Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/22

 invasion, do not institute or found slavery; they but bear testimony to its existence, either by incidental mention of it, or by imposing new conditions to regulate the relation of master and slaves; in short, they only go to show that slavery was before they were, or, in other words, that slavery was not (to use the language of jurists) the work of positive law, but a "great fact" anterior to all law, and as old as the origin of society itself.

The aboriginal character of slavery admitted, it remains to be shown, wherefore did society, in its infancy, establish slavery; or, rather, by what modus operandi was slavery made to develop itself in aboriginal society. History, reason, our very instincts, tell us there is but one satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. It arose from the unbounded power which fathers, or the heads of families, exercised, in early days, over their households—wives, concubines, and children. All history is unanimous as to the fact that fathers exercised a supreme authority over their offspring in the early ages of the world. The same fact is found still to obtain amongst races retaining primitive customs. Evidences to this effect are to be abundantly met with in the Bible, in the Greek tragedians, in the legislation of the Romans, in Asiatic traditions. All go to prove that parental authority was bounded only by parental will,—that it extended even to the power of life and death over their offspring. The old pagans, in order to give the highest idea of the power of Jupiter, call him the "father of the gods." For no other reason have Jews and Christians, in like manner, named God the All-Powerful Father. Paternal authority was so absolute and extensive in primitive times, that it suffered no other, co-ordinate or paramount: it completely absorbed the rights and the very existence of wife and children. Out of this absolute paternal authority did personal slavery first arise. Sons daughters, and even wives were but slaves of the head of the family; they were amongst his chattels—a part of his estate. Aristotle calls children the "animated tools or instruments of their parents." In the days of the patriarchs, paternal authority over children was absolute amongst the Jews. Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac is one of many proofs that might be cited. It is evident God would not have ordered a thing contrary to the positive law—a law ordained by God himself. Moreover, divers passages in Josephus show in the clearest and most explicit terms that the absolute authority of fathers over their children continued undisputed, and to be held sacred, down to the time of Herod the Great, who was contemporary with the Emperor Augustus of Rome. The strongest evidence of this is the prosecution of his own two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, before Augustus, wherein Herod took great credit to himself for his moderation in referring the matter to the emperor, "seeing that, in virtue of his rights as a father, he might put them to death without any other warrant or authority." The elder son, Alexander, in his reply, frankly admitted his father's right to give him death as he had given him life. Some years later, this same Herod exemplified the paternal power of the Jews in a still more impressive manner. In a speech which he delivered against these same rebellious sons before an assembly of