Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/100

of the fields could not supply with employment. They precipitated themselves into Rome, which was then the largest city in the world, and where, better than anywhere else, they might escape the vigilant search of their masters. . . . Justinian re-enacts pretty nearly the same law as Valentinian—only with this difference,—that he condemns all sturdy beggars to labour on the public works.

The whole of this vast redundancy of beggars took place in the third and fourth centuries. It seems they had interpreted literally St. Jerome's character of Christians, when he calls them, in his 26th Epistle to Pammachius, the subordinates and candidates of the poor. The predominant historic and social fact of the fourth century is the outrageous multiplication of proletarians, and (after innumerable failures of private charity) the creation and organization of a grand system of public charity to relieve the wants of the poor, and to provide asylums for old age, for the infirm, and for deserted children. This eleemosynary system, which the lapse of time has but more largely developed, and which is still the only palliative resorted to by modern societies to cure, or rather to bandage, the wounds of civilization, thus owes its origin to Christianism.

"Seeing that antiquity, during a period of more than 4,000 years, had not emancipated so many slaves as to produce any noticeable or considerable mass of proletarians, and that in less than 400 years Christianism had so multiplied them, that regular society was, as it were, choked and perilled by them, one would be tempted to believe that Christianity made a dead set against slavery, and went to work by grand essays of systematic enfranchisement. That, however, would be an error. In general, Christianism did not meddle with the positive law: it left to Cæsar what belonged to Cæsar. St. Paul wrote to the slaves of Ephesus that the new religion made no change in their duties as slaves. Nevertheless, Christianity created, alongside the old moral world, a new moral world, into which it admitted all who volunteered to accept its conditions. It was by this attractive power that Christianism drew over to it, in succession, all the members of pagan society; and the magnificent application that it gave to its ideas of charity, fraternity, and love was the principal cause which indirectly determined so many emancipations, and which gave birth to such a host of proletarians."