+291. Rise of the freedmen in industry.+ The freedmen were the ones who were free from the old Roman contempt for productive labor. They seized the chances for industry and commerce and amassed wealth. "Not only are they crowding all the meaner trades [in the first and second centuries of the Christian era], from which Roman pride shrank contemptuously, but, by industry, shrewdness, and speculative daring, they are becoming great capitalists and landowners on a senatorial scale."[787] "The plebeian, saturated with Roman prejudice, looking for support to the granaries of the state or the dole of the wealthy patron, turned with disdain from the occupations which are in our days thought innocent, if not honorable."[788] "After all reservations, the ascent of the freedmen remains a great and beneficent revolution. The very reasons which made Juvenal hate it most are its best justification to a modern mind. It gave hope of a future to the slave. By creating a free industrial class it helped to break down the cramped social ideal of the slave owner and the soldier. It planted in every municipality a vigorous mercantile class, who were often excellent and generous citizens. Above all, it asserted the dignity of man."[789] But for the freedmen the society seems to have contained but two classes,--"a small class of immensely wealthy people, and an almost starving proletariat."[790]

+292. The freedmen in the state.+ Every despot needs ministers. The history of all despotisms shows that they find those best suited to their purpose in persons of humble rank. They can use such ministers against nobles or other great men, and can command their complete loyalty. Julius Caesar made some of his freedmen officers of the mint. It was simply an extension of the usage of aristocratic households. The emperor employed freedmen to write letters and administer the finances of the empire as he would have used them to manage his private estate.

"Under Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, the imperial freedmen attained their greatest ascendancy. Callistus, Narcissus, and Pallas rose to the rank of great ministers, and, in the reign of Claudius, were practically masters of the world. They accumulated enormous wealth by abusing their power, and making a traffic in civic rights, in places, or pardons."[791] The freedmen favorites carried the evil effects of slavery on character to another stage and were agents of the corruption of the new form of the state by the inheritance of slavery. "The women of the freedmen class, for generations, wielded, in their own way, a power which sometimes rivaled that of the men." They often had great charms of person and mind. "Their morals were the result of an uncertain social position, combined with personal attractions, and education."

Some of them did great mischief. Panthea, mistress of Lucius Verus, is celebrated as one of the most beautiful women who ever lived. She had a lovely voice, was fond of music and poetry, and had a very superior mind. She "never lost her natural modesty and simple sweetness."[792] In the first century some freedmen married daughters of senatorial houses.

They were very able men. No others could have performed the duties of the three great secretaryships,--appeals, petitions, and correspondence.

The fortunes of these men were often adventurous in the extreme, like those of the ministers of sultans in the Arabian Nights. A slave, advanced to a higher position in a household, then to a position of confidence, where he proved his ability and devotion, got a great office and became master of the world. Men of this kind have always been refused social status.[793] In the second century the system was changed, and knights became the great officers of administration.

+293. Philosophers opponents of slavery.+ The great neostoics of the first century first denounced slavery and uttered the great humanitarian doctrines. The real question in regard to Roman slavery was this: Is a slave not a man? If he was one, he was either the victim of misfortune or the inheritor of the misfortune of an ancestor. If he did not thereby lose human status as a member of the race he deserved pity and help. The humanitarian philosophy, therefore, had the simplest task and the most direct application. Dio Chrysostom declared the evil effects of slavery on the masters, sensuality, languor, and dependence. He pointed out the wide difference between personal status and character,--the possible nobility of a slave and the possible servility of a freeman.[794] Seneca especially taught the abstract philosophy of liberalism, kindness, and humanity. He represented a movement in public opinion. Pliny cultivated all the graces of the debonair gentleman. Dill compares him to a "kindly English squire." The inscriptions show that "his household was by no means a rare exception."[795] Slaves had such perquisites and chances that "the slave could easily purchase his own freedom." "The trusted slave was often actually a partner, with a share of the profits of an estate, or he had a commission on the returns."[796] Plutarch's whole philosophy of life is gentle and kindly. It is unemotional and nonstimulating. The neostoics had the character of an esoteric sect. We never are sure that their writings are any more than rhetorical exercises, or that they act or expect others to act by their precepts.

Slavery was such a fact in the social order that no one could conceive of the abolition of it, or propose abolition as a thing within the scope of statesmanship.

