Читать книгу The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery. How it came into the world and how it shall be made to go out онлайн

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In the early periods of history, and, indeed, until some time after the introduction of Christianity, the Proletarians constituted a very small fraction of society. The reason is obvious. Actual slaves and their owners formed the bulk of every community. The few Proletarians of the old Pagan world were either decayed families who had lost the patrimonies of their fathers, or else the descendants of manumitted slaves, who, in succeeding to the condition of freemen (acquired for them by their enfranchised forefathers), succeeded also to their poverty and precarious tenure of life, by inheriting the disadvantage of having no patrons bound to protect them, no masters answerable for their maintenance, no market for their labour. But as such manumissions were, before the establishment of Christianity, comparatively of rare occurrence, and as the offspring of them were as likely to be absorbed in time by the slave-owning class as to sink into and swell the Proletarian, the result was, that until the times of Augustus Cæsar, and indeed for a considerable period after, the Proletarians were by no means a numerous class. In other words, there were comparatively few upon whom the necessity was imposed of obtaining a precarious subsistence by hired labour, mendicity, theft, or prostitution. Almost all kinds of labour, agricultural and mechanical, were performed by slaves; masters had, therefore, little or no occasion to hire “free labourers.” Prostitution was followed as a profession only by courtesans who were freed-women or the offspring of freed-women. The slave class who were devoted to that degradation were either the property of masters (of whose households they formed part) or else of mangones, or slave-merchants, who openly sold them or let them out on hire for that purpose. Of beggars and thieves there could have been comparatively few, for the same reasons the conditions of society, as then constituted, did not make place for them. As already observed, almost every one was either an actual slave or an owner of slaves. If a slave-owner, he lived upon the revenues of his estates—upon his possessions, of which his slaves constituted a part, often the greater part. If a slave, his wants were supplied, and his necessities provided for, by those to whom he belonged. If a predial slave, he was kept out of the produce of his master’s farms, just as the herds and flocks were kept, both being regarded alike in the light of chattel property. If a domestic slave, his keep was a necessary part of his master’s household expenses. If let out for hire (an ordinary condition of ancient slavery), a portion of his gains was of necessity applied to his own maintenance. In any case—in all cases—he was exempt from want, and from the fear of want, as well as from all care and anxiety about providing for his subsistence. He could not, it is true, earn wages or acquire property for himself without his master’s leave; but neither, on the other hand, was he liable to starvation or privation because there might happen to be no work for him to do. Work or no work, he was always sure to be well fed, well housed, well clothed, and well cared for, as long as his master had enough and was satisfied with him. If he was incapable of acquiring property, so was he also exempt from its cares, and sure to participate in the use of his master’s, at least to the extent requisite for keeping him in bodily health and in good condition. Nor were slaves always debarred from the acquisition of property. There are instances recorded of slaves having been permitted to amass considerable fortunes, though this was rarely the case till after their masters manumitted them. Some also became celebrated as grammarians, poets, and teachers of belles lettres and philosophy. Indeed, when they happened to have good, kind masters their lot was by no means a hard one;—it was an enviable one in comparison with that of a modern “free-born Briton,” rejoicing in the status of an “independent labourer.” Of this we shall adduce proofs enough by-and-by. Suffice it, for the present, to observe, that so well must slaves have been used to fare under the old pagan system, that terms corresponding with our “wanton,” “saucy,” “pampered,” are of frequent occurrence in the old Greek and Roman classics as applied to slaves, particularly domestic or menial. At all events, destitution, in the modern sense, was unknown to them; and, with it, were also unknown its inevitable consequences—mendicity, robbery, theft, prostitution, and crime—as characteristic of a class or of a system. Individual or isolated cases there might be, and these chiefly amongst the manumitted; but there was no large class of persons subsisting by such means—no outlawed class compelled, as it were, by the very first law of nature—self-preservation—to erect such means into a system in order to preserve life.