n of the tribal
distribution of wealth. Cruel, revolting, and vile as slavery appears to
our modern sense,--especially the earlier forms of slavery before the
body of legislation, and, not less important, sentiment, which
surrounded it later arose,--it still was a step forward, a distinct
advance upon the older customs of cannibalism and wholesale slaughter.

Nor was it a progressive step only on the humanitarian side. It had
other, profounder consequences from the evolutionary point of view. It
made a leisure class possible, and provided the only conditions under
which art, philosophy, and jurisprudence could be evolved. The secret of
Aristotle's saying, that only by the invention of machines would the
abolition of slavery ever be made possible, lies in his recognition of
the fact that the labor of slaves alone made possible the devotion of a
class of men to the pursuit of knowledge instead of to the production of
the primal necessities of life. The Athens of Pericles, for example,
with all its varied forms of culture, its art and its philosophy, was a
semi-communism of a caste above, resting upon a basis of slave labor
underneath. Similar conditions prevailed in all the so-called ancient
democracies of civilization.

The private ownership of wealth producers and their products made
private exchange inevitable; individual ownership of land took the place
of communal ownership, and a monetary system was invented. Here, then,
in the private ownership of land and laborer, private production and
exchange, we have the economic factors which caused the great revolts of
antiquity, and led to that concentration of wealth into few hands, with
its resulting mad luxury on the one hand and widespread proletarian
misery upon the other, which conspired to the overthrow of Greek and
Roman civilization. The study of those relentless economic forces which
led to the break-up of Roman civilization is important as showing how
chattel slavery became modified and the slave to be regarded as a serf,
a servant bound to the soil. The lack of adequate production, the
crippling of commerce by hordes of corrupt officials, the overburdening
of the agricultural estates with slaves, so that agriculture became
profitless, the crushing out of free labor by slave labor, and the rise
of a wretched class of freemen proletarians, these, and other kindred
causes, led to the breaking up of the great estates; the dismissal of
superfluous slaves, in many ca