SERVICE OF CHRISTIANITY IN BREAKING CASTE-BONDS.
Division of Emancipated Slaves into two Classes of
Proletarians--Equality and Fraternity gave the desire for
Liberty--Inveteracy of Caste-Prejudice--Perversion of Christianity
under Constantine--Antagonism of Wages-Slavery and Christianity.
Our last chapter concluded with an instructive passage, translated from
the work of M. Granier de Cassagnac, showing how the pure spirit of
primitive Christianity had operated the manumission of slaves in such
masses that the Roman empire was soon overrun with proletarians of the
several conditions described. What four thousand years of paganism had
not effected, to any sensible extent, was the work of less than three
hundred years of Christian propagandism. But, alas! how different was
the result aimed at by Christ and his successors! Those emancipations,
which the early Christians had fondly hoped would bring about the reign
of universal liberty and fraternity, but introduced a new form of
slavery infinitely worse than the old, became, under Constantine and
his successors, a curse to the emancipated, whose fatal consequences
have never since ceased to be felt by three-fourths of Christendom.
A few of the manumitted prospered, in the old Roman guilds or
corporations, as burgesses, employers, or administrators; and a similar
class, more extensive and more opulent, still obtains in our own times.
But the vast majority, being without land, capital, or the patronage of
masters, had to seek a precarious subsistence by casual labour, or else
by theft, beggary, or prostitution. The passage from Cassagnac, quoted
in the last chapter, shows how fearfully those unhappy proletarians
had multiplied before the end of the fourth century. Immediately
following it, there is another which bears so authoritatively upon the
subject-matter of our inquiry, and which so strongly corroborates what
has been advanced, in this work, on the relative merits of chattel
and wages slavery, that we cannot forbear giving it a place here. We
translate from pages 304 and 305 of the work referred to:--
“In pagan society few slaves desired to become free; and the reason
is very simple. As slaves, they had, in their masters’ homes, all the
necessaries of life; they were sure of never having to suffer cold, nor
hunger or thirst, and to be comfortably housed and well taken care of,
in old age as well as in youth, in sickness as well as in health. As
freemen (‘independent labourers’!) they would have to provide not only
for their own wants, but also for those of their wives and children;
and this not only during the vigour of life, but also in old age and
during their infirmities, without taking into the account that, poor
and weak as they must necessarily be when emerging from slavery,
they would have to encounter all the chances of a perpetual struggle
with society--a struggle in which even the rich and the strong not
unfrequently succumb.”
This account of the ancient pagan slaves corresponds exactly with Mr.
Edward Smith’s account of the slaves he met with in the Southern States
of America. The latter would not give you “thank ye” for their liberty,
“feeling the protection of their masters to be an advantage,” and
because the “mere hirer has not the attachment for the hired that the
master naturally feels for his slave.”
It may be asked, then, how came the ancient pagan slave to appreciate
the boon of liberty when gratuitously given to him by his Christian
master? M. de Cassagnac, we think, answers the question with great
force and truth. “But in the new Christian association the slave felt
a new motive and attraction towards liberty. In the first place, the
enfranchised Christian was not, as in pagan society, repulsed by the
remorseless prejudices of caste. Without refusing to take nobility
of race into account, it showed no extravagant preference for it, as
paganism did. The Apostles and the early Fathers had freely extended
the hand of fellowship to the enfranchised and to the lower orders in
general--a race of men whom the Gentiles, that is to say, the genteel
society of paganism, had, up to that time, scornfully flouted. St.