+294. The industrial colleges.+ The Romans had a genius for association and organization. Under the republic artisans began to unite in colleges. In the last century of the republic the political leaders took alarm at these unions and forbade them. Caesar and Augustus abolished the right of association. In the second century a certain number of societies existed, in spite of prohibitions,--miners, salt workers, bakers, and boatmen. Until Justinian all such unions were carefully watched as dangerous to public peace and order. In the civil law they were authorized, and made like natural persons.[797] The fashion of them became very popular. "The colleges in which the artisans and traders of the Antonine age grouped themselves are almost innumerable, even in the records which time has spared. They represent almost every conceivable branch of industry, or special skill, or social service."[798] "Men formed themselves into these groups for the most trivial or whimsical reasons, or for no reason at all, except that they lived in the same quarter and often met. From the view which the inscriptions give us of the interior of some of these clubs, it is clear that their main purpose was social pleasure."[799] "And yet, many an inscription leaves the impression that these little societies of the old pagan world are nurseries, in an imperfect way, of gentle charities and brotherliness."[800] They had many honorary members from among the richer classes. Wandering merchants and military veterans, as well as young men fond of sport, formed clubs on the same type. Alexander Severus organized all the industrial colleges and assigned them _defensores_. In the colleges all were equal, so that they were educational in effect. "But these instances cannot make us forget the cruel contempt and barbarity of which the slave was still the victim, and which was to be his lot for many generations yet to run. Therefore the improvement in the condition of the slave, or of his poor plebeian brother, by the theoretical equality in the colleges may be easily exaggerated."[801] The statesmen had feared that the artisans might use their organization to interfere in politics. What happened in the fourth century was that the state used the organizations to reduce the artisans to servitude, and to subject them to heavy social obligations by law.

+295. Laws changed in favor of slaves.+ When the conquests ceased and the supply of new slaves was reduced those slaves who were born in the households or on the estates came into gentler relations to their owners. Slaves rose in value and were worth more care. The old plan of Cato became uneconomical. All sentiments were softened in the first century as war became less constant, less important, and more remote.

The empire was an assumption by the state of functions and powers which had been family powers and functions, and part of the _patria potestas_.

Women, children, and slaves shared in emancipation until the state made laws to execute its jurisdiction over them. Hadrian took from masters the power of life and death over slaves. Antoninus Pius confirmed this, and provided that he who killed his own slave should suffer the same penalty as he who killed the slave of another.[802] This brought the life of every slave into the protection of the state. Under Nero a judge was appointed to hear the complaints of slaves and to punish owners who misused them. Domitian forbade castration. Hadrian forbade the sale of slaves to be gladiators. The right to sell female slaves into brothels was also abolished.[803]

+296. Christianity and slavery.+ In 1853 C. Schmidt published an essay on the "Civil Society of the Roman World and its Transformation by Christianity," in which he thought it right to attribute all the softening of the mores in the first three Christian centuries to Christianity. Lecky, on the other hand, says: "Slavery was distinctly and formally recognized by Christianity, and no religion ever labored more to encourage a habit of docility and passive obedience."[804]

Schmidt is obliged to take the ground that Christianity received and accepted slavery as a current institution, in which property rights existed, and that it suffered these to stand. If that is true, then Christianity could not exert much influence on civil society. What Christianity did was to counteract to a great extent the sentiment of contempt for slaves and for work. It did this ritually, because in the church, and especially in the Lord's Supper, all participated alike and equally in the rites. The doctrine that Christ died for all alike combined with the philosophical and humanitarian doctrine that men are of the same constitution and physique to produce a state of mind hostile to slavery. In the fourth century the church began to own great possessions, including slaves, and it accepted the standpoint of the property owner.[805] In the Saturnalia of Macrobius (fl. 400 A.D.) Praetextatus reaffirms the old neostoic doctrine about slavery, of Seneca and Dio Chrysostom. Dill[806] takes the doctrine to be the expression of the convictions of the best and most thoughtful men of that time. It is not to be found in Jerome, Augustine, or Chrysostom. Nevertheless the church favored manumission and took charge of the ceremony. It especially favored it when the manumitted would become priests or monks.

The church came nearest to the realization of its own doctrines when it refused to consider slave birth a barrier to priesthood. In all the penitential discipline of the church also bond and free were on an equality. The intermarriage of slave and free was still forbidden.

Constantine ordered that if a free woman had intercourse with her slave she should be executed and he should be burned alive.[807] The pagan law only ordered that she should be reduced to slavery. The manumissions under Constantine were believed, in the sixteenth century, to have caused almshouses and hospitals to be built, on account of the great numbers of helpless persons set adrift.[808] Basil the Macedonian ([Symbol: cross] 886) first enacted that slaves might have an ecclesiastical marriage, but the prejudice of centuries made this enactment vain.[809] The abolition of crucifixion had special value to the slave class. There was no longer a special and most infamous mode of execution for them. A law of Constantine forbade the separation of members of a family of slaves.[810] These are the most important changes in the law of slavery until the time of the codex of Justinian. Lecky thinks that Justinian advanced the law beyond what his predecessors had done more in regard to slavery than on any other point. His changes touched three points: (1) He abolished all the restrictions on enfranchisement which remained from the old pagan laws, and encouraged it. (2) He abolished the freedmen as an intermediate class, so that there remained only slave and free, and a senator could marry a freed woman, i.e. a slave whom he had already freed. (3) A slave might marry a free woman, if his master consented, and her children, born in slavery, became free if the father was enfranchised. The punishment for the rape of a slave woman was made death, the same as for the rape of a free woman.[811] Isidore of Seville ([Symbol: cross] 636) said: "A just God alloted life to men, making some slaves and some lords, that the liberty of ill-doing on the part of slaves might be restrained by the authority of rulers." Still he says that all men are equal before God, and that Christ's redemption has wiped away original sin, which was the cause of slavery.[812]

