Читать книгу The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery - James Bronterre O'Brien - Страница 3

Table of Contents

Importance of Social Reform—Universality of Covert or Open Slavery—Partial Prevalence of Working Class—Origin in Proletarianism—Advent of Christianity—Its Effects on Slavery—Middle and Working Classes the Produce of Emancipations—Classification of the Proletariat.

At this critical period of the world’s history, when either the whole of society must undergo a peaceful Social Reformation that shall strike at the root of abuses, or else be incessantly menaced with revolutionary violence and anarchy, it becomes a subject of grave interest to ascertain how Human Slavery came into the world; how it has been propagated; wherefore it has been endured so long; the varied phases it has assumed in modern times; and, finally, how it may be successfully grappled with and extinguished, so that henceforth it may exist only in the history of the past.

Glancing over the world’s map, we find nearly all the inhabited parts parcelled out into various nations and races—some called civilized, some savage, and the rest, forming the greater part, in some intermediate state of semi-barbarism. One sad feature, however, is found, with hardly an exception, to belong to all. It is Slavery, in one form or another;—it is the subjection of man to his fellow-man by force or fraud. Yes, disguise it as we may, human slavery is everywhere to be found—as rife in countries called Christian and civilized as in those called barbarous and pagan—as rife in the western as in the eastern hemisphere—as rife in the middle of the nineteenth century as in the pagan days of the Ptolemies and the Pharaohs. The only difference is, it is in the one case slavery direct and avowed; in the other, slavery hypocritically masked under legal forms. The latter is the phase slavery has assumed in countries calling themselves Christian and civilized; but it is a slavery not the less galling and unbearable because it is indirect and disguised.

What are called the “Working Classes” are the slave populations of civilized countries. These classes constitute the basis of European society in particular and of all civilized societies in general. We make this restriction, because there are societies in which there is found nothing to correspond with what in England and France are called the working classes. For example, they are unknown in Arabia, amongst the Nomad tribes of Africa, the Red-Indians of America, and the hunter tribes of Tartary; and, although in process of development, they are comparatively “few and far between” in Russia, Turkey, Greece and, indeed, throughout the nations of the East in general.

Amongst those who write books and deliver speeches about the working classes, few concern themselves to note this peculiarity in their history, namely, the fact that they exist in some countries and not in others; and the no less startling fact, that it is only at particular epochs of history, and only under certain peculiar circumstances of society, that they have been known to spring into social existence as a distinctive class. Books, journals, pamphlets, essays, speeches, sermons, Acts of Parliament, all are alike silent upon this notable fact. Nobody dreams of inquiring whether the working classes do, or do not, constitute a separate and distinct race in the countries they are found in; or of asking themselves what cause or causes produced them at particular epochs and in certain climes, while they continue to be unknown at other epochs and in other climes; and why we find them, as it were, sown broadcast in one country, while they appear but emerging into doubtful existence in other countries. In truth, the history of the middle and working classes has still to be written; and though it is far from our present purpose to undertake any such task, we shall, nevertheless, of necessity have to draw largely upon history for the elucidation of the facts and arguments by which we shall support our views upon the subject of slavery.

Not to encumber the question with details which, however interesting to antiquarians and scholars, would be out of place here, let us briefly observe at once, that the working classes, however general and extensive an element they constitute in modern society, are, nevertheless, but an emanation from another element, much more extensive and general, bequeathed to us by the ancient world under the name of Proletarians. By the term Proletarians is to be understood, not merely that class of citizens to which the electoral census of the Romans gave the name, but every description of persons of both sexes who, having no masters to own them as slaves, and consequently to be chargeable with their maintenance, and who, being without fortune or friends, were obliged to procure their subsistence as they best could—by labour, by mendicity, by theft, or by prostitution. The Romans used the term to denote the lowest, or lowest but one, class of voters—those who, being without property, had only their offspring (proles) to offer as hostages to the State for their good behavior, or rather as guarantees for not abusing their rights of citizenship. We use the term in the more enlarged sense of its modern acceptation, to denote every description of persons who are dependent upon others for the means of earning their daily bread, without being actual slaves.

