old feeling of participation in the life as
well as the industry of the economic unit. In an interesting chapter
Varro advises that the vilicus should be carefully selected, and
should be conciliated by being allowed a wife and the means of
accumulating a property (_peculium_); he even urges that he should
enforce obedience rather by words than blows.[371] But of the
condition of the ordinary slave on the farm this is the only hint he
gives us, and it never seems to have occurred to him, or to any other
Roman of his day, that the work to be done would be better performed
by men not deprived by their condition of a moral sense; that slave
labour is unwillingly and unintelligently rendered, because the
labourer has no hope, no sense of dutiful conduct leading him to
rejoice in the work of his hands. Nor did any writer recognise the
fact that slaves were potentially moral beings, until Christianity
gave its sanction to dutiful submission as an act of morality that
might be consecrated by a Divine authority.[372]

Lastly, it is not difficult to realise the mischievous effects of such
a slave system as the Roman upon the slave-owning class itself. Even
those who themselves had no slaves would be affected by it; for
though, as we have seen, free labour was by no means ousted by it,
it must have helped to create an idle class of freemen, with all its
moral worthlessness. Long ago, in his remarkable book on _The Slave
Power_ in America before the Civil War, Professor Cairnes drew a
striking comparison between the "mean whites" of the Southern States,
the result of slave labour on the plantations, and the idle population
of the Roman capital, fed on cheap corn and ready for any kind of
rowdyism.[373] But in the case of the great slave-owners the mischief
was much more serious, though perhaps more difficult to detect. The
master of a horde of slaves had half his moral sense paralysed,
because he had no feeling of responsibility for so many of those with
whom he came in contact every day and hour. When most members of a
man's household or estate are absolutely at his mercy, when he has no
feeling of any contractual relation with them, his sense of duty and
obligation is inevitably deadened, even towards others who are not
thus in his power. Can we doubt that the lack of a sense of justice
and right dealing, more especially towards provincials, but also
towards a man's fellow-citizens, which we have noticed in the two
upper sectio