+297. The colonate.+ At the end of the empire population was declining, land was going out of use and returning to wilderness, the petty grandees in towns were crushed by taxes into poverty, artisans were running away and becoming brigands because the state was immobilizing them, and peasants were changed into colons. The imperial system went on until the man, the emperor, was above all laws, the senate were slaves, and the provinces were the booty of the emperor. The whole system then became immobilized. What the colons were and how they came into existence has been much disputed. They were immobilized peasants. We find them an object of legislation in the _codex Theodosianus_ in the fourth century. They were personally free (they could marry, own property, could not be sold), but they were bound to the soil by birth and passed with it. They cultivated the land of a lord, and paid part of the crops or money.[813] Marquardt thinks that they arose from barbarians quartered in the Roman empire.[814] Heisterbergk[815] thinks that there are three possible sources, between which he does not decide,--impoverished freemen, emancipated slaves, barbarian prisoners.

Wallon[816] ascribes the colonate to the administration. As society degenerated it became harder and harder to get the revenue, and the state adopted administrative measures to get the property of any one who had any. This system impoverished everybody. To carry it out it was necessary to immobilize everybody, to force each one to accept the conditions of his birth as a status from which he could not escape. What made the colonate, then, was misery.[817] Emancipated slaves and impoverished peasants met in the class of colons, in state servitude.

The proprietors were only farmers for the state. The tribute was the due of the state. Laborers were enrolled in the census and held for the state. The interest of the _fiscus_ held the colon to the soil.[818] The words "colon" and "slave" are used interchangeably in the _codex Justinianus_.

+298. Depopulation.+ The depopulation of Italy under the empire is amply proved. Vespasian moved population from Umbria and the Sabine territory to the plain of Rome.[819] Marcus Aurelius established the Marcomanni in Italy.[820] Pertinax offered land in Italy and the provinces to any one who would cultivate it.[821] Aurelian tried to get land occupied.[822]

He sent barbarians to settle in Tuscany.[823] As time went on more and more land was abandoned and greater efforts were made to secure settlers. Valentinian settled German prisoners in the valley of the Po.[824] In the time of Honorius, in Campania five hundred thousand arpents were discharged from the _fiscus_ as deserted and waste. In the third century, if the colon ran away from land which no one would take he was pursued by all the agencies of the law and brought back like a criminal.[825] The colons ran away because the _curiales_, their masters, put on them the taxes which the state levied first on the _curiales_.[826] What was wanted was men. The Roman imperial system had made men scarce by making life hard. Pliny said that the _latifundia_ destroyed Italy. The saying has been often quoted in modern times as if it had some unquestionable authority. It is a case of the common error of confusing cause and consequence. The _latifundia_ were a consequence and a symptom. Heisterbergk[827] thinks that the _latifundia_ were not produced by economic causes, but by vanity and ostentation. The owners did not look to the land for revenue. He asks[828] how a strictly scientific system of grand culture with plenty of labor could ruin any country. Rodbertus[829] thinks that the _latifundia_ went from a grand system to a petty system between the times of the elder and the younger Pliny by the operation of the law of rent. He thinks that there must have been garden culture in Italy at the beginning of the empire, and that the colonate arose from big estates with petty industry and from the law of mortgage. He thinks, further, that the colons, until the fourth century, were slaves, and that their status was softened by the legislation of the fourth century. Heisterbergk thinks that the colonate began in the corn provinces, and that it was, at the beginning of the fourth century, on the point of passing away, but the legislation of the fourth century perpetuated it. He thinks that it was injured, as an institution, by the great increase of taxation after Diocletian. Then legislation was necessary to keep the colons on the land.[830]

+299. Summary on Roman slavery.+ Chrysostom describes the misbehavior of all classes, about 400 A.D.[831] The colons were overburdened. When they could not pay they were tortured. A colon was flogged, chained, and thrown into prison, where he was forgotten. His wife and child were left in misery to support themselves, and get something for him if they could. The Roman system, after consuming all the rest of the world, began to consume itself. The Roman empire at last had only substituted one kind of slaves for another. Artisans and peasants were now slaves of the state. Slavery was at first a means. By it the subjugated countries were organized into a great state. Then it developed its corruption. It was made to furnish gladiators and harlots. Nowhere else do we see how slavery makes cowards of both slaves and owners as we see it at Rome in the days of glory. Slavery rose to control of the mores. The free men who discussed contemporary civilization groaned over the effects of slavery on the family and on private interests, but they did not see any chance of otherwise getting the work done. Then all the other social institutions and arrangements had to conform to slavery. It controlled the mores, prescribed the ethics, and made the character. In the last century of the Western empire the protest against it ceased. It seemed to be accepted as inevitable, and one of the unavoidable ills of life.

