houses, and
the provincials were clothed with the rights of Roman citizens, and
uniform laws were established throughout the empire.

The grand error, as has already been said, of the Graeco-Roman or
gentile civilization, was in its denial or ignorance of the unity of
the human race, as well as the Unity of God, and in its including in
the state only a particular class of the territorial people, while it
held all the rest as slaves, though in different degrees of servitude.
It recognized and sustained a privileged class, a ruling order; and if,
as subsequently did the Venetian aristocracy, it recognized democratic
equality within that order, it held all outside of it to be less than
men and without political rights. Practically, power was an attribute
of birth and of private wealth. Suffrage was almost universal among
freemen, but down almost to the Empire, the people voted by orders, and
were counted, not numerically, but by the rank of the order, and the
comitia curiata could always carry the election over the comitia
centuriata, and thus power remained always in the hands of the rich and
noble few.

The Roman Law, as digested by jurists under Justinian in the sixth
Century, indeed, recognizes the unity of the race, asserts the equality
of all men by the natural law, and undertakes to defend slavery on
principles not incompatible with that equality. It represents it as a
commutation of the punishment of death, which the emperor has the right
to inflict on captives taken in war, to perpetual servitude; and as
servitude is less severe than death, slavery was really a proof of
imperial clemency. But it has never yet been proved that the emperor
has the right under the natural law to put captives taken even in a
just war to death, and the Roman poet himself bids us "humble the
proud, but spare the submissive." In a just war the emperor may kill
on the battle-field those in arms against him, but the jus gentium, as
now interpreted by the jurisprudence of every civilized nation, does
not allow him to put them to death after they have ceased resistance,
have thrown down their arms, and surrendered. But even if it did, it
gives him a right only over the persons captured, not over their
innocent children, and therefore no right to establish hereditary
slavery, for the child is not punishable for the offences of the
parent. The law, indeed, assumed that the captive ceased to exist as a
person and treated him as a thing