of free Romans; and everybody was now a free Roman. An increasing number of superfluous slaves who had become a drug on their owners were dismissed, while on the other hand the number of colonists and of beggared free men (similar to the poor whites in the slave states of America) grew continuously. Christianity is perfectly innocent of this gradual decline of ancient slavery. For it had taken part in the slavery of the Roman empire for centuries. It never prevented the slave trade of Christians later on, neither of the Germans in the North, nor of the Venetians on the Mediterranean, nor the negro traffic of later years. Slavery died, because it did not pay any longer. But it left behind its poisonous sting by branding as ignoble the productive labor of free men.