Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/104

 his lowly, poverty-stricken, and degraded state. The gentlefolk repelled him from the family hearth; civil society made him an outcast from all its prerogatives. He was born, and he lived and he died, apart from other men. And as we are told of certain rivers which flow together in the same bed or channel without once commingling their waters, so proletarianism and gentility, enfranchised slavery and nobility, touched and elbowed each other, and even lay down in the same bed, but without ever combining or losing themselves in each other by amalgamation."

Had Christianity operated no other good in the world than breaking down the barriers of rank and pedigree—those barriers which up to Christ's advent had effectually divided the human race into two irreconcilable castes—it would have done enough to entitle it to be regarded as the most important event that had till then occurred in the world. Until that most stupid and inveterate of all prejudices, the prejudice in favour of race or blood, was effectually rooted out, no real progress could have been made by humanity. The early Christians felt this, and so did the few freed-men and proletarians of their day. The latter, ousted from the family circle and from the rights of citizenship, rejected at once from private and from public society, must naturally have yearned for some new society in which their wounded feelings might find a refuge from the barbarous pride of their fellow-men. Such a society they found in the new Christian brotherhood. Hence the ardour with which the slave and proletarian class embraced the new dispensation; and hence its first fatal but unforeseen consequence—the myriad pauper-population which soon after overran Italy and the whole Roman empire.

But no sooner was the character of Christianity altered and debased—as it became after its legal establishment under Constantine—no sooner did the wealthy and ambitious portion of the Christians abandon their religious obligations for worldly advantages, and lose all sympathy with their poorer brethren, than the latter found themselves in a worse condition, in respect of social intercourse, than was the lot of the old slaves, their forefathers. They had then to endure the pangs of destitution, superadded to the insolence and pride of race and riches.

Before the epoch of Christianity, the only refuge society offered to the few manumitted slaves and proletarians from the withering pride of social disparagement was what Frenchmen call communes, or what we in England would call municipal institutions. All ancient history goes to show that communes or municipalities, of some kind or other, existed from a very remote period. In these communes or municipalities the progeny and descendants of slaves formed a sort of society amongst themselves, in which they were governed by their own bye-laws, according to the charters they held, or the amount of privileges conceded to them by the governments under which they found shelter. The enormous mass of proletarianism caused by Christianity necessarily enlarged and greatly altered the character of these municipal bodies: one portion of the members became in time opulent burgesses, growing rich by manufactures, commerce,