It ruled society. Scarcely a man represented the old civilization who can command our respect. The social and civic virtues were dead.

+300.+ In all the ancient world we meet with distinct repudiation of slavery only amongst the Therapeuts, a communistic association amongst the Jews in the last century before Christ. They were ascetics, each of whom lived in a cell. We first hear of them through Philo Judaeus (_The Contemplative Life_) about the time of the birth of Christ. They had no slaves. They regarded slavery as absolutely contrary to nature. Nature produced all in a state of freedom, but the greed of some had vested some with power over others.[832] The Therapeuts, who included women, did their own work. They carried on no productive industry the products of which they could give in exchange. Their system could not endure without an endowment.[833] Bousset[834] thinks that, "if they ever existed, they can never have had more than a limited and ephemeral significance." Their central home was on a hill near lake Marea. Their place of meeting, on the seventh day, was divided by a wall, three or four cubits high, into two compartments, one for the women, the other for the men. They reduced the consumption of food and drink as much as possible. Sometimes they abstained for three or four days. They had a very simple feast on the forty-ninth day, the men and women sitting separately on coarse mattresses.[835]

+301. Slavery amongst the Germanic nations.+ According to the most primary view, the one which we might call natural, a war captive's due fate was to be killed in sacrifice to the god of the victor. During some interval of time before his public execution he was set at work, and the convenience of his services was learned. He was kept alive in order to be employed in the labors which were the most irksome and disagreeable.

The joke of letting him live on to perform these tasks was not lost.

When, now, we turn our attention to the Germanic invaders of the Roman empire, we are carried back to primitive barbarism. In the heroic age of Scandinavia we find that thralls are sacrificed at Upsala at solemn feasts in honor of the heathen gods. They were thrown from the cliffs, or into a hole in the ground, or tortured and hung up in the clear air, or the spine was broken.[836] In the prehistoric period of German history the unfree were tenderly handled. "A well-born youth, who grew up amongst the same herds and on the same land with an unfree youth, eating and drinking together, and sharing joy and sorrow, could not handle shamefully the comrades of the unfree man."[837] In the Scandinavian _Rigsmal_, Rig, the hero, begets a representative of each of three ranks,--noble, yeoman, laborer,--the first with the mother, the second with the grandmother, and the third with the great-grandmother, as if they had come from later and later strata of population.[838] Rig slept between man and wife when he begot the yeoman and thrall, but not when he begot the noble. The thrall has no marriage ceremony. The food, dwelling, dress, furniture, occupations, and manners of the three classes are carefully distinguished, also the physique, as if they were racially different, and the names of the children are in each case characteristic epithets. The great-grandfather wears the most ancient dress; his wife provides an ash-baked loaf, flat, heavy, mixed with bran. She bore Thrall, who was swarthy, had callous hands, bent knuckles, thick fingers, an ugly face, a broad back, long heels.

Toddle-shankie also came sunburnt, having scarred feet, a broken nose, called Theow. Their children were named: the boys,--Sooty, Cowherd, Clumsy, Clod, Bastard, Mud, Log, Thickard, Laggard, Grey Coat, Lout, and Stumpy; the girls,--Loggie, Cloggie, Lumpy [= Leggie], Snub-nosie, Cinders, Bond-maid, Woody [= Peggy], Tatter-coatie, Crane-shankie. The story seems to present the three classes or ranks as founded in natural facts. Slaves were such by birth, by sale of themselves to get maintenance (esteemed the worst of all, debtors, war captives, perhaps victims of shipwreck), and free women who committed fornication with slave men.[839] If a debtor would not pay he was brought into court, and the creditor might cut off a piece [of his body] above or below.[840] A free man would not allow his slave to be buried by his side, even if the slave had lost his life in loyalty to his master. Slaves, criminals, and outlaws were buried dishonorably in a place by themselves on one side.

They were harnessed to plows when there were no oxen at hand. When Eisten, king of Opland, wanted to annihilate the Ernds, he gave them their choice of his slave or his dog for a king. They chose the dog.[841] The sister of King Canute bought in England most beautiful slave men and women, who were sent to Denmark, and were sold for use chiefly in vice.[842] Here we see again the great contempt for slaves.

