Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/16

 of want, as well as from all care and anxiety about providing for his subsistence. He could not, it is true, earn wages or acquire property for himself without his master's leave; but neither, on the other hand, was he liable to starvation or privation because there might happen to be no work for him to do. Work or no work, he was always sure to be well fed, well housed, well clothed, and well cared for, as long as his master had enough and was satisfied with him. If he was incapable of acquiring property, so was he also exempt from its cares, and sure to participate in the use of his master's, at least to the extent requisite for keeping him in bodily health and in good condition. Nor were slaves always debarred from the acquisition of property. There are instances recorded of slaves having been permitted to amass considerable fortunes, though this was rarely the case till after their masters manumitted them. Some also became celebrated as grammarians, poets, and teachers of belles lettres and philosophy. Indeed, when they happened to have good, kind masters their lot was by no means a hard one;—it was an enviable one in comparison with that of a modern "free-born Briton," rejoicing in the status of an "independent labourer." Of this we shall adduce proofs enough by-and-by. Suffice it, for the present, to observe, that so well must slaves have been used to fare under the old pagan system, that terms corresponding with our "wanton," "saucy," "pampered," are of frequent occurrence in the old Greek and Roman classics as applied to slaves, particularly domestic or menial. At all events, destitution, in the modern sense, was unknown to them; and, with it, were also unknown its inevitable consequences—mendicity, robbery, theft, prostitution, and crime—as characteristic of a class or of a system. Individual or isolated cases there might be, and these chiefly amongst the manumitted; but there was no large class of persons subsisting by such means—no outlawed class compelled, as it were, by the very first law of nature—self-preservation—to erect such means into a system in order to preserve life.

Social evils there were—frightful evils—under the old pagan system. Slavery itself was an evil—an appalling evil—under even its most favourable conditions. But fearful as those evils were—hateful as direct slavery must ever be while man is man—the ancient pagan world has exhibited nothing so revolting and truly abominable as the development and progress of Proletarianism, which was consequent upon the breaking up of the old system of slavery, and which has ever since gained more and more strength in every age, till, in our times, it has made Proletarians of three-fourths of the people of every civilized country, and threatens society itself with actual dissolution.

Strange that what God designed to be man's greatest blessing should be made man's greatest curse by man's own perversity! Yet so it is with almost every good thing designed or invented to perfect man in wisdom and civilization. It is so with science and machinery, it is so with money; it is so with public credit; it is so with mercantile enterprise; it is so with the institution of private property; and so, also, it has hitherto been with the divine institution of Christianity itself.