Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/103

 Cassagnac's work. And, in this passage, what a true but frightful picture is presented to us of the wrongs inflicted by the self-privileged few upon the despised many—wrongs as old as the world, and yet as green in the present day as though they were but of yesterday's growth! It is a fearfully significant passage:—

"The proletarians are, then, the progeny of the ancient slave-class—of the ancient junior branches of families, given, bartered, or sold by the fathers of the heroic period—the age of gods and heroes. This great, active, terrible, poetic, and calamitous race has been marching onwards since the beginning of the world, struggling to conquer repose for itself, like Ahasuerus, and mayhap, like him, will never attain it. It has still the old malediction on its head, which dooms it to move incessantly without making progress. All it has gained from its fatigues of ages is, that Homer and Plato say to it, 'March on!—you will never reach your destination in this world;' and that St. Paul says to it, 'You will reach it in the next world.' It marches on, then, and has been so marching for sixty centuries; covered with obscurity, opprobrium, and contempt; obtaining no credit for its virtues or talents, none for its labours, none for its sufferings. It is not accounted more beautiful for having produced an Aspasia, more illustrious for having given birth to a Phedon, more brave for having turned out a Spartacus from amid its ranks. Whatever may have been its intelligence, its patient endurance, its wisdom, its parts, it was never honoured with the title of 'sons of the gods,' like the noble race; and Plato himself, though he had felt what slavery was under King Dionysius, cast in its teeth the famed Homeric verse, in which it is told that the slave has but the half of a human soul. Singular fatality! In vain did manumissions and enfranchisements break the chains of this doomed race. The mark of the collar is still on their necks (as with the dog in the fable); and one of their own caste, Horace, the son of a freed man, in the very golden age of antique philosophy, poesy, and civilization, threw in their face the eternal aspersion, 'Money alters not the race—changes not the blood.' Though they had gained this money by fatigues of body or fatigues of mind, by manual or by intellectual excellence,—though they had been merchants or soldiers, senators or philosophers,—still was the cry rung in their ears, 'Money alters not the race.' This malediction of race or blood was implacable. In vain had Ventidius Bassus become a consul: he was told, 'You have been a scavenger and a muleteer.' In vain had Galerius, Diocletian, Probus, Pertinax, Vitellius, Augustus himself, become emperors. Galerius was told, 'You are but an upstart;' Diocletian, 'You have been a slave;' Probus, 'Your father was a gardener;' Pertinax, 'Your father was an enfranchised bondsman;' Vitellius, 'Your father was a soap-maker;' and they were very near writing upon the marble statue of Augustus, 'Your grandfather was a mercer, and your father was a usurer or a money-lender.'

"If this eternal and universal reprobation of the slave and enfranchished caste did not spare the most exalted heads and the most illustrious, imagine what the wretched proletarian was to expect in