people to construct with infinite toil a vast and practically indestructible monument to himself for his own permanent glorification. But this waste of their labour roused even the passive and long-enduring Egyptians to such furious discontent that his successors found it more convenient, as well as less dangerous, to obtain the necessary man-power for similar bootless constructions by successful wars, and the consequent importation of vast numbers of slaves from without. Organised slave raids of this character formed part of the foreign policy of all the slave monarchies. This was not always the acknowledged object of their wars, which were sometimes carried on for the more obvious ends of direct plunder of riches already accumulated, or for the humbling of a rival potentate whose ascendancy was obnoxious to the attacking ruler. But this economic and social motive had increasing influence, as is evidenced by the importance attached on the monuments to the numbers of slaves marshalled behind the war chariot of the conquerors, in these records of their triumphs. Slavery required a constant supply of slaves from without for the maintenance of the system within. Home breeding rarely, if ever, sufficed to meet the demand for more slaves to replace those lost by the wear and tear of slave life.

CHAPTER VII

SLAVERY IN GREECE

THERE is no accurate record of the development from tribal, chiefdom and patriarchal slavery to the period of complete chattel slavery. The nearest approach to such a record is in the case of Greece and Rome. Here again, as in the instance of the duration of communism, of the change from matriarchal to paternal descent, of the growth of the institution of private property and the transformation from the gentile society to the citizen polity and state-from societas to civitas-the length of time occupied was probably far greater than is as yet generally recognised. It was accompanied in each country where the full evolution was accomplished by the simultaneous growth of exchange as an economic factor, until the power of that impersonal and for centuries wholly uncomprehended agent of accumulative and individual tyranny, money, overshadowed all else, and led, in state after state, to genuine social revolution. Moneylending, usury, mortgages, commerce, production and mining for profit, with the ever-magnified strength of the merchant, helped to extend the sphere of slavery, and to put the slaves quite outside the category of independent human beings. Capture in war universally obliterated freedom for the captives save in those exceptional cases where ransom was permitted and taken advantage of. There was no evading this recognised rule. Might, as already said, constituted ethical right, not only in Asia and Africa, but among the most capable and cultured peoples of Europe. Debt acted in the same way as the agent of slavery at home.

For centuries before the complete organisation of slavery the free farmers on the land and the freemen workers in the cities carried on their employment, and constituted their trade combinations outside the slave system which was slowly growing up. As in Attica and other city states, the power of usury went hand in hand with the development of slavery. The farmer on

the land, or the workman and trader of the city who fell into the grip of the usurer, was in the long run forced by his relentless creditor into the ranks of the slaves as the last means of paying his debt. But this was a slow process of increase in the home production of slaves, slower even than the domestic reproduction of the slaves themselves.

For domestic and farm slavery the slave's condition was precarious enough, yet the relations between master and bondsman were at least human. But work in mines was, during the whole slave period, the worst fate that could befall a man. There was no personal relation, nor any touch of humanity in it. Brought directly into contact with the compelling motive of immediately realising production for profit, the life of the slaves in the gold and copper, and later in the silver, mines was one perpetual routine of slow torture. This applies not only to the slave labour in the mines of Greece, Sicily and Egypt, but likewise to the mines worked by the Carthaginians and afterwards by the Romans in Spain, in Gaul and other countries. The slave miner was the soulless, material instrument for wealth production in fact, which philosophers and jurists declared him to be in theory. In the hey-day of the slave system, when slaves could be easily and cheaply obtained by capture in war, by piracy in peace, or by the selling into slavery of debtors by the usurer, the life of the slave was of no account. The calculation simply was, how much gold or silver he could be forced by repeated floggings to obtain before utterly exhausted human nature relieved his sufferings by death.