It was a proverb in Scandinavia: "Put no trust in the friendship of a thrall,"[843] although in the sagas there are many cases in which the heroes profited by trusting them. Yet the sagas are also full of stories of persons who fell into slavery, e.g. Astrid, widow of King Trygve Olafson, who was found by a merchant in the slave market of Esthonia and redeemed.[844] A thrall was despised because he feared death, and when it impended over him hid, whimpered, begged, wept, lamented to leave his swine and good fare, and offered to do the meanest work if he might live. A hero bore torture bravely and met death laughing.[845] When hero children and thrall children were changed at birth, the fraud was discovered by the cowardice of the latter and the courage of the former, when grown.[846] In the heroic age a conqueror could set a princess to work at the _qvern_. In Valhalla the hero set thralls to work for his conquered victim, to give him footbath, light fire, bind dogs, groom horses, and feed swine. Thrall women became concubines. They worked at the _qvern_, and wove. Love could raise them to pets. Thralls were obtained in the lands raided, but even after they became Christians the Scandinavians raided and enslaved each other. The Roman law system, as the church employed it, and especially tithes, were means of reducing the masses to servitude.[847] Beggars could be arrested and taken before the _Thing_, where, if they were not ransomed by their relatives, they were at the mercy of the captor.[848] Magnus Erikson ascended the throne of Sweden, Norway, and Skona in 1333. Two years later he decreed that no one born of Christian parents should thereafter be, or be called, a thrall.[849]

+302. The sale of children.+ In the Germanic states it remained lawful until far down in the Middle Ages for a man to sell his wife or child into servitude, or into adoption in another family in time of famine or distress. The right fell into disuse.[850]

+303. Slavery and the state.+ The reason why there was little slavery in the Middle Ages is that slavery needs a great state to return fugitives or hold slaves to work. The feudal lord was at odds with such a state as existed, and could not get its aid to restore his slaves. Hence the extension of the state made the slaves worse off, e.g. in Russia and parts of Germany.[851] Amongst the Franks "slavery took many forms." The vicissitudes of life produced the strongest contrasts of fortune.

Freeman[852] mentions a case in which a boy king reigned, but his mother, formerly a slave woman, reigned as queen in rank and authority, and the power was really exercised by the man who was once her owner.

"In the system of a Frankish kingdom a slave-born queen could play, with more of legal sanction, the part often played in Mohammedan courts by the mother of the sultan, son of a slave." The Franks had a peculiar ceremony of manumission. The lord struck a coin from the hand of his slave to the ground, and the slave became free.[853] Philippe le Bel, enfranchising the serfs of Valois, in the interest of the _Fiscus_, uttered a generality which Louis le Hutin reiterated: "Seeing that every human creature who is formed in the image of our Lord, ought, generally speaking, to be free by natural right,--no one ought to be a serf in France." In the eighth and ninth centuries serfs were sold to Jews who sold them to Mohammedans. Montpelier carried on a slave trade with the Saracens. The clergy joined in this trade in the twelfth century, and it is said to have lasted until the fifteenth century.[854] The Romance of Hervis (of about the beginning of the thirteenth century) turns on the story of a youth who ransomed a girl who had been kidnapped by some soldiers. They proposed to take her to Paris and sell her at the fair there. The Parliament of Bordeaux, in 1571, granted liberty to Ethiopians and other slaves, "since France cannot admit any servitude."

Still slavery existed in the southern provinces, including persons of every color and nationality.[855] Biot[856] thinks that the slave trade in the Middle Ages was carried on chiefly by pirates, so that slave markets existed on the coast only, not inland. The Council of Armagh, in 1171, forbade the Irish to hold English slaves and mentions the sale of their children by the English.[857] Thomas Aquinas is led by Aristotle to approve of slavery. Like Aristotle he holds it to be in the order of nature.[858] A society was founded in Spain at the beginning of the thirteenth century to redeem Christian captives from Moorish slavery. The pious made gifts to this society to be used in its work.

Christians sold kidnapped persons to the Moors that they might be redeemed again. In 1322 the Council of Valladolid imposed excommunication on the sale of men. In the fourteenth century the Venetians and Genoese were selling young persons from all countries in Egypt.[859] Pope Nicholas V, in 1454, gave Portugal the right to subjugate western Africa, supposed to be lands which belonged to the Saracens, and "to reduce the persons of those lands to perpetual servitude," expressing the hope that the negroes would be thoroughly converted. Margry puts in the year 1444 the first sale of negroes as slaves, under the eyes of Don Enrique of Portugal.[860] As early as 1500 Columbus suggested to the king of Spain to use negroes to work the mines of Hispaniola. The king decreed that only such negroes should be taken to Hispaniola as had been Christianized in Spain. In 1508 the Spaniards took negroes to the mines to work with Indian slaves. The slave trade was authorized by Charles V in 1517.[861] Christian slaves existed in Spain until the seventeenth, perhaps until the eighteenth, century. If blacks and Moors are included, slavery has existed there until the most recent times.[862]

+304. Slavery in Europe. Italy in the Middle Ages.+ Slavery existed in Italy in the thirteenth century, by war, piracy, and religious hatred.

