Looked at from an Abolitionist point of view, we are here dealing with a sheer evasion of the slavery-question. But this was inevitable. The imperial government, which alone had the power necessary for attempting solutions of grave problems, was doomed to become more and more mechanical. Under great strains in the third century it lost its vital forces to such a degree that it was powerless for internal betterment. The later despotic Empire, seeing the failure of past policy, could find no better way than to do as before[1814], only more mechanically and more thoroughly. What little of freedom of movement and of self-disposal still remained to the toiling classes accordingly disappeared. Once a certain number had been slaves; now none were practically free. Diminution of personal slavery had not increased personal freedom. The attempt to confine all labour to fixed grooves and rigid rules was a last desperate effort to control and employ the resources of ancient civilization, in the hope of thus finding means sufficient to endure the ever-growing strain upon the empire. This system might serve its purpose for the moment, but it was a vain device, killing enterprise and working out its own ruin through its own stagnation. In agriculture, on which the whole fabric rested, its effects were particularly ruinous: for in no occupation is there greater need of constant forethought and loving care, which the prospect of private advantage alone can guarantee. All these phenomena may assure us that as yet there was no clear understanding of the value of free self-disposal as the economic basis of society. From the moral point of view no genuine progress was to be looked for in a stagnant age. The transition from normal slavery to gild-bondage and normal land-serfdom does not seem to have been affected by the spiritual levelling of Christianity. But that as she gained power, the Church did something to mitigate[1815] the hardness of the time, is not to be doubted.
I need not dwell at length on the contrast presented by modern anti-slavery movements. The influence of religion, personal and humanitarian, is alone enough to account for the new spirit aroused and organized by Clarkson and Wilberforce. To put down the slave-trade because it was wrong was a momentous step, and emancipation its inevitable corollary, costly though it might be. That the reform was carried out two generations before the handworking masses of England gained political power is a most notable fact. For it is not possible to connect the achievement with the natural jealousy of free labour objecting to competition of slave labour. In the United States the motives for Abolition were necessarily more mixed, but sincere fanatics, religious and violent, were the leaders of the crusade. But the repugnance of free labour to the recognition of slavery in any part of the Republic (and it was this sentiment that furnished the necessary voting-power) was not so purely philanthropic. Students of American history are well aware of the moral change brought about by a single mechanical invention in the southern states. The economic advantages of the cotton-gin made slavery so profitable that existing tendencies towards emancipation died out in the South. A new life was given to a confessed evil, and the developed plantation-system, industrialized for the profit of a few, went down the road of fate to end in tragedy. The result of the great civil war at all events settled one question. Henceforth labour was to stand on a footing of self-disposal and wage-earning, with freedom to improve its conditions on those lines. The solution, obtained at an awful cost, was final for the time: what will be its ultimate outcome is at present (1919) a matter of some doubt, for reasons not to be discussed here.
The fact that Abolitionism is a phenomenon of the modern[1816] world, and not of the ancient, will not seem insignificant to those who have read widely in the ancient writers and remarked how very little we hear of free wage-earning labour. If we deduct the references to independent artisans practising trades on a small scale (and their cases are not relevant here), what we hear of mere wage-earners is very little indeed. And of this little again only a part concerns agriculture. I take it that we may fairly draw one conclusion from this: the wishes of the free wage-earning class, whatever their numbers may have been, were practically of no account in the ancient world. From first to last the primitive law of superior force, the ‘good old rule’ of which slavery was a product, was tacitly accepted. Civilization might undergo changes of character, periods of peace might alternate with periods of war: still bondage and labour were closely connected in men’s minds, and honest labour as such commanded no respect. How could it? Of a golden age, in which all men were free and slavery unknown, we have nothing that can be called evidence. The curtain rises on a world in which one man is at the full disposal of another. What is at first a small domestic matter contains the germ of later developments; and in the case of agriculture we see clearly how demands of an industrial nature transformed single bond-service into the wholesale and brutal exploitation of human chattels in slave-gangs. We have no good reason to believe that men ever in the ancient world abstained from employing slave labour out of humanitarian scruples. Scarcity of slaves, or lack of means to buy them, were certainly the main restrictive influences. The institution was always there, ready for extension and adaptation as changing conditions might suggest. If ancient civilization did not rest on a basis of slavery, on what did it rest? Assuredly not on free self-disposal. The man free to dispose of himself claimed the right to dispose of others, up to the limits of his own power and will. In this there is nothing wonderful. We need not flatter ourselves that the rule of force is now extinct. True, personal bondage to individuals is forbidden by law, but effective freedom of self-disposal, perhaps an impossible dream, is not yet realized: only its absence is dissembled under modern forms.
When I say that ancient civilization rested on a basis of slavery, the condition present to my mind is this. A social and political structure requires for its stability a reasonably sound economic foundation. This foundation is found in the assured and regular use of natural resources. And this use implies the constant presence of an obedient labour-force that can be set to work and kept working as and when needed. This force is now more and more supplied by machinery, the drudge that cannot strike. Antiquity made the slave its quasi-mechanical drudge: the more or less of slavery at a given moment simply depended on circumstances.
