Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/188

182 This brought the Roman world into a closed alley from which it could not escape. Slave labor was economically impossible and the labor of free men was under a moral ban. The one could exist no longer, the other could not yet be the fundamental form of social production. There was no other help but a complete revolution.

The provinces were not any better off. The most complete reports on this subject are from Gaul. By the side of the colonists, free farmers still existed there. In order to protect themselves against the brutal blackmail of the officials, judges and usurers, they frequently placed themselves under the protectorate of a man of influence and power. Not only single individuals did so, but whole communities, so that the emperors of the fourth century often issued decrees prohibiting this practice. But what good did protection do to the clients? The patron imposed the condition that they should transfer the title of their lots to him, and in return he assured them of the free enjoyment of their land for life—a trick which the holy church remembered and freely imitated during the ninth and tenth century, for the greater glory of God. In the fifth century, however, about the year 475, Bishop Salvianus of Marseilles still vehemently denounced such robbery and relates that the methods of the Roman officials and great landlords became so oppressive that many "Romans" fled to the districts occupied by the barbarians and feared nothing so much as a return under Roman rule. That poor parents frequently sold their children into slavery, is proved by a law forbidding this practice.

In return for liberating the Romans from their own state, the barbarians appropriated two-thirds of the entire land and divided it among themselves. The distribution was made by gentile rules. As the number of the conquerors was relatively small, large