The preaching friars, by preaching against all property, helped to break it down, and it began to decline.[863] The religious hatred is illustrated by the act of Clement V ([Symbol: cross] 1314). When he excommunicated the Venetians for seizing Ferrara he ordered that wherever they might be caught they should be treated as slaves.[864]

Not until 1288 was a law passed at Florence forbidding the sale of serfs away from the land. Such a law was passed at Bologna in 1256, and renewed in 1283. Such laws seem to have been democratic measures to lessen the power of nobles in the rural districts.[865] A man who made a slave woman a mother must pay damages to her owner. In a contract of 1392 a man in such a case confesses a debt, as for money borrowed. By a statute of Lucca, in 1539, a man so offending must buy the woman at twice her cost and pay to the state a fine of one hundred lire. By a statute of Florence, 1415, it was affirmed that the quality of Christian would not exempt from slavery.[866] In a contract of sale of a woman at Venice, 1450, it is specified that the seller sells _purum et merum dominium_.[867] The Italian cities continued to protect the slave trade until the middle of the sixteenth century.[868] The Venetians and Genoese carried on the trade actively, except in times of great public or general calamity, when they suspended it to appease the wrath of God.[869] The intimate connection of the great commercial republics with the Orient, and hatred for Greek heretics, are charged with causing them to keep up the trade.[870] Conjugal life at Venice was undermined by the desire for variety in pleasure, and by the easy opportunity to get beautiful slaves in the markets of the Orient. From the most ancient times laws, as fierce as inefficacious, punished with death merchants who traded in men, but the trade did not cease until the end of the sixteenth century. The national archives contain contracts from the twelfth century to the sixteenth about slaves. Priests were the notaries in these contracts, in spite of the state, the popes, and the councils.

Slaves were brought from every country in the Levant, including Circassian and Georgian girls of twelve and fourteen. Slaves passed entirely under the will of the buyer.[871] Biot[872] finds evidence of slavery in Italy until the middle of the seventeenth century.

+305. Slavery in France.+ When the Armagnacs captured two men, in 1445, who could not pay ransom, they threatened to sell them to the Spanish Jews.[873] Bodin[874] admits that it is better to hold captives as slaves than to kill them, but his argument is all against slavery. He mentions cases in which it had been decided, apparently on the ground of the dictum of Philippe le Bel, that slaves who set foot in France became free.

+306. Slavery in Islam.+ Islam is more favorable to the emancipation of slaves than Christianity is, as the Visigothic bishops understood it.

Mohammed set free his own slaves and ordered that all slaves should have the right to redeem themselves. He taught that it is a good work to emancipate a slave, which will offset many sins.[875] In his last sermon he said: "Know that every Moslem is the brother of every other Moslem.

Ye are all a fraternity; all equal."[876] The law recognizes only two ways in which a human being may become a slave,--(1) by birth, (2) by war. A debtor cannot become a slave, and parents in distress cannot sell their children. Slaves cannot be so sold that a mother and her child under seven years of age are separated. Any slave woman may be made a concubine, but may not be married. Children of slave women are legitimate and free. A woman who has borne her master a child becomes free at the master's death, and may not be sold or pawned by him while he lives. Slaves are in many respects inferior to free persons as to rights and powers. They have no right of property against their owners.

They are under milder criminal law than their owners. All this is to be understood of slaves who are Moslems.[877] The Koran often inculcates kindness to slaves.[878] Slaves are goods given to the free by the grace of God. Mohammedans would consider the abolition of slavery a triumph of Christianity over Islam.[879] An unbelieving slave has no guarantees at all against the will of his owner. In the eighth century the serfs in the Asturias rose _en masse_ against their Mohammedan lords, and we are told that under the wealth and glory of Grenada the peasants hated the lords with great intensity.[880] In the great days of Abdurrahman III slaves were very numerous. They possessed land and slaves and the sultan charged them with "important military and civil functions, and pursued the policy of all despots in making them his ministers and favorites, in order to humiliate the aristocrats."[881] They were also armed. The late Romans put colons in the army. The Visigoths inherited the usage, although the lords would not give them up. At last the levy arose to one half of the serfs and they became a majority of the army.[882]

Schweinfurth[883] says that "wherever Islamism has sway in Africa it appears never to be the fashion for any one to allow himself to be carried." "A strict Mohammedan reckons it an actual sin to employ a man as a vehicle, and such a sentiment is very remarkable in a people who set no limits to their spirit of oppression. It is a known fact that a Mohammedan, though he cannot refuse to recognize a negro, denying the faith, as being _a man_, has not the faintest idea of his being entitled to any rights of humanity." The jurists early set up the doctrine that the life of a Mohammedan slave was worth as much as that of a Mohammedan freeman, but this doctrine rarely was fulfilled in practice, never inside of the harem. The jurists pronounced against the right of life and death on the part of the slave owner, but it was exercised.[884] It is not law, but custom, to emancipate an adult slave after from seven to nine years' service. In most Moslem families slaves are well treated, as members of the household. Their children are educated as those of their masters are.[885] Pischon says that Moslems cannot live without slavery.

