Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/14

 The only difference is, it is in the one case slavery direct and avowed; in the other, slavery hypocritically masked under legal forms. The latter is the phase slavery has assumed in countries calling themselves Christian and civilized; but it is a slavery not the less galling and unbearable because it is indirect and disguised.

What are called the "Working Classes" are the slave populations of civilized countries. These classes constitute the basis of European society in particular and of all civilized societies in general. We make this restriction, because there are societies in which there is found nothing to correspond with what in England and France are called the working classes. For example, they are unknown in Arabia, amongst the Nomad tribes of Africa, the Red-Indians of America, and the hunter tribes of Tartary; and, although in process of development, they are comparatively "few and far between" in Russia, Turkey, Greece and, indeed, throughout the nations of the East in general.

Amongst those who write books and deliver speeches about the working classes, few concern themselves to note this peculiarity in their history, namely, the fact that they exist in some countries and not in others; and the no less startling fact, that it is only at particular epochs of history, and only under certain peculiar circumstances of society, that they have been known to spring into social existence as a distinctive class. Books, journals, pamphlets, essays, speeches, sermons, Acts of Parliament, all are alike silent upon this notable fact. Nobody dreams of inquiring whether the working classes do, or do not, constitute a separate and distinct race in the countries they are found in; or of asking themselves what cause or causes produced them at particular epochs and in certain climes, while they continue to be unknown at other epochs and in other climes; and why we find them, as it were, sown broadcast in one country, while they appear but emerging into doubtful existence in other countries. In truth, the history of the middle and working classes has still to be written; and though it is far from our present purpose to undertake any such task, we shall, nevertheless, of necessity have to draw largely upon history for the elucidation of the facts and arguments by which we shall support our views upon the subject of slavery.

Not to encumber the question with details which, however interesting to antiquarians and scholars, would be out of place here, let us briefly observe at once, that the working classes, however general and extensive an element they constitute in modern society, are, nevertheless, but an emanation from another element, much more extensive and general, bequeathed to us by the ancient world under the name of Proletarians. By the term Proletarians is to be understood, not merely that class of citizens to which the electoral census of the Romans gave the name, but every description of persons of both sexes who, having no masters to own them as slaves, and consequently to be chargeable with their maintenance, and who, being without fortune or friends, were obliged to procure their subsistence as they best could—by labour, by mendicity, by theft, or by prostitution.