Paul wrote to the Romans, that before God there is no exception of
persons; and St. Gregory and St. Ambrose have filled their works with
philosophical as well as Christian raillery levelled against the
pride of pedigree, and the right of domination founded upon it, which
was a direct onslaught upon the pagan nobility, whose principle was
the tradition of power and rank according to blood. The enfranchised
slaves and their offspring were always welcome amongst the Christians,
to share with them every social advantage. They might pass through
all the degrees of clerical ordination--become deacons, priests,
bishops,--in short, leap that hitherto impassable gulf, which, under
the old pagan régime, completely separated the humble from the higher
ranks of society. Accordingly, the Christian slaves who became free
were sure to have no moral prepossession or prejudice against them,
while all religious ones were in their favour. They were certain not to
be insolently scouted as of the lower orders, and also to be succoured
and relieved, in case of need, as fellow-Christians. It was on this
account they precipitated themselves into the régime of liberty, and
that so imprudently and in such immense masses that, suddenly becoming
their own masters, and responsible for their own maintenance, the vast
majority were soon overtaken and overwhelmed by misery of which they
had had no foresight--a misery till then unheard of--an appalling
misery, the recollections of which, as handed down to us from the
fourth century, present a veritable picture of horrors.”
It is only those who have felt the insolence of rank and power who can
appreciate the motives which impelled the slaves and the lower ranks of
citizens to embrace the new Christian code of liberty in the days to
which the foregoing passage refers. One more passage, illustrative of
this view, we shall translate from another part of Cassagnac’s work.
And, in this passage, what a true but frightful picture is presented to
us of the wrongs inflicted by the self-privileged few upon the despised
many--wrongs as old as the world, and yet as green in the present
day as though they were but of yesterday’s growth! It is a fearfully
significant passage:--
“The proletarians are, then, the progeny of the ancient slave-class--of
the ancient junior branches of families, given, bartered, or sold by
the _fathers_ of the _heroic_ period--the age of gods and heroes. This
great, active, terrible, poetic, and calamitous race has been marching
onwards since the beginning of the world, struggling to conquer repose
for itself, like Ahasuerus, and mayhap, like him, will never attain
it. It has still the old malediction on its head, which dooms it to
move incessantly without making progress. All it has gained from its
fatigues of ages is, that Homer and Plato say to it, ‘March on!--you
will never reach your destination in this world;’ and that St. Paul
says to it, ‘You will reach it in the next world.’ It marches on,
then, and has been so marching for sixty centuries; covered with
obscurity, opprobrium, and contempt; obtaining no credit for its
virtues or talents, none for its labours, none for its sufferings. It
is not accounted more beautiful for having produced an Aspasia, more
illustrious for having given birth to a Phedon, more brave for having
turned out a Spartacus from amid its ranks. Whatever may have been its
intelligence, its patient endurance, its wisdom, its parts, it was
never honoured with the title of ‘sons of the gods,’ like the noble
race; and Plato himself, though he had felt what slavery was under
King Dionysius, cast in its teeth the famed Homeric verse, in which
it is told that the slave has but the half of a human soul. Singular
fatality! In vain did manumissions and enfranchisements break the
chains of this doomed race. The mark of the collar is still on their
necks (as with the dog in the fable); and one of their own caste,
Horace, the son of a _freed_ man, in the very golden age of antique
philosophy, poesy, and civilization, threw in their face the eternal
aspersion, ‘Money alters not the race--changes not the blood.’ Though
they had gained this money by fatigues of body or fatigues of mind, by
manual or by intellectual excellence,--though they had been merchants
or soldiers, senators or philosophers,--still was the cry rung in their
ears, ‘Money alters not the race.’ This malediction of race or blood
was implacable. In vain had Ventidius Bassus become a consul: he was
told, ‘You have been a scavenger and a muleteer.’ In vain had Galerius,
Diocletian, Probus, Pertinax, Vitellius, Augustus himself, become
emperors. Galerius was told, ‘You are but an upstart;’ Diocletian, ‘You
have been a slave;’ Probus, ‘Your father was a gardener;’ Pertinax,
‘Your father was an enfranchised bondsman;’ Vitellius, ‘Your father was
a soap-maker;’ and they were very near writing upon the marble statue
of Augustus, ‘Your grandfather was a mercer, and your father was a
usurer or a money-lender.’
