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Updated: June 11, 2025
What has been said above will have given the reader some idea of the conditions of life which created a great demand for labour in the last two centuries B.C., and of the circumstances which produced an abundant supply of unfree labour to satisfy that demand. I propose now to treat the whole question of Roman slavery from three points of view, the economic, the legal, and the ethical.
Slaves, I mean; not the unfree agricultural laborers, they were in a higher class, but the regularly bound slaves, who were descendants, either of the early British inhabitants or of the Saxons themselves, who had been punished in the courts and had been sentenced into slavery, or men who had voluntarily sold themselves into slavery.
When the Saxon kings began to be clothed with a mysterious dignity as "the Lord's anointed," the people were correspondingly degraded; and the degradation of this class, in which the true strength of England consisted, bore unhappy but natural fruits. A slave or "unfree" class had come with the Teutons from their native land.
The "ignoble," "not noble," men with no charter from the Crown, or Earl, Thane, or Church, were, if lease-holders, though not "noble," still "free." Beneath them were the "unfree" nativi, sold or given with the soil. The old Celtic landholders were not expropriated, as a rule, except where Celtic risings, in Galloway and Moray, were put down, and the lands were left in the King's hands.
The fathers of that council looked upon the Norman invasion as a punishment from Heaven on the slave trade; for they believed in their purity of heart, that power is transferred from one nation to another, because of injustices, oppressions, and divers deceits. The purchased slaves and unfree tribes tilled the soil, and practised the mechanic arts.
Of the free clans, the most illustrious were those of whose Princes we have traced the record the descendants of Nial in Ulster and Meath, of Cathaeir More in Leinster, of Oliold in Munster, and of Eochaid in Connaught. An arbitrary division once limited the free clans to six in the southern half-kingdom, and six in the north; and the unfree also to six.
Second, we are politically unfree. The causes of the existence of the first condition are analysed, as we have seen, in The Servile State; the causes of the second are analysed in The Party System. With the prime truths of this book every man possessing but the most elementary knowledge of political science and constitutional history is familiar.
When Peter the Great, with his terrible broom, swept all the free peasants into the same mass with the unfree serfs, and when he established the empire upon a chain of service to be rendered to the nobility by the peasantry, and then to the state by the nobility, he simply applied to the whole state the Slavonic principle existing in the social unit the family.
He considered himself unfree to seek friendships or favors among women. By every demand of honor he was bound to solicit no girl's trust or affection until that mystery was cleared and his father's innocence established.
Colonel Baird-Smith, needing to draw on altogether extraordinary stores of energy, found that brandy and opium were ways of throwing them into gear. Such cases are humanly typical. We are all to some degree oppressed, unfree. We don't come to our own. It is there, but we don't get at it. The threshold must be made to shift. Then many of us find that an eccentric activity a "spree," say relieves.
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