“The proletarians are, then, the progeny of the ancient slave-class—of the ancient junior branches of families, given, bartered, or sold by the fathers of the heroic period—the age of gods and heroes. This great, active, terrible, poetic, and calamitous race has been marching onwards since the beginning of the world, struggling to conquer repose for itself, like Ahasuerus, and mayhap, like him, will never attain it. It has still the old malediction on its head, which dooms it to move incessantly without making progress. All it has gained from its fatigues of ages is, that Homer and Plato say to it, ‘March on!—you will never reach your destination in this world;’ and that St. Paul says to it, ‘You will reach it in the next world.’ It marches on, then, and has been so marching for sixty centuries; covered with obscurity, opprobrium, and contempt; obtaining no credit for its virtues or talents, none for its labours, none for its sufferings. It is not accounted more beautiful for having produced an Aspasia, more illustrious for having given birth to a Phedon, more brave for having turned out a Spartacus from amid its ranks. Whatever may have been its intelligence, its patient endurance, its wisdom, its parts, it was never honoured with the title of ‘sons of the gods,’ like the noble race; and Plato himself, though he had felt what slavery was under King Dionysius, cast in its teeth the famed Homeric verse, in which it is told that the slave has but the half of a human soul. Singular fatality! In vain did manumissions and enfranchisements break the chains of this doomed race. The mark of the collar is still on their necks (as with the dog in the fable); and one of their own caste, Horace, the son of a freed man, in the very golden age of antique philosophy, poesy, and civilization, threw in their face the eternal aspersion, ‘Money alters not the race—changes not the blood.’ Though they had gained this money by fatigues of body or fatigues of mind, by manual or by intellectual excellence,—though they had been merchants or soldiers, senators or philosophers,—still was the cry rung in their ears, ‘Money alters not the race.’ This malediction of race or blood was implacable. In vain had Ventidius Bassus become a consul: he was told, ‘You have been a scavenger and a muleteer.’ In vain had Galerius, Diocletian, Probus, Pertinax, Vitellius, Augustus himself, become emperors. Galerius was told, ‘You are but an upstart;’ Diocletian, ‘You have been a slave;’ Probus, ‘Your father was a gardener;’ Pertinax, ‘Your father was an enfranchised bondsman;’ Vitellius, ‘Your father was a soap-maker;’ and they were very near writing upon the marble statue of Augustus, ‘Your grandfather was a mercer, and your father was a usurer or a money-lender.’
“If this eternal and universal reprobation of the slave and enfranchised caste did not spare the most exalted heads and the most illustrious, imagine what the wretched proletarian was to expect in his lowly, poverty-stricken, and degraded state. The gentlefolk repelled him from the family hearth; civil society made him an outcast from all its prerogatives. He was born, and he lived and he died, apart from other men. And as we are told of certain rivers which flow together in the same bed or channel without once commingling their waters, so proletarianism and gentility, enfranchised slavery and nobility, touched and elbowed each other, and even lay down in the same bed, but without ever combining or losing themselves in each other by amalgamation.”
Had Christianity operated no other good in the world than breaking down the barriers of rank and pedigree—those barriers which up to Christ’s advent had effectually divided the human race into two irreconcilable castes—it would have done enough to entitle it to be regarded as the most important event that had till then occurred in the world. Until that most stupid and inveterate of all prejudices, the prejudice in favour of race or blood, was effectually rooted out, no real progress could have been made by humanity. The early Christians felt this, and so did the few freed-men and proletarians of their day. The latter, ousted from the family circle and from the rights of citizenship, rejected at once from private and from public society, must naturally have yearned for some new society in which their wounded feelings might find a refuge from the barbarous pride of their fellow-men. Such a society they found in the new Christian brotherhood. Hence the ardour with which the slave and proletarian class embraced the new dispensation; and hence its first fatal but unforeseen consequence—the myriad pauper-population which soon after overran Italy and the whole Roman empire.
But no sooner was the character of Christianity altered and debased—as it became after its legal establishment under Constantine—no sooner did the wealthy and ambitious portion of the Christians abandon their religious obligations for worldly advantages, and lose all sympathy with their poorer brethren, than the latter found themselves in a worse condition, in respect of social intercourse, than was the lot of the old slaves, their forefathers. They had then to endure the pangs of destitution, superadded to the insolence and pride of race and riches.
Before the epoch of Christianity, the only refuge society offered to the few manumitted slaves and proletarians from the withering pride of social disparagement was what Frenchmen call communes, or what we in England would call municipal institutions. All ancient history goes to show that communes or municipalities, of some kind or other, existed from a very remote period. In these communes or municipalities the progeny and descendants of slaves formed a sort of society amongst themselves, in which they were governed by their own bye-laws, according to the charters they held, or the amount of privileges conceded to them by the governments under which they found shelter. The enormous mass of proletarianism caused by Christianity necessarily enlarged and greatly altered the character of these municipal bodies: one portion of the members became in time opulent burgesses, growing rich by manufactures, commerce, and the professions allied with them; the remainder—the vast majority—became wages-slaves, or else fell into the other degraded sections of proletarianism already described.
