Page:Earth-Hunger and Other Essays.djvu/139

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WHAT IS CIVIL LIBERTY?
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sess wrongfully whatever you get, but, if you permit them to retain anything, it will be out of humanity."[1] It seems that the reason why slaves in antiquity so universally accepted their fate was that they understood that such was the fortune of war. They acquiesced in it as according to the rules of the game. The earliest writer whom I have found who utters the dogma of liberty is Philemon (about 350 B.C.): "No one by nature ever was born a slave, but ill-fortune enslaved the body."[2] Aristotle discusses the subject in the third and fourth chapters of the first book of the "Politics." He says that some held that slavery was against nature. Such persons, whoever they were, must have derived their opinions entirely from humane impulse and poetic enthusiasm; Aristotle was not of that tone of mind. He could not find in history any example of a state which had not slavery, and when he examined the state in which he lived he easily saw that slavery was of its very essence; he therefore held that slavery was a natural necessity. Such it was in the sense that it was rooted in the nature of the classical state; it is undeniable that the classical state could not have grown up and could not have produced its form of civilization without slavery. It must also be recognized as a fact that no other organization of society has yet shown itself capable of that degree of expansion which the Roman state developed by means of slavery. The mediæval state broke down under the first expansive requirement which was made upon it. Whether the modern state, based on natural agents and machinery, is capable of expansion or not, is yet to be proved. There seems to be ample reason to believe that it is, unless the modern world votes not to go on;

  1. "Kyroped.," vii, 5, 73. Cf. "Memorab.," ii, 2, 2, and Polybius, ii, 58, 9.
  2. Frag. 39 in Meineke, "Com. Graec.," iv, S. 47.