Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/27

 when paganism lost its hold upon the population. It is inferred from divers documents still extant, that the absolute authority of fathers did not disappear before the end of the third century; and the first law which positively prohibited fathers from giving, selling, or contracting away their children is said to be a law of Dioclesian and of Maximian. These laws are recited in the fourth book of the Justinian Code. Nevertheless, there is a law of Constantine, whereby the sale of children, in cases of great poverty or destitution, was made legally permissible. In truth, paternal despotism, like its offspring, direct slavery, perished little by little, or by slow degrees. Like direct slavery itself, it paled and sank before the rising light of the Gospel. The three first centuries witnessed one continuous struggle of Christianity against the establishments of paganism. Amongst the worst of these were parental despotism and personal slavery. As the Gospel gained ground upon paganism, parental despotism and slavery went down. Towards the close of the third century, the majority of the better classes of the Romans had embraced the new faith. Parental despotism and the servile subjection of man to man being imcompatible with that faith, these two relics of primeval barbarism began rapidly to disappear; and after the legal establishment of the Christian religion by Constantine, the relation of master and servant (though, as we shall see by-and-by, by no means improved) became altogether a new and different relation.

These preliminary remarks upon the history of fathers of families and of the ancient paternal authority must not be considered irrelevant, or otherwise than essential to our design. Without them, we could not account for the origin of human slavery; and, without knowing its origin, we could not well develop its progress and the various phases it has assumed up to the present time. No ancient record or tradition in existence goes to show that human slavery originated in positive laws or in coercive ordinances enforced by the sword. Reason and experience naturally coincide with history in this matter. That any portion of society, after living on terms of equality with the rest, should suddenly allow all its rights to be extinguished by brute force, or consent to have its liberties and independence voted away, when it had arms and instincts to defend them, is contrary to common sense and to all experience. Much less is it probable that the great majority would have everywhere suffered a contemptible minority to usurp the rights and powers of the whole. The ancient slave-class were everywhere a majority. Nothing but the force of early habit and traditional example could have made the majority the willing bondsmen of the minority. But as the relation must have commenced at some period before such habits and such traditional example could take effect, and as some sort of authority was absolutely necessary to establish the relation, it follows that, in the absence of all other competent authority, it must have been the natural authority of parents over their offspring that first established slavery. Such slavery must, of course, in the first instance have been direct; for, in a rude and primitive society, no other would be intelligible or possible.