In our modern society, the pride and exclusiveness of the upstart burgess-class towards their proletarian brethren is not less insulting and obdurate than were the same qualities in the ancient nobles towards the slave-class from which these burgesses are derived. If our modern middle-classes have still to endure an occasional humiliation from aristocratic morgue—from the exclusive pretensions of noble blood and ancestral honours—they take care to indemnify themselves largely by similar insolence at the expense of their less fortunate brethren, the working-classes. Indeed, were the latter to be asked which of the two classes, the higher or the middle, they ordinarily experience most courtesy from, they would unhesitatingly make answer, from the higher.
Nor is this class-insolence, this two-fold pride of blood and riches, confined to monarchical countries. It is as rife in republican Americas as in purse-proud, aristocratic England. In Spanish America both kinds of pride exist in full vigour; but that of caste, or blood, is carried to such excess as must render the excluded classes perfectly miserable all their lives. In the Free States even of republican America a man of colour dared not sit in the same part of a church or a theatre with the whites. Intermarriage between the two races was regarded with horror, and with difficulty could a clergyman be found to officiate at such a ceremony. In travelling, the people of colour must not enter the same carriages, nor (if in a steamboat) must they be seen in the same cabin as the whites. The negro-class, male and female, must travel in inferior trains by land, and sleep in inferior berths or upon deck when at sea or in excursions up and down the rivers. At places of public amusement they have their “coloured” seat and in the house of God their “coloured” gallery. In New Orleans and other cities in the South there are great numbers of coloured ladies of excellent education—ladies highly accomplished, and possessed, too, of great wealth, who lived in concubinage with white men, because they could not be legally married to them. There was a distinguished American general in the States who had several children, the offspring of such concubinage; and, with all his influence, he could not find admission into society for the members of his family. They and their like find barriers everywhere opposed to them.
It is true, these are not so much distinctions of wealth and pedigree, as distinctions of blood and race. But the principle of exclusiveness is the same. It is the exercise of injustice by the strong against the weak—the oppression of one class by another—a particular form or phase of slavery, which under any and every phase is anti-Christian and anti-human. Liberty and Christianity do not require a black man to marry a white woman, nor vice versâ; but both liberty and Christianity forbid coercive laws against such marriages, and more especially do they repudiate and reprobate the system of exclusiveness and unnecessary insults so universally exercised by the whites against the people of colour. Had the Christianity which overthrew paganism, in the three first centuries, continued to prevail in the world, and succeeded in assimilating the laws and institutions of nations to the law of the Gospel, it is certain slavery must have long since become extinct. Christianity knows no distinction between black men and white men—between noble and peasant—between proletarian and millionaire. Wages-slavery is as incompatible with its spirit as is chattel-slavery. Were that spirit to prevail, our laws and institutions would be such that neither form of slavery could for an instant raise its head anywhere.
It is true, great efforts are being made by a certain class of soi-disant Christians to procure the abolition of chattel-slavery. We must, however, regard all such efforts as the fruits of folly or hypocrisy, so long as we find no efforts made by the same parties to abolish wages-slavery—a slavery which we have shown to be immeasurably worse for white slaves than is chattel-slavery for the blacks. If it be said that to abolish wages-slavery would be impossible, we answer, No! We shall show, before we dismiss this inquiry, that wages-slavery is wholly and solely the work of tyrannical laws which one set of men impose upon another by fraud and force, and which they have no more right to impose, nor necessity for imposing, than they have to traffic in human flesh, or the black king of Dahomey has to make war upon his neighbours that he may conquer and sell them for slaves.
As long as these infamous laws (the laws alluded to) continue to be in force, we hold it to be disgustingly absurd and even infamous to agitate the world for the abolition of chattel-slavery. If we attempt to alter the condition of slaves we should do so for their own benefit, and not for ours. We should do so to ameliorate their condition, and not to make it worse. The ranters of Exeter Hall have no idea of ameliorating the condition of the negroes they so yearn to “emancipate.” Their whole and sole object is to “proletarianize” them for the benefit of employers and usurers. Their object is, in fact, to reduce them to the level of the Irish peasantry, or of the labourers in Dorsetshire or the weavers in Lancashire. The planters themselves did not deny that they would have preferred “independent labourers” to slaves, if they could have got them. They acknowledged that white labour would have been more profitable to them than slave-labour—even in cotton and sugar planting—if they could only have made sure of a constant supply of it when wanted. But they said the white labourer was too independent to render it safe for the planters to trust to his services in seasons of pressure, as during the time of cane-pressing, sugar-boiling, and cotton-picking. Assure him of a supply of such labour—only give him a “surplus population” of starving proletarians to be ever ready at his hand, like so many sheep in a crib, and you will make him an abolitionist at once. And why? Because wages-slavery would be then cheaper and better for him than chattel-slavery. On no other principle would he emancipate them. Upon no other principle did any emancipations ever take place in the world, save in the three first ages of Christianity. And no sooner did the pagan masters and hypocritical Christians discover, under Constantine, that more work could be got out of “free” proletarians than out of chattel-slaves, and that the former need not while the latter must be kept, than they, too, became abolitionists upon the same principle.