In the early periods of history, and, indeed, until some time after the introduction of Christianity, the Proletarians constituted a very small fraction of society. The reason is obvious. Actual slaves and their owners formed the bulk of every community. The few Proletarians of the old Pagan world were either decayed families who had lost the patrimonies of their fathers, or else the descendants of manumitted slaves, who, in succeeding to the condition of freemen (acquired for them by their enfranchised forefathers), succeeded also to their poverty and precarious tenure of life, by inheriting the disadvantage of having no patrons bound to protect them, no masters answerable for their maintenance, no market for their labour. But as such manumissions were, before the establishment of Christianity, comparatively of rare occurrence, and as the offspring of them were as likely to be absorbed in time by the slave-owning class as to sink into and swell the Proletarian, the result was, that until the times of Augustus Cæsar, and indeed for a considerable period after, the Proletarians were by no means a numerous class. In other words, there were comparatively few upon whom the necessity was imposed of obtaining a precarious subsistence by hired labour, mendicity, theft, or prostitution. Almost all kinds of labour, agricultural and mechanical, were performed by slaves; masters had, therefore, little or no occasion to hire “free labourers.” Prostitution was followed as a profession only by courtesans who were freed-women or the offspring of freed-women. The slave class who were devoted to that degradation were either the property of masters (of whose households they formed part) or else of mangones, or slave-merchants, who openly sold them or let them out on hire for that purpose. Of beggars and thieves there could have been comparatively few, for the same reasons the conditions of society, as then constituted, did not make place for them. As already observed, almost every one was either an actual slave or an owner of slaves. If a slave-owner, he lived upon the revenues of his estates—upon his possessions, of which his slaves constituted a part, often the greater part. If a slave, his wants were supplied, and his necessities provided for, by those to whom he belonged. If a predial slave, he was kept out of the produce of his master’s farms, just as the herds and flocks were kept, both being regarded alike in the light of chattel property. If a domestic slave, his keep was a necessary part of his master’s household expenses. If let out for hire (an ordinary condition of ancient slavery), a portion of his gains was of necessity applied to his own maintenance. In any case—in all cases—he was exempt from want, and from the fear of want, as well as from all care and anxiety about providing for his subsistence. He could not, it is true, earn wages or acquire property for himself without his master’s leave; but neither, on the other hand, was he liable to starvation or privation because there might happen to be no work for him to do. Work or no work, he was always sure to be well fed, well housed, well clothed, and well cared for, as long as his master had enough and was satisfied with him. If he was incapable of acquiring property, so was he also exempt from its cares, and sure to participate in the use of his master’s, at least to the extent requisite for keeping him in bodily health and in good condition. Nor were slaves always debarred from the acquisition of property. There are instances recorded of slaves having been permitted to amass considerable fortunes, though this was rarely the case till after their masters manumitted them. Some also became celebrated as grammarians, poets, and teachers of belles lettres and philosophy. Indeed, when they happened to have good, kind masters their lot was by no means a hard one;—it was an enviable one in comparison with that of a modern “free-born Briton,” rejoicing in the status of an “independent labourer.” Of this we shall adduce proofs enough by-and-by. Suffice it, for the present, to observe, that so well must slaves have been used to fare under the old pagan system, that terms corresponding with our “wanton,” “saucy,” “pampered,” are of frequent occurrence in the old Greek and Roman classics as applied to slaves, particularly domestic or menial. At all events, destitution, in the modern sense, was unknown to them; and, with it, were also unknown its inevitable consequences—mendicity, robbery, theft, prostitution, and crime—as characteristic of a class or of a system. Individual or isolated cases there might be, and these chiefly amongst the manumitted; but there was no large class of persons subsisting by such means—no outlawed class compelled, as it were, by the very first law of nature—self-preservation—to erect such means into a system in order to preserve life.

Social evils there were—frightful evils—under the old pagan system. Slavery itself was an evil—an appalling evil—under even its most favourable conditions. But fearful as those evils were—hateful as direct slavery must ever be while man is man—the ancient pagan world has exhibited nothing so revolting and truly abominable as the development and progress of Proletarianism, which was consequent upon the breaking up of the old system of slavery, and which has ever since gained more and more strength in every age, till, in our times, it has made Proletarians of three-fourths of the people of every civilized country, and threatens society itself with actual dissolution.

Strange that what God designed to be man’s greatest blessing should be made man’s greatest curse by man’s own perversity! Yet so it is with almost every good thing designed or invented to perfect man in wisdom and civilization. It is so with science and machinery, it is so with money; it is so with public credit; it is so with mercantile enterprise; it is so with the institution of private property; and so, also, it has hitherto been with the divine institution of Christianity itself.

Christianity was introduced into the world at a period when the cup of human wickedness was full to overflowing. The inequalities of human condition were then greater than at any antecedent epoch. Wars the most bloody and brutal, and on the most extensive scale, had just ravaged the whole civilized world, ending with the destruction of the Roman Republic and with the erection of a military empire which threatened all nations and all future generations with irredeemable bondage. The long internecine struggles of Marius and Sylla, of Julius Cæsar and Pompey, and afterwards of Anthony and Augustus, had crimsoned three parts of the globe with human blood, and let loose such a universal torrent of rapine, lust, proscriptions, conspiracy, and crime of every sort throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, that hardly any nation or people escaped the general demoralization. Direct human slavery—the personal subjection of man to man as property—was at its height as a social institution. Thousands and hundreds of thousands who had been free citizens were taken prisoners and sold as slaves during those horrid wars. To escape similar disasters, whole nations and races without number placed themselves under the protectorate of Rome, paid tribute to the imperial exchequer, and basely bartered their independence and the rights and liberties of their subjects to win the smiles or to court the pleasure of Augustus and his successors. Rome herself was a mass of incarnadined corruption. To reconcile the Romans to their newly forged fetters it became the policy of their government to brutalize their minds with gladiatorial shows, or with the familiar sight of human beings torn to pieces by wild beasts, or by shedding each other’s blood with a ferocity unknown to wild beasts, and to corrupt their hearts and manners with importations of all that was most debasing in the systematized lewdness and debaucheries of the Grecian stage.

