Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/56

 whole population would not have responded to Marius's appeal for a general rising of their order; still less would they have failed to profit by the splendid victories of Spartacus, when, had they only felt the sentiment of equality, or entertained any dissatisfaction with their lot as slaves, they might have effectually exterminated the whole master-class, and established whatever form of government and of social order they thought fit. Indeed, they had frequent opportunities during the last sixty years of the Republic, and also during the first century or two of the Empire, to make a successful rising against the master-class, had they been inspired generally with a hatred of their servile condition. But it was not so.

As a general rule, the slaves both of Greece and Rome were fully reconciled to their condition, and had good reason to be so, considering how profoundly ignorant they were of the political conditions upon which alone real liberty can exist for the many. With their ideas and habits, any attempt to emancipate themselves would have plunged them into deeper degradation and ruin. Even their masters, much less themselves, knew little of the laws and institutions by which liberty, with security and prosperity, can be established. The proof of this is their interminable wars with one another, and with their neighbours all around them. A still stronger proof is their egregious folly in allowing agrarian monopoly, and usury to make such frightful progress amongst them, that "free citizens" became actually greater slaves to money-lenders and land-monopolists than the slaves so called; till at last the republics of Greece and Rome were brought to such a state that a military despotism alone could save them from tearing one another to pieces. When such universal ignorance and barbarity prevailed amongst the master-class—an ignorance and barbarity that virtually left civil liberty and equality without any solid guarantees whatever—it would be madness to expect that any revolution useful to humanity could have been effected by a still more ignorant slave-class. They would but have made confusion more confounded, and, by altogether suspending production, annihilated society itself amid scenes of indescribable carnage and cannibalism. At all events, the slaves knew better than to make any such attempt. They preferred bearing the ills they had, to flying to those they knew not of. Without land or capital, and freedom to use them in security, they were infinitely better off as slaves than they would be by any revolution, however successful, that did not give them these essential requisites. And seeing how the poorer classes of free citizens fared (who had to make shift to live without the use of land or capital), it is no wonder they clung so tenaciously to their well-fed, well-housed servile condition. In plain truth, the slaves of antiquity would have been mad to exchange their slavery for what is, now-a-days, falsely called liberty, unless in so doing they took good care that, along with liberty, ''they had the means of producing and distributing wealth on their own account''. And as this supposes a species of politico-economical knowledge infinitely beyond what might be expected from such a class in their day,—as it supposes such a knowledge of agrarian, monetary, fiscal,