se the crops but would cause deep slumber by night, valuable as a
safeguard against conspiracy; discord was to be sown instead of harmony
among the slaves, for the same purpose of hindering plots; capital
sentences when imposed by law were to be administered in the presence of
the whole corps for the sake of their terrorizing effect; while rations for
the able-bodied were not to exceed a fixed rate, those for the sick were to
be still more frugally stinted; and the old and sick slaves were to be
sold along with other superfluities.[11] Now, Cato was a moralist of wide
repute, a stoic it is true, but even so a man who had a strong sense of
duty. If such were his maxims, the oppressions inflicted by his fellow
proprietors and their slave drivers must have been stringent indeed.

[Footnote 11: A.H.J. Greenidge, _History of Rome during the later Republic
and the early Principate_ (New York, 1905), I, 64-85; M. Porcius Cato, _De
Agri Cultura_, Keil ed. (Leipsig, 1882).]

The heartlessness of the Roman _latifundiarii_ was the product partly of
their absenteeism, partly of the cheapness of their slaves which were
poured into the markets by conquests and raids in all quarters of the
Mediterranean world, and partly of the lack of difference between masters
and slaves in racial traits. In the ante-bellum South all these conditions
were reversed: the planters were commonly resident; the slaves were costly;
and the slaves were negroes, who for the most part were by racial quality
submissive rather than defiant, light-hearted instead of gloomy, amiable
and ingratiating instead of sullen, and whose very defects invited
paternalism rather than repression. Many a city slave in Rome was the boon
companion of his master, sharing his intellectual pleasures and his revels,
while most of those on the _latifundia_ were driven cattle. It was hard to
maintain a middle adjustment for them. In the South, on the other hand, the
medium course was the obvious thing. The bulk of the slaves, because they
were negroes, because they were costly, and because they were in personal
touch, were pupils and working wards, while the planters were teachers and
guardians as well as masters and owners. There was plenty of coercion in
the South; but in comparison with the harshness of the Roman system the
American regime was essentially mild.

Every plantation of the standard Southern type was, in fact, a school
constantly training and controlling pupils who were