It was at this peculiar crisis of human affairs that Christianity made its appearance in the world. Need we say the divine mission of its Author was to rescue humanity from the scourges we have been describing, to bind up its bleeding wounds, and to infuse into it a spirit the opposite of what had produced the appalling vices and evils so rife at the time of His advent? Need we expatiate upon the marvellous successes which attended the labours of Himself and his apostles in the early propagation of the Gospel, or upon the amazing revolution which His followers wrought in the minds of men during the three first centuries? It is quite unnecessary to do so: history has made the world familiar with the prodigies of those days. Suffice it to say that anything like so extraordinary and so universal a revolution in the opinions and manners of men had never before been conceived, much less operated. Upon this point, at least, all historians of credit and all true philosophers are agreed.

Amongst the greatest of these marvels was the gradual but rapid extinction of direct human slavery, which took place throughout the greater part of the Roman empire during the three first ages. Antecedently to the preaching of the Gospel, the emancipation of slaves was but of rare and casual occurrence: it happened only on those unusual occasions when a slave could purchase his freedom, or get somebody to purchase it for him; or when a benevolent owner conferred it upon him as the reward of long and faithful services; or when he broke loose from his owner, to become a pirate or bandit; or when some ambitious chieftain or conspirator conferred it illegally, by draughting him into his insurgent battalions. But how few the aggregate of these emancipations were, even in the early days of the empire, we may infer from a passage in Seneca, where he tells us that, upon the occasion of a discussion in the senate upon sumptuary laws, a certain senator, having proposed that all slaves should be forced to wear a certain uniform, was immediately reminded of the danger there would be in furnishing the slaves with so ready a means of contrasting their own numbers with the paucity of their masters. Indeed, Tacitus also informs us, that when the quæstor, Curtius Lupus, was dispersing a revolt of slaves which took place in Italy about the twenty-fourth year of the vulgar era, “Rome trembled at the frightful number of the slaves,” as compared with the small number of free citizens—a number which, Tacitus further states, was diminishing every day. It would be easy to multiply proofs of this kind, but it is unnecessary, seeing that all historians admit that no emancipation of slaves upon a large scale—no systematic emancipations upon principle—took place antecedently to the introduction of Christianity; but that from the moment when the Gospel began to take root in Rome and in its tributary provinces—from that moment the manumissions of slaves began to take place frequently and systematically, till at last, upon the complete establishment of Christianity, direct personal slavery was entirely abolished.

Here, however, the perversity of man stepped in, to undo all that Christianity had done. The very emancipations it operated, and which it intended for the happiness of the emancipated, and to serve as the foundation of a new social edifice, in which all should enjoy equal rights and equal laws—these very emancipations were made a curse instead of a blessing to the emancipated, and to serve for the foundation of a worse system of slavery than any that was known under the Cæsars or the Pharaohs, or than any that existed in the Southern States of America or under any Oriental despotism.

Yes, the perverse ingenuity of man has turned the systematic and benevolent emancipations operated by Christianity into an evil greater than the evil it sought to redress—into an indirect and masked system of slavery more hideous and unbearable than the direct and undisguised slavery it warred against. For what did these Christian emancipations operate; and what have been their consequences to humanity? They turned well-fed, well-housed, comfortable slaves into ragged, starving paupers; and their consequences have been to fill Europe with a race of Proletarians by far more numerous and miserable than the human chattels of the ancients, whose place they occupy in modern civilization. Out of the systematic emancipations (the progressive and ultimately universal manumission of slaves) operated by Christianity have sprung what are now called the middle and working classes. The more fortunate of the manumitted and of their posterity have become our modern Bourgeois; the less fortunate and more numerous have become our modern Proletarians. These latter are what the French call le Prolétariat de l’Europe; and this Prolétariat their Guizots and doctrinaires now divide into the four following classes, which we pray all true democrats to mark, learn, and inwardly digest:—1, les Ouvriers; 2, les Mendians; 3, les Voleurs; and 4, les Filles Publiques: that is to say, 1, Workmen; 2, Beggars; 3, Robbers; and 4, Prostitutes!—a classification which must be highly flattering to the operative class, and enamour them vastly of royal and doctrinaire governments.

These several divisions of the Prolétariat are thus defined by the doctrinaires:—

“A workman is a Proletarian who works for wages in order to live.

“A beggar is a Proletarian who will not or cannot work, and who begs in order to live.

“A robber is a Proletarian who will neither work nor beg, but who robs or steals in order to live.

“A public woman is a Proletarian who will neither work nor beg nor steal, but who prostitutes herself in order to live.”

Such is the classification by which the vast majority of civilized society is nowadays distinguished by writers of the first eminence! Such is the classification they justify and would uphold! Nay, as we shall show, they offer it to us as the legitimate development of civilization, and as a just and righteous inheritance purchased for us by the blood of our Redeemer, and bequeathed to us through eighteen centuries of Gospel propagandism!!!