William Emerton Heitland

“ The monstrous slave-markets of the historical periods shew that it developed into a normal institution of the ancient world. But it is not unreasonable to suppose that an alien from afar was less easily absorbed into his master’s family circle than a man of a neighbouring community though of another tribe. Are we to see in this the germ of a change by which the house-slave became less ‘domestic’ and tended to become a human chattel?
The exploitation of some men’s labour for the maintenance of others could and did take another form in ages of continual conflict. ”

“ Idleness bