the most rigorous precision in all its details. As the citizen was the equal of all other citizens in the eye of the state, so he was absolute sovereign within his own house. And the slave was so absolutely his master's property that neither the favour of the people nor the authority of the prince could legally sever the bond. The master could not bind himself to a slave; could not accuse him of theft, because the slave being within his dominion, any thing taken by him could not go out of it. The slave had no civil position; no marriage; no paternity. By custom his master allowed him certain perquisites, which he could lay by for himself, and which was called his peculium; but this too belonged legally to the master. Much more had he no political rights; and an attempt on his part to enter military service or to take any civil office was punished with death. He had no power to receive a legacy; no power of legal action. could not give evidence, save upon torture; and when he was so called in as a witness the law carefully provided that any damage done to him by breaking of limbs or loss of life should be repaid according to its money value to his master. His punishment was left entirely in his master's hand. The right of the master had no limitation. There was an old law punishing with death the killing of an ox; but the law made no such provision in the case of the slave; the human being, outside the range of civic rights, had never such value in its

He

eyes. The master, then, might condemn his slave; his sentence itself was subject to no control, and its execution to no impediment. Such executions were carried out publicly under Augustus, and without his interference. The usual mode of inflicting death on the slave was by crucifixion. Not until Hadrian's time was this power taken away by law, on account of the excesses still witnessed. As long as the Romans were their own masters, they never thought of limiting the master's power over the slave.

Cato the Censor, that brilliant example of old Roman virtue, Cicero's model of the old man, was especially remarkable for the exactness with which he carried out the Roman view of the slave being his master's chattel. He saw no difference between animals and slaves, save that the latter were reasonable and docile, and so could be made responsible. When his slaves grew old and helpless he used to sell or drive them away. And he had them trained like dogs and horses, and at certain times he allowed them to pair. Finding the slavetrade profitable, and loving money more and more, he made his slaves in his latter years buy and train boys, and then sell them again.

Such being the law, in custom and in fact, the ordinary state of the slave was no doubt ruled by the law of interest. It is in the whole mass that the true character of their condition must be scen; and this condition in general represented the

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influence on which by its nature it depended, that is, the law of property as foundation, and utility as rule. The Roman's custom answered but too well to the law, which gave him the slave for his property, to use him as a thing. This false idea had taken full possession of Roman life.

Such was the condition of that large majority by whose labour society was supported. But must not the superstructure of society correspond to its basis? There could not be a single free Roman household which was not affected by the existence of such slavery as this. Large as was the part of the social domain which it occupied entirely to itself, it fermented through all the rest. The spirit of slavery is never limited to the slave: it saturates the atmosphere which the freeman breathes together with the slave, passes into his nature, and corrupts it. Let us mark this aggressive character of slavery at Rome in three points of view.

(a) 1. First, slave-labour was continually expelling free labour. The land of Italy was originally tilled by a free peasantry. At Rome especially agriculture was held in the highest honour. But the effect of war and conquest had been to exterminate the class of small proprietors both at Rome and in Italy. Their lands went to form the broad estates, latifundia, of the nobles; their honourable toils were replaced by the sorry but cheaper til

lage of the slave, who was incapable of military service, and without suffrage, the mere instrument of an absent master, and superintended by a steward like himself a slave. Thus agriculture, which had been the nursery of Roman legions for so many centuries, was become servile, and the land of the hardy Sabins had been, in the words of Seneca, delivered over to "fettered feet, bound hands, and branded faces."*

2. Again, not only were servants slaves, but slaves were the only servants. There is nothing in domestic service of its own nature incompatible with freedom. The happier state of society in which we live allows master and servant to have the same political and civil rights, the same religious duties and hopes. But at Rome the system of slavery had rendered free service impossible, not only by fixing a brand upon it, but because the whole social economy was opposed

to it.

3. Once more, slaves were artisans, and held in the city almost as complete a monopoly of the skilled labour by which the various arts of life are carried on, as of the ruder field-labour in the country. Industry, retail trade, commerce itself in large part were not free, but conducted by masters through their slaves, who were taught at the smallest cost every manufacture and every

"Impediti pedes, vinctæ manus, inscripti vultus;" quoted by Champagny, iv. 2.

art by which the fortune of their lords might be increased.

Labour, therefore, under the three great divisions of tillage, domestic service, and artisanship, had been rendered ignominious because it was the portion of slaves.

(b) But, secondly, what was the social and political temper which slavery generated around and outside of itself? What was the condition and the spirit of the free? This rich man, to whose absolute power the life, the honour, the happiness of so many slaves are committed, without a check upon passion or caprice, what else could he be but a tyrant, regardless of human life and suffering? By the original constitution of the Roman family he was master, with power of life and death, both of wife and children. But when, in addition to this, his household was founded upon slavery, when from his tenderest youth he had been received in the arms of slaves, heard their language, witnessed their habits, and beheld them not merely sacrificed to their master's advantage, but crouching before his feet in helpless impotence, where was he to learn the spirit of a father or of a citizen? And the poor freeman, supplanted by the slave of the rich in the great field of trade and industry, indisposed moreover to work of all kinds, as being the portion of the slave, what had he left to him but his quality of a Roman, dependence upon the imperial largess of corn and money, and servile