Where you have that, you have slavery: with all the manifold, spiritual, and political results of that ancient institution.
Where you have slavery affecting a class of such considerable size as to mark and determine the character of the State, there you have the Servile State.
To sum up, then:—The Servile State is that in which we find so considerable a body of families and individuals distinguished from free citizens by the mark of compulsory labour as to stamp a general character upon society, and all the chief characters, good or evil, attaching to the institution of slavery will be found permeating such a State, whether the slaves be directly and personally attached to their masters, only indirectly attached through the medium of the State, or attached in a third manner through their subservience to corporations or to particular industries. The slave so compelled to labour will be one dispossessed of the means of production, and compelled by law to labour for the advantage of all or any who are possessed thereof. And the distinguishing mark of the slave proceeds from the special action upon him of a positive law which first separates one body of men, the less-free, from another, the more free, in the function of contract within the general body of the community.
Now, from a purely Servile conception of production and of the arrangement of society we Europeans sprang. The Immemorial past of Europe is a Servile past. During some centuries which the Church raised, permeated, and constructed, Europe was gradually released or divorced from this immemorial and fundamental conception of slavery; to that conception, to that institution, our Industrial or Capitalist society is now upon its return. We are re-establishing the slave.
Before proceeding to the proof of this, I shall, in the next few pages, digress to sketch very briefly the process whereby the old Pagan slavery was transformed into a free society some centuries ago. I shall then outline the further process whereby the new non-servile society was wrecked at the Reformation in certain areas of Europe, and particularly in England. There was gradually produced in its stead the transitory phase of society (now nearing its end) called generally Capitalism or the Capitalist State.
Such a digression, being purely historical, is not logically necessary to a consideration of our subject, but it is of great value to the reader, because the knowledge of how, in reality and in the concrete, things have moved better enables us to understand the logical process whereby they tend towards a particular goal in the future.
One could prove the tendency towards the Servile State in England to-day to a man who knew nothing of the past of Europe; but that tendency will seem to him far more reasonably probable, far more a matter of experience and less a matter of mere deduction, when he knows what our society once was, and how it changed into what we know to-day.