Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/97

 And that is just what happened. All that could find work, and were inclined to work, became labourers for hire; others took to begging; a third class became thieves and robbers; and the unfortunates of the weaker sex as naturally and as necessarily betook themselves to prostitution.

The majority of both sexes, of course, took to hired labour, when they could get it, as the safest occupation. Having no land nor capital wherewith to turn their freedom to account for their own advantage, they had no alternative but to find employers, or else die of hunger, unless they betook themselves to the other courses adverted to.

Here began that frightful system of wages-slavery, so often adverted to in the progress of this inquiry—that desolating system which has since extended itself all over the civilized world, and which has converted three-fourths of Christendom into more degraded and unhappy beings than were the ancient chattel-slaves of the pagans or the negro-slaves who were in the Southern States of the American republic.

Constantine's courtier-"Christians" and capitalists were not slow in availing thamselves of this new form of slavery. They soon discovered that it was (to them) a cheaper slavery than the old one. They discovered that an "independent labourer" might be made, by the fear of starvation, to do more work than a chattel-slave ever did under the fear of the lash; and with this advantage in their own favour, that he might be turned off and left to starve when there was no work for him; whereas they would have to keep the chattel-slave, and keep him well too, whether there was work for him or not.

But as we have already, in a former chapter, so largely dwelt on the comparative merits of the two kinds of slavery, it is unnecessary to repeat here the signal advantages which landlords and capitalists derive from wages-slavery in comparison with the other. At any rate, the capitalists or proprietors, under Constantine and his successors, must have been well aware of them; for we find that, instead of compelling the manumitted slaves and their progeny to return to the condition of chattel-slavery, they greatly added to their numbers by still further manumissions, only accompanying them with very stringent laws and regulations to keep them, now "independent labourers," as effectually under their thumb as when they had been nominal bondsmen.

Had the primitive Christians foreseen the terrible abuse their benevolent labours were destined to give rise to, it may be questioned whether they would not have abandoned their mission, rather than risk the superinducing of proletarianism, with all its horrors, upon the system they sought to explode—the system of chattel-slavery. It was not in order to fill the world with famishing beggars, with necessitous thieves and prostitutes, and, above all, with myriads of honest producers starving in the midst of their own productions,—it was not for such unholy purposes that the early Christians divized the regime of fraternity and equality; yet all the traditions that remain to us of Christian propagandism prove unmistakably that