that was carried on in the Mediterranean. The historian tells
us that, even so late as this, slaves were the principal article of
European export to Africa, Syria, and Egypt, in payment for the produce
of the East which was brought from those countries. It was the crumbling
of the old social system which, by reducing the population, lessening
the wealth, and lowering the standard of living among the free masters,
tended to extinguish slavery, by diminishing the differences between the
masters and their bondsmen. Again, it was certain laws enacted by the
Roman government for the benefit of the imperial fisc, which first
conferred rights on the slave. The same laws brought the free farmer,
whose position was less satisfactory for the purposes of the revenue,
down nearer and nearer to a servile condition. Again, in the ninth and
tenth centuries, pestilence and famine accelerated the extinction of
predial slavery by weakening the numbers of the free population.
'History,' we are told by that thoroughly competent authority, Mr.
Finlay, 'affords its testimony that neither the doctrines of
Christianity, nor the sentiments of humanity, have ever yet succeeded
in extinguishing slavery, where the soil could be cultivated with profit
by slave labour. No Christian community of slave-holders has yet
voluntarily abolished slavery. In no country where it prevailed has
rural slavery ceased, until the price of productions raised by slave
labour has fallen so low as to leave no profit to the slave-owner.'

The moral of all this is the tolerably obvious truth, that the
prosperity of an abstract idea depends as much on the medium into which
it is launched, as upon any quality of its own. Stable societies are
amply furnished with force enough to resist all effort in a destructive
direction. There is seldom much fear, and in our own country there is
hardly any fear at all, of hasty reformers making too much way against
the spontaneous conservatism which belongs to a healthy and
well-organised community. If dissolvent ideas do make their way, it is
because the society was already ripe for dissolution. New ideas, however
ardently preached, will dissolve no society which was not already in a
condition of profound disorganisation. We may be allowed just to point
to two memorable instances, by way of illustration, though a long and
elaborate discussion would be needed to bring out their full force. It
has often been thought since, as it was though