ses, and the partial enfranchisement of
others by making them hereditary tenants, paying a fixed share of their
product as rent--here we have the embryonic stage of feudalism. It was a
revolution, this transformation of the social system of Rome, of
infinitely greater importance than the sporadic risings of a few
thousand slaves. Yet, such is the lack of perspective which the
historians have shown, it is given a far less important place in the
histories than the risings in question. Slavery, chattel slavery, died
because it had ceased to be profitable; serf labor arose because it was
more profitable. Slave labor was economically impossible, and the labor
of free men was morally impossible; it had, thanks to the slave system,
come to be regarded as a degradation. In the words of Engels, "This
brought the Roman world into a blind alley from which it could not
escape.... There was no other help but a complete revolution."[93]

The invading barbarians made the revolution complete. By the poor
freemen proletarians who had been selling their children into slavery,
the barbarians were welcomed. Misery, like opulence, has no patriotism.
Many of the proletarian freemen had fled to the districts of the
barbarians, and feared nothing so much as a return to Roman rule. What,
then, should the proletariat care for the overthrow of the Roman state
by the barbarians? And how much less the slaves, whose condition,
generally speaking, could not possibly change for the worse? The free
proletarian and the slave could join in saying, as men have said
thousands of times in circumstances of desperation:--

"Our fortunes may be better; they can be no worse."

VI

Feudalism is the essential politico-economic system of the Middle Ages.
Obscure as its origin is, and indefinite as the date of its first
appearances, there can be no doubt whatever that the break-up of the
Roman system, and the modification of the existing form of slavery,
constituted the most important of its sources. Whether, as some writers
have contended, the feudal system of land tenure and serfdom is
traceable to Asiatic origins, being adopted by the ruling class of Rome
in the days of the economic disintegration of the empire, or whether it
rose spontaneously out of the Roman conditions, matters little to us.
Whatever its archaeological interest, it does not affect the narrower
scope of our present inquiry whether economic necessity caused the
adoption of an alien