Nor was it a progressive step only on the humanitarian side. It had other, profounder consequences from the evolutionary point of view. It made a leisure class possible, and provided the only conditions under which art, philosophy, and jurisprudence could be evolved. The secret of Aristotle's saying, that only by the invention of machines would the abolition of slavery ever be made possible, lies in his recognition of the fact that the labor of slaves alone made possible the devotion of a class of men to the pursuit of knowledge instead of to the production of the primal necessities of life. The Athens of Pericles, for example, with all its varied forms of culture, its art and its philosophy, was a semi-communism of a caste above, resting upon a basis of slave labor underneath. Similar conditions prevailed in all the so-called ancient democracies of civilization.
The private ownership of wealth producers and their products made private exchange inevitable; individual ownership of land took the place of communal ownership, and a monetary system was invented. Here, then, in the private ownership of land and laborer, private production and exchange, we have the economic factors which caused the great revolts of antiquity, and led to that concentration of wealth into few hands, with its resulting mad luxury on the one hand and widespread proletarian misery upon the other, which conspired to the overthrow of Greek and Roman civilization. The study of those relentless economic forces which led to the break-up of Roman civilization is important as showing how chattel slavery became modified and the slave to be regarded as a serf, a servant bound to the soil. The lack of adequate production, the crippling of commerce by hordes of corrupt officials, the overburdening of the agricultural estates with slaves, so that agriculture became profitless, the crushing out of free labor by slave labor, and the rise of a wretched class of freemen proletarians, these, and other kindred causes, led to the breaking up of the great estates; the dismissal of superfluous slaves, in many cases, and the partial enfranchisement of others by making them hereditary tenants, paying a fixed share of their product as rent—here we have the embryonic stage of feudalism. It was a revolution, this transformation of the social system of Rome, of infinitely greater importance than the sporadic risings of a few thousand slaves. Yet, such is the lack of perspective which the historians have shown, it is given a far less important place in the histories than the risings in question. Slavery, chattel slavery, died because it had ceased to be profitable; serf labor arose because it was more profitable. Slave labor was economically impossible, and the labor of free men was morally impossible; it had, thanks to the slave system, come to be regarded as a degradation. In the words of Engels, "This brought the Roman world into a blind alley from which it could not escape.... There was no other help but a complete revolution."[93]
The invading barbarians made the revolution complete. By the poor freemen proletarians who had been selling their children into slavery, the barbarians were welcomed. Misery, like opulence, has no patriotism. Many of the proletarian freemen had fled to the districts of the barbarians, and feared nothing so much as a return to Roman rule. What, then, should the proletariat care for the overthrow of the Roman state by the barbarians? And how much less the slaves, whose condition, generally speaking, could not possibly change for the worse? The free proletarian and the slave could join in saying, as men have said thousands of times in circumstances of desperation:—
"Our fortunes may be better; they can be no worse."
VI
Feudalism is the essential politico-economic system of the Middle Ages. Obscure as its origin is, and indefinite as the date of its first appearances, there can be no doubt whatever that the break-up of the Roman system, and the modification of the existing form of slavery, constituted the most important of its sources. Whether, as some writers have contended, the feudal system of land tenure and serfdom is traceable to Asiatic origins, being adopted by the ruling class of Rome in the days of the economic disintegration of the empire, or whether it rose spontaneously out of the Roman conditions, matters little to us. Whatever its archæological interest, it does not affect the narrower scope of our present inquiry whether economic necessity caused the adoption of an alien system of land tenure and agricultural production, or whether economic necessity caused the creation of a new system. The central fact is the same in either case.
That period of history which we call the Middle Ages covers a span of well-nigh a thousand years. If we arbitrarily date its beginning from the successful invasion of Rome by the barbarians in the early part of the fifth century, and its ending with the final development of the craft guilds in the middle of the fourteenth century, we have a sufficiently exact measure of the time during which feudalism developed, flourished, and declined. There are few things more difficult than the bounding of epochs in social evolution by exact dates. Just as the ripening of the wheat fields comes almost imperceptibly, so that the farmer can say when the wheat is ripe, yet cannot say when the ripening occurred, so with the epochs into which social history divides itself. There is the unripe state and the ripe, but no chasm yawns between them; they are merged together. We speak of the "end" of chattel slavery, and the "rise" of feudalism, therefore, in a wide, general sense. As a matter of fact, chattel slavery survived to some extent for centuries, existing alongside of the new form of servitude; and its disappearance took place, not simultaneously throughout the civilized world, but at varying intervals. Likewise, there is a vast difference between the first, crude, ill-defined forms of feudalism and its subsequent development.
The theory of feudalism is the "divine right of kings." God is the Supreme Lord of all the earth, the kings are His vice-regents, devolving their authority in turn upon whomsoever they will. All land is held as belonging to the king, God's chosen representative. He divides the realm among his barons, to rule over and defend. For this they pay tribute to the king—military service in times of war and, at a later period, money. In turn, the barons divide the land among the lesser nobility, receiving tribute from them. By these divided among the freemen, who also pay tribute, the land is tilled by the serfs, who pay service to the freeman, the lord of the manor. The serf pays no tribute directly to the king, only to his liege lord; the liege lord pays to his superior, and so on, up to the king. This is the economic framework of feudalism; with its ecclesiastical side we are not here concerned.
At the base of the whole superstructure, then, was the serf, his relation to his lord differing only in degree, though in material degree, from that of the chattel slave. He might be, and often was, as brutally ill-treated as the slave before him had been; he might be ill-fed and ill-housed; his wife or daughters might be ravished by his master or his master's sons. Yet, withal, his condition was better than that of the slave. He could maintain his family life in an independent household; he possessed some rights, chief of which perhaps was the right to labor for himself. Having his own allotment of land, he was in a much larger sense a human being. Compelled to render so many days' service to his lord, tilling the soil, clearing the forest, quarrying stone, and doing domestic work, he was permitted to devote a certain, often an equal, number of days to work for his own benefit. Not only so, but the service the lord rendered him, in protecting him and his family from the lawless and violent robber hordes which infested the country, was considerable.