“If this eternal and universal reprobation of the slave and
enfranchised caste did not spare the most exalted heads and the most
illustrious, imagine what the wretched proletarian was to expect
in his lowly, poverty-stricken, and degraded state. The gentlefolk
repelled him from the family hearth; civil society made him an outcast
from all its prerogatives. He was born, and he lived and he died,
apart from other men. And as we are told of certain rivers which flow
together in the same bed or channel without once commingling their
waters, so proletarianism and gentility, enfranchised slavery and
nobility, touched and elbowed each other, and even lay down in the same
bed, but without ever combining or losing themselves in each other by
amalgamation.”
Had Christianity operated no other good in the world than breaking down
the barriers of rank and pedigree--those barriers which up to Christ’s
advent had effectually divided the human race into two irreconcilable
castes--it would have done enough to entitle it to be regarded as the
most important event that had till then occurred in the world. Until
that most stupid and inveterate of all prejudices, the prejudice in
favour of race or blood, was effectually rooted out, no real progress
could have been made by humanity. The early Christians felt this, and
so did the few freed-men and proletarians of their day. The latter,
ousted from the family circle and from the rights of citizenship,
rejected at once from private and from public society, must naturally
have yearned for some new society in which their wounded feelings
might find a refuge from the barbarous pride of their fellow-men.
Such a society they found in the new Christian brotherhood. Hence the
ardour with which the slave and proletarian class embraced the new
dispensation; and hence its first fatal but unforeseen consequence--the
myriad pauper-population which soon after overran Italy and the whole
Roman empire.
But no sooner was the character of Christianity altered and debased--as
it became after its legal establishment under Constantine--no sooner
did the wealthy and ambitious portion of the Christians abandon their
religious obligations for worldly advantages, and lose all sympathy
with their poorer brethren, than the latter found themselves in a worse
condition, in respect of social intercourse, than was the lot of the
old slaves, their forefathers. They had then to endure the pangs of
destitution, superadded to the insolence and pride of race and riches.
Before the epoch of Christianity, the only refuge society offered to
the few manumitted slaves and proletarians from the withering pride of
social disparagement was what Frenchmen call _communes_, or what we in
England would call _municipal institutions_. All ancient history goes
to show that _communes_ or _municipalities_, of some kind or other,
existed from a very remote period. In these communes or municipalities
the progeny and descendants of slaves formed a sort of society amongst
themselves, in which they were governed by their own bye-laws,
according to the charters they held, or the amount of privileges
conceded to them by the governments under which they found shelter.
The enormous mass of proletarianism caused by Christianity necessarily
enlarged and greatly altered the character of these municipal bodies:
one portion of the members became in time opulent burgesses, growing
rich by manufactures, commerce, and the professions allied with them;
the remainder--the vast majority--became wages-slaves, or else fell
into the other degraded sections of proletarianism already described.
In our modern society, the pride and exclusiveness of the upstart
burgess-class towards their proletarian brethren is not less insulting
and obdurate than were the same qualities in the ancient nobles towards
the slave-class from which these burgesses are derived. If our modern
middle-classes have still to endure an occasional humiliation from
aristocratic _morgue_--from the exclusive pretensions of noble blood
and ancestral honours--they take care to indemnify themselves largely
by similar insolence at the expense of their less fortunate brethren,
the working-classes. Indeed, were the latter to be asked which of the
two classes, the higher or the middle, they ordinarily experience most
courtesy from, they would unhesitatingly make answer, from the higher.
Nor is this class-insolence, this two-fold pride of blood and riches,
confined to monarchical countries. It is as rife in republican Americas
as in purse-proud, aristocratic England. In Spanish America both kinds
of pride exist in full vigour; but that of caste, or blood, is carried
to such excess as must render the excluded classes perfectly miserable
all their lives. In the Free States even of republican America a man of
colour dared not sit in the same part of a church or a theatre with the
whites. Intermarriage between the two races was regarded with horror,
and with difficulty could a clergyman be found to officiate at such
a ceremony. In travelling, the people of colour must not enter the
same carriages, nor (if in a steamboat) must they be seen in the same
cabin as the whites. The negro-class, male and female, must travel in
inferior trains by land, and sleep in inferior berths or upon deck when
at sea or in excursions up and down the rivers. At places of public
amusement they have their “coloured” seat and in the house of God their
“coloured” gallery. In New Orleans and other cities in the South there
are great numbers of coloured ladies of excellent education--ladies
highly accomplished, and possessed, too, of great wealth, who lived in
concubinage with white men, because they could not be legally married
to them. There was a distinguished American general in the States who
had several children, the offspring of such concubinage; and, with all
his influence, he could not find admission into society for the members
of his family. They and their like find barriers everywhere opposed to
them.