No free woman will do the menial housework, and no woman may be seen unveiled by a free man.[886] This is a repetition of the opinion of the ancients that slavery was indispensable (sec. 285). If all the women were free, some of them would do the housework. A modern Turk is a tyrant inside his own dwelling. For his wife he has a proverb that she should have "neither mouth nor tongue." The girls are not educated to be such wives. They find some support at home against their husbands.

Hence nearly all Turks entertain feelings of dislike and ill will towards their parents-in-law, and prefer slave concubines, whose relatives they welcome, if the wife is pretty, or wins their affection.

Great ladies buy promising girls of seven or eight and train them, and sell them again.[887]

+307. Review of slavery in Islam.+ The injunctions of Mohammedanism sound just and humane; the practice of Mohammedans is cruel and heartless. The slave is not a thing or ware; he is a man entitled to treatment worthy of a man. A man may take his slave as a concubine, but he must not sell her to vice. A free man may marry a slave, if she is not his own. A free woman may marry a slave, with the same restriction.

If a slave woman bears a child to her master, the child is free, and the mother cannot be sold or given away. At the death of her owner she becomes free. A slave man and woman may marry, with the consent of the owner, to which they have a claim if they have behaved well. A slave man is limited to two wives. Emancipation is a religious and meritorious act on the part of a slave owner.[888] "In general, it must be acknowledged that neither amongst the people of antiquity, nor amongst Christians, have slaves enjoyed such good treatment as amongst Moslems."[889] The provision about a slave woman who becomes a mother by her master is the one to arouse most Christian shame. Still, the Moslems have so many special pleas and technical interpretations by which to set aside troublesome laws that we can never infer that the mores conform to the laws. It is against the law for a Moslem to reduce a Moslem to slavery, but the Turks rob the Kurds and other tribes of their women, or buy them from the barbarous Tcherkess.[890]

+308. Slavery in England.+ Sir Thomas More[891] provided for some of the troubles of life by slavery. Slaves were to do "all laborsome toil,"

"drudging," and "base business." They were to be persons guilty of debt and breakers of marriage.[892] Garnier quotes a law of 1547 (I Ed. VI, c. 3), in which a vilein is mentioned as a slave. "Long after this date there are mentioned instances of a slave's emancipation, and such philanthropic writers as Fitzherbert lament the possibility of slavery and its actual existence, as a disgrace both to legislation and religion."[893]

+309+. Slavery in America.+ In the Anglo-American colonies which did not have a plantation system for tobacco or indigo the great reason for slavery was to hold the laborer to the place where the owner wanted him to work. In New England the negro slave lived in close intimacy with his owner and the latter's sons. In Connecticut he was allowed to go to the table with the family, "and into the dish goes the black hoof as freely as the white hand."[894] In that colony the creditor might require the debtor, by a law of 1650, to pay by service, and might sell his due service to any one of the English nation. The law remained in force into the nineteenth century.[895]

+310. Colonial slavery.+ France reopened the slave trade by a law of May 20, 1802. One of the reasons for this law submitted by Buonaparte to the legislature was: "The commercial prosperity of France renders it necessary that a certain quantity of the produce of the country, in wine and cereals, should be sent to the Antilles for consumption by the blacks. Now these negroes, were they free, would prefer manioc to wheat, and the juice of the sugar cane to our wines. It is, therefore, indispensable that they should be slaves."[896]

+311. Slavery preferred by slaves.+ It appears, therefore, that the subjection of one man's muscles and nerves to another man's will has been in the mores of all people from the beginning of human societal organization until now. Now it exists, as an institution, only in barbarism and half-civilization. In English North Borneo slavery is traditional. Any slave may be free for 4, "but in most cases they have been brought up as ordinary members of the family, and have no wish to leave their home. Cases of unkind treatment are very few and far between."[897] In fact, the purely sentimental objections to slavery have reached, in Africa, many people who are on a grade of civilization where slavery is an advantage to the slave (sec. 275). Schweinfurth tells us, of the Sudanese, that numbers of them often "voluntarily attach themselves to the Nubians, and are highly delighted to get a cotton shirt and a gun of their own. They will gladly surrender themselves to slavery, being attracted also by the hope of finding better food in the seribas than their own native wilderness can produce.

