Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/49

 in those Jacqueries, the principle of fraternity and equality was invoked by the disaffected. In the 16th century the Anabaptists of Munster rose against aristocracy and privilege, and, for a season, put down their lords and masters with as high a hand as Eunus and Athenio put down theirs in ancient Sicily. But mark the difference: the Anabaptists sought an order of things in which all should work, and none be drudges or slaves; the followers of Eunus and Parthenio sought quite a different thing,—they sought only to exchange places with their masters, and they had no objection at all to human slavery, provided they were not slaves themselves.

What is true of John of Leyden and his followers might be applied to our own Fifth-Monarchy men in Cromwell's time, and to the French revolutionists of 1793 and 1795 under Babœuf. If they sought to pull down those above them, it was upon the principle and the understanding that neither themselves nor anybody else should take the places of the dethroned oppressors. Something similar might be predicated of certain Socialist sects in modern France and Germany. If they are for making a clean sweep of the aristocracy, it is not that they may take their places. If they are against privilege, it is against the principle that they contend, and not against the mere accident that they themselves are not privileged parties.

This remarkable difference in the revolutionary movements of ancient and modern times cannot but strike every thinking man who will take the trouble to compare them. Nor let it be said that the difference arises solely from the disaffected having been slaves in the times of paganism and freemen in the times of Christianity. Cataline and his co-conspirators were not slaves, nor the friends of slaves: yet they acted precisely upon the same motives and principles as those ascribed to Eunus and Athenio. Cataline did not promise his brother-revolutionists a régime of liberty and equality for all orders of men; quite the contrary. In the first place, he indignantly repudated all co-operation with slaves; and instead of ''equal rights and equal laws for all'', he promised one portion of his followers a cancelling of all their debts; another portion, ''magistrates, sacerdotia, rapinas''—i.e. magisterial offices, the preferments and property of the Church, and general plunder; and to all he promised women, wine, horses, dogs, &c., according to their age and tastes. If we are to believe Sallust, he was to begin with setting fire to Rome, proceed with the massacre and spoliation of his enemies during the confusion, and end by putting his associates and friends in the place of the men they wished to get rid of. In other words, Cataline's doctrine was (to use an old Roman phrase), that every man must be either prædo or præda—either the thief or the spoil, or, as Voltaire expresses it, either hammer or anvil; and he was determined to be the thief, or the hammer. The doctrine of equality, at any rate, had no share in his system.

What history describes Cataline to have been is equally predicable of the whole of the revolutionary school in which he had had his political training. Sylla and his lieutenants, on the one hand, representing patrician revolutionists, and Marius, Sulpitius, Saturninus, &c.,