In returning to my original questions, whether the growth of Greco-Roman civilization was in fact achieved through the system of slavery, and whether it could conceivably have been accomplished without slavery, I have I think given my answer to the first, that is, so far as agriculture is concerned. And agriculture was the vital industry, on which the whole fabric principally rested. As to the second question, I can give no satisfactory answer. For my part, I agree with those who hold that, in the conditions of antiquity as depicted in our traditions and inferred by modern inquirers, slavery in some form and degree was an indispensable condition of progress. States, organizations of a lasting kind, had to be established by force. Captive labour, added to the resources of conquerors, seems to be a powerful means of increasing their economic strength and abridging the wasteful periods of conflict. But, once the stage had been reached at which a state was sufficiently stable and strong to provide for order within and to repel invaders, a slave-system became a canker, economic, social, ultimately political. I believe that the maladies from which the old Greco-Roman civilization suffered, and which in the end brought about its decay and fall, were indirectly or directly due to this taint more than to any other cause. I know of no case ancient or modern in which a people have attained to a sound and lasting prosperity by exploiting the servitude of other men. Serfdom or slavery, it matters not. So far as human experience has gone, it appears that all such conditions are eventually ruinous[1817] to the rulers.
For it is not merely the degradation of manual labour that results from slavery. The deadening of inventive genius and economic improvements is fatally promoted through the tendency to remedy all shortcomings by simply using up more flesh and blood. Man abdicates a most important function of his reason, and accepts a mere superiority of animal over animal. This is surely not following the true law of his development. It is from this point of view that the great scientific inventions of modern times present an encouraging spectacle, as the earlier abuses of their exploitation are gradually overcome, and the operative citizen vindicates his claims as a human being. That ancient slavery did in some ways act for good by guaranteeing leisure to classes some of whom employed it well, may be freely admitted. But I do not think we can sincerely extend the admission to include the case of Politics, whatever Greek philosophers may have thought. Nor can we without reservations apply it in the field of Art. On the other hand Literature surely owed much to the artificial leisure created by slavery. Even in its most natural utterances Greco-Roman literature is the voice of classes privileged because free, not restrained by the cramping influences of workaday life and needs. Its partisan spirit is the spirit of the upper strata of society, ignoring the feelings, and often the existence, of the unfree toilers below. In the main aristocratic, it tells us next to nothing of the real sentiments of even the free masses, particularly on the labour-questions that have now for some time increasingly occupied the public mind. That we are, for good or for evil, viewing all matters of human interest on a different plane from that of the ‘classic’ writers, is a consideration that students of the Past are in duty bound never to forget.
But, when we are told[1818] that ancient civilization in its early stages (as seen in the Homeric poems etc) may fairly be labelled as Medieval, while it may be called Modern when in its full bloom, we shall do well to pause before accepting a dogma that may imply more than we are prepared to grant. That mankind had to make a fresh start in the Middle Ages, ancient civilization having run its course and failed, is a proposition dangerously true. If it implies that the ‘free’ labour of modern times is not a direct development from ancient slavery, so far good. If we are to hold that ancient slave labour and modern free labour, when and so far as each is a factor of economic importance, are practically identical phenomena of capitalism eager to make a profit out of cheap labour, we may ask—is the parallelism so exact as it is thus represented to be? When we are told that the capitalist would nowadays prefer to employ slave labour if it were to be had, and that the legal form in which labour is supplied is a secondary consideration from the economic point of view, we begin to hesitate: is this really true? Was not the ineffectiveness of slave labour detected in ancient times? Was it not proved to demonstration in America, as attested by the evidence of both Northern and Southern witnesses? To reply that what capital wants is not mere slave labour but efficient slave labour, would be no answer. Capital is not, and never was, blind to the inefficiency of slave labour as compared with free labour. In the pursuit of profit it needs a supply of labour at its immediate and certain disposal; therefore it takes what it can get. In the ancient world the unquestioned institution of slavery offered a source of supply, not ideal, but such as could be relied on. Therefore capital employed slavery to extend its operations, simply turning existing conditions to account. And the admission, that the most flourishing period of Greco-Roman civilization was also the period in which slavery reached its greatest development, is surely a virtual denial that the basis of that civilization was free labour. That is, free wage-earning labour. For the independent farmer or artisan had nothing to do with the matter: he worked for himself, not for another, and was on a different plane from either wage-earner or slave. If he did not employ either wage-earner or slave, it was because he found such help too costly or a doubtful boon.
The case of agriculture at once reveals what was found to be the strong point of slave labour, the feasibility of employing it in large masses. Much of the work consisted in the mere mechanical use of brute force, and one overseer could direct many hands. In operations dependent on the seasons, the labour must be at hand to utilize opportunities. The choice lay between slaves not working with a will and free wage-earners not likely to be on the spot when wanted. Why were slaves preferred? Because their presence in sufficient number could be relied on in the existing conditions of the world. The history of industrial agriculture was a long tale of effort so to organize slave labour as to get out of it the greatest possible margin of profit. Not that slavery was thought preferable in itself; but a means of wholesale cultivation had to be found, and the then available resources of civilization offered no other. When the supply of slaves began to fail, landlords sought a remedy in letting some or all of their land to tenant farmers (extending an old practice), not in attempting to farm on their own account with hired labour. Hired labour remained as before, an occasional appliance to meet temporary needs.
The use of the terms Medieval and Modern as labels[1819] for ancient civilization in two clearly marked stages has, I repeat, just enough truth in it to be dangerous. As a rhetorical flourish it may pass. But it conveys by suggestion much that cannot be accepted. No doubt it is not meant to imply that what we call the Middle Ages is to be ignored. But it inevitably tends to stifle a belief in historical continuity, a faith in which is the soul of historical inquiry as generally understood in the present day. That modern labour-conditions shew a powerful reaction against medieval, is obvious: that medieval conditions have not influenced the modes of this reaction, is to me incredible. I do not believe that the modern free wage-earning system could have grown out of the ancient slave-labour system, had there been no such intervening period as the ‘Middle Ages.’ That the aims of the capitalist ancient and modern are the same, is a mere truism: but is not the same true of the medieval capitalist also?