Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/54

 *dition, that he might be the better workman when there was work for him to do, and that he might fetch a better price in the slave-market when his services were no longer wanted. Besides, it was the custom in those days for masters to take a pride in displaying the goodly state of their slaves—of both their prædial and domestic slaves—just as our modern gentry and graziers take a pride in displaying the stock upon their farms, the studs in their stables, and, above all, the plump and portly figures of their butlers, footmen, grooms, and all the other paraphernalia of modern flunkeyism. There was, in those days, none of that desperate competition, in vanity or in trade, which now-a-days makes starvelings of the millions in order to make millionaires of the thousands; which offers premiums for fat oxen, and the union workhouse to lean labourers; and which awards prizes for bulls and rams, and superior breeds of every description of brutes (not excluding even the stye and the kennel), while it degrades the human animal below the lowest description of savage man, and maintains its anti-christian pomp of circumstances for the few, at the expense of blistering the backs and pinching the bellies of those who, St. Paul said, should be "first partakers of the fruits." This kind of modern science was wholly unknown to the ancients. Not a line is there in the works of Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, indeed of any of the old poets, philosophers, or historians, to show that they knew anything of our modern science of political economy. They believed in slaves and in slavery; but they had no idea of enriching a master-class by famishing the bodies of those to whom the masters owed everything, much less did they ever dream that the wealth and aggrandisement of the master-class were to be promoted by the expatriation, decimation, or diminution of the slave-class. If the ancient Spartans occasionally decimated their slaves, it was not because they looked upon them as a "surplus population," burdensome upon their estates, but because they feared their growing numbers, while their own ranks were being continually thinned by internecine wars with their neighbours. The idea of a slave being a useless incumbrance, a mere incubus upon the soil, was an idea utterly incompatible with their established custom of regarding slaves not only as property, but as that superior description of property which alone gave value to every other. Accordingly, though amongst the ancient philosophers we find many strange schools and sects, and very many eccentric and incomprehensible doctrines taught, yet nowhere do we meet with any sect or school corresponding with our modern political economists. There is no such philosopher as our Parson Malthus to be found in the whole circle of classic or Biblical lore. Had such a fellow as Malthus shown himself in the days of Alexander the Great, and gone about preaching that the gods had sent too many mouths for the meat and harvests they had provided, not even Diogenes would have associated with such a lunatic; and if the slaves had only got scent of the tendencies of his theory, not Alexander himself could, in all probability, have prevented them from flaying him alive. Fortunately for them, however, there were no Malthuses in the world at that time. In the