It is true, these are not so much distinctions of wealth and pedigree,
as distinctions of blood and race. But the principle of exclusiveness
is the same. It is the exercise of injustice by the strong against the
weak--the oppression of one class by another--a particular form or
phase of slavery, which under any and every phase is anti-Christian
and anti-human. Liberty and Christianity do not require a black
man to marry a white woman, nor _vice versâ_; but both liberty and
Christianity forbid coercive laws against such marriages, and more
especially do they repudiate and reprobate the system of exclusiveness
and unnecessary insults so universally exercised by the whites against
the people of colour. Had the Christianity which overthrew paganism,
in the three first centuries, continued to prevail in the world, and
succeeded in assimilating the laws and institutions of nations to the
law of the Gospel, it is certain slavery must have long since become
extinct. Christianity knows no distinction between black men and white
men--between noble and peasant--between proletarian and millionaire.
Wages-slavery is as incompatible with its spirit as is chattel-slavery.
Were that spirit to prevail, our laws and institutions would be such
that neither form of slavery could for an instant raise its head
anywhere.
It is true, great efforts are being made by a certain class of
_soi-disant_ Christians to procure the abolition of chattel-slavery.
We must, however, regard all such efforts as the fruits of folly or
hypocrisy, so long as we find no efforts made by the same parties
to abolish _wages-slavery_--a slavery which we have shown to be
immeasurably worse for white slaves than is chattel-slavery for
the blacks. If it be said that to abolish wages-slavery would be
impossible, we answer, No! We shall show, before we dismiss this
inquiry, that wages-slavery is wholly and solely the work of tyrannical
laws which one set of men impose upon another by fraud and force, and
which they have no more right to impose, nor necessity for imposing,
than they have to traffic in human flesh, or the black king of Dahomey
has to make war upon his neighbours that he may conquer and sell them
for slaves.
As long as these infamous laws (the laws alluded to) continue to be
in force, we hold it to be disgustingly absurd and even infamous
to agitate the world for the abolition of chattel-slavery. If we
attempt to alter the condition of slaves we should do so for their
own benefit, and not for _ours_. We should do so to ameliorate their
condition, and not to make it worse. The ranters of Exeter Hall have
no idea of ameliorating the condition of the negroes they so yearn to
“emancipate.” Their whole and sole object is to “proletarianize” them
for the benefit of employers and usurers. Their object is, in fact, to
reduce them to the level of the Irish peasantry, or of the labourers
in Dorsetshire or the weavers in Lancashire. The planters themselves
did not deny that they would have preferred “independent labourers”
to slaves, if they could have got them. They acknowledged that white
labour would have been more profitable to them than slave-labour--even
in cotton and sugar planting--if they could only have made sure of a
constant supply of it when wanted. But they said the white labourer
was too independent to render it safe for the planters to trust to his
services in seasons of pressure, as during the time of cane-pressing,
sugar-boiling, and cotton-picking. Assure him of a supply of such
labour--only give him a “surplus population” of starving proletarians
to be ever ready at his hand, like so many sheep in a crib, and you
will make him an abolitionist at once. And why? Because wages-slavery
would be then cheaper and better for him than chattel-slavery. On no
other principle would he emancipate them. Upon no other principle did
any emancipations ever take place in the world, save in the three
first ages of Christianity. And no sooner did the pagan masters and
hypocritical _Christians_ discover, under Constantine, that more work
could be got out of “free” proletarians than out of chattel-slaves, and
that the former _need not_ while the latter _must be_ kept, than they,
too, became abolitionists upon the same principle.
[Illustration: Decoration]