The mere offer of these simple inducements in any part of the Niam-niam lands would be sufficient to gather a whole host of followers and vassals."[898] He goes on to show how the mode of grinding durra corn used in Africa keeps women in slavery. They pound it on a big stone by means of a little stone. One woman's day's work will grind enough for five or six men. It has been shown above (sec. 275) how badly the abolition of slavery has been received in Algeria and Sahara. Gibson is quoted "that voluntary and hereditary slavery might well be permitted to continue" in West Africa.[899] In that region "a slave man could hold property of his own. If he were a worthy, sensible person, he could inherit." He could take part in discussions and the palaver, and could defend himself against abuse. There are now no slaves bought or sold, but there are "pawns" for debt, who are not free.[900] On the one hand, the slave trade in Africa has required for its successful prosecution that the slaves should first be war captives or raid captives of other negroes. This has led to the wildest and most cruel devastation of the territory. On the other hand, the question arises whether savages must be left to occupy and use a continent as they choose, or whether they may be compelled to come into cooperation with civilized men to use it so as to carry on the work of the world. Many who think the latter view sound are arrested by the fact that no one has ever been found great or good enough to be a slave owner. On the other hand, a humanitarian doctrine which orders that a slave be turned out of doors, in spite of his own wish, is certainly absurd.

+312. Future of slavery.+ In the eighteenth century, in western Europe, there was a moral revolt against slavery. None of the excuses, or palliatives, were thought to be good. The English, by buying the slaves on their West India islands, took the money loss on themselves, but they threw back the islands to economic decay and uncultivation. When the civilized world sees what its ideas and precepts have made of Hayti, it must be forced to doubt its own philosophy. The same view has spread.

Slavery is now considered impossible, socially and politically evil, and so not available for economic gain, even if it could win that. It is the only case in the history of the mores where the so-called moral motive has been made controlling. Whether it will remain in control is a question. The Germans, in the administration of their colonies, sneer at humanitarianism and eighteenth-century social philosophy. They incline to the doctrine that all men must do their share in the world and come into the great modern industrial and commercial organization. They look around for laborers for their islands and seem disposed to seek them in the old way. In South Africa and in our own southern states the question of sanitary and police control is arising to present a new difficulty.

Are free men free to endanger peace, order, and health? Is a low and abandoned civilization free to imperil a high civilization, and entitled to freedom to do so? The humanitarians of the nineteenth century did not settle anything. The contact of two races and two civilizations cannot be settled by any dogma. Evidence is presented every day that the problems are not settled and cannot be settled by dogmatic and sentimental generalities. Is not a sentiment made ridiculous when it is offered as a rule of action to a man who does not understand it and does not respond to it? In general, in the whole western Sahara district slaves are as much astonished to be told that their relation to their owners is wrong, and that they ought to break it, as boys amongst us would be to be told that their relation to their fathers was wrong and ought to be broken.

+313. Relation of slavery to the mores and to ethics.+ Inasmuch as slavery springs from greed and vanity, it appeals to primary motives and is at once intertwined with selfishness and other fundamental vices. It is not, therefore, a cause which gradually produces and molds the mores, nor is it an ethical product of folkways and mores. It is characteral.

It rises into an interest which overrules everything else. This appears most clearly in the history of Roman slavery (see sec. 288). The due succession of folkways, mores, character, and ethics is here broken. The motive of slavery is base and cruel from the beginning. Later, there are many people of high character who accept it as an inheritance, and are not corrupted by it. The due societal relation of interests and mores is broken, however. It is an evil thing that that relation should be broken. All which is moral (pertaining to mores) or ethical is thrown out of sequence and relation. The interests normally control life. It is not right that ethical generalizations should get dogmatic authority and be made the rule of life. Ethical generalizations are vague and easy.

They satisfy loose thinkers, and it is a matter of regret when, in any society, they get the currency of fashion and are cherished by great numbers. Interests ought to control, being checked and verified by ethical principles of approved validity. Slavery is an interest which is sure to break over all restraints and correctives. It therefore becomes mistress of folkways and dictates the life policy. It is a kind of pitfall for civilization. It seems to be self-evident and successful, but it contains a number of forms of evil which are sure to unfold. The Moslems have suffered from the curse of it, although in entirely other ways than the Christians. It intertwines with any other great social evil which may be present. There it has combined with polygamy. It is, in any case, an institution which radically affects the mores, but it is to be noticed that its effect on them is not normal and not such as belongs to the prosperous development of civilization.

[625] Maine, _Anc. Law_, 164.

[626] Galton, _Human Faculty_, 79.

[627] Gumplowicz, _Soziologie_, 121.

[628] _Durch Afrika_, 207.

[629] Gumplowicz (_Soziol._, 118) quotes a seventeenth-century author who said that high wages could get soldiers and sailors for a galley, but not oarsmen, who would allow themselves to be bound by a chain, bastinadoed, etc. Gumplowicz explains that if the galley was to manoeuver with exactitude, chains, the bastinado, etc., must be used to regulate the service.

[630] Ratzel, _Volkerkunde_, I, Introd., 83.

[631] Holub, _Maschukalumbe_, I, 477; JAI, X, 9.