Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/101

 CHAPTER XIV.

SERVICE OF CHRISTIANITY IN BREAKING CASTE-BONDS.

Division of Emancipated Slaves into two Classes of Proletarians—Equality and Fraternity gave the desire for Liberty—Inveteracy of Caste-Prejudice—Perversion of Christianity under Constantine—Antagonism of Wages-Slavery and Christianity.

Our last chapter concluded with an instructive passage, translated from the work of M. Granier de Cassagnac, showing how the pure spirit of primitive Christianity had operated the manumission of slaves in such masses that the Roman empire was soon overrun with proletarians of the several conditions described. What four thousand years of paganism had not effected, to any sensible extent, was the work of less than three hundred years of Christian propagandism. But, alas! how different was the result aimed at by Christ and his successors! Those emancipations, which the early Christians had fondly hoped would bring about the reign of universal liberty and fraternity, but introduced a new form of slavery infinitely worse than the old, became, under Constantine and his successors, a curse to the emancipated, whose fatal consequences have never since ceased to be felt by three-fourths of Christendom. A few of the manumitted prospered, in the old Roman guilds or corporations, as burgesses, employers, or administrators; and a similar class, more extensive and more opulent, still obtains in our own times. But the vast majority, being without land, capital, or the patronage of masters, had to seek a precarious subsistence by casual labour, or else by theft, beggary, or prostitution. The passage from Cassagnac, quoted in the last chapter, shows how fearfully those unhappy proletarians had multiplied before the end of the fourth century. Immediately following it, there is another which bears so authoritatively upon the subject-matter of our inquiry, and which so strongly corroborates what has been advanced, in this work, on the relative merits of chattel and wages slavery, that we cannot forbear giving it a place here. We translate from pages 304 and 305 of the work referred to:—

"In pagan society few slaves desired to become free; and the reason is very simple. As slaves, they had, in their masters' homes, all the necessaries of life; they were sure of never having to suffer cold, nor hunger or thirst, and to be comfortably housed and well taken care of, in old age as well as in youth, in sickness as well as in health. As freemen ('independent labourers'!) they would have to provide not only for their own wants, but also for those of their wives and children; and this not only during the vigour of life, but also in old age and during their infirmities, without taking into the account that, poor and weak as they must necessarily be when emerging from