The quantity of treasure thus gained was enormous. In one district alone in Spain at a late period 40,000 slaves were continuously employed; and probably Hannibal's army in Italy was to a large extent supported by the produce of his rich silver mines near Saguntum which have never been rediscovered. All these mines, and the mines in Gaul as well, after the Roman conquest of that province, were steadily worked with the same ruthless disregard for human life and human suffering. It was a pure matter of calculation. If more gold could be won at less cost by working men to death under the lash than in any other way, then that method was at once adopted and persistently applied. This was the system in use at Laurium at the time of the successful rising. But though

the slaves were victorious for the moment, that did not suffice to change the methods of working in the long run or to ensure more humane treatment. Thus the general conception of Greek and particularly Athenian mildness in relation to slavery is quite a misconception. The great slave market at Delos, where ancient writers tell us that arrangements were constantly maintained for offering and selling as many as 10,000 slaves a day, was of course a Greek centre of this huge trade. The steady demand and ready sale for eunuchs at a high price on this mart proves also that, though the Western Greeks might not use these unfortunate appurtenances of polygamous civilisation for themselves, they were quite ready to procure them for others.

The ablest of Greek thinkers, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, Socrates, Plato, could not even imagine a state of society where the chattel slavery to which they were accustomed would not continue as the foundation of their civilisation, and the economic basis of industry, art, science and culture generally. Yet Plato had been made a slave himself, in the course of one of those changes which were so common in the political affairs of his day. Aristotle, of course, considered slaves as a necessary and permanent portion of family life. His speculation as to the function of wholly mythical automatic machinery, whereby slavery could be avoided, is drawn from the conceptions of the poet Hesiod. At the disposal of the deified ironmaster, Vulcan, in his labours such machinery might work alone, subject only to the supervision of Vulcan himself. If the shuttle could weave of its own motion, and the lyre could play of itself, then also the builder might need no artificers nor the master any slaves. As things were, however, slaves performed, under the control of the master, those services with which the gods alone could dispense. Slaves were, in fact, indispensable human instruments of production like other animals. As a great reward for their good behaviour or for some conspicuous deed of bravery they might be given their freedom, and even accorded the rights of citizenship. These entailed the power and advantages of entering the competitive stage of freemen, and working for wages, advantages of which the slaves were by no means always inclined to avail themselves, hesitating to sacrifice the security of their dependent position,

E

with all its manifold drawbacks, for the uncertainty of a life

of liberty.

Aristotle returns to this subject of the inevitability and the ethical status of slavery several times, having always, apparently, on his conscience, an unexpressed, perhaps halfconscious, doubt as to whether all slavery was not opposed to "nature." Thus the human being who does not belong to himself by nature, but belongs wholly to another man, is a slave by nature; is, therefore, the property of somebody else, and consequently a mere chattel, though a man all the same. But the main origin of this slavery being capture of men, women and children in and by war, the man who was perhaps the ablest thinker of all antiquity found himself, after all, greatly puzzled to give an equitable or even legal status for this same chattel slavery which he contended was not only inevitable, but in itself just. So in his usual laudable endeavour to be quite clear and precise he becomes, of course entirely against his own will or intention, confused and even contradictory, though he imputes the same self-contradiction to others. Some, he avers, with whom the philosopher himself does not agree, put forward this identical plea that right founded upon custom justifies slavery due to success or defeat in war. But then the war itself which led to this slavery may have been unjust; and it cannot reasonably be affirmed that a man who is by this means unjustly enslaved is consequently a slave by nature. For then men of the highest families and noblest descent might be made slaves if taken prisoners in war and sold. But such persons ought not to be regarded as slaves at all. The outer barbarians, however those who are not noble Greeks, that is to say-stand on quite a different level. There are, then, some who are necessarily slaves and others who under any circumstances never can be slaves.

So it all comes to this: that some human beings are slaves and others are free men and women owing to the decision of nature; that there are two different classes of mankind, the one, advantageously for society, destined to be slaves, the other beneficially ordained to be masters; that it is just and right that some should be under control and that others should govern as nature fitted them to do. In which case it is likewise just that the master being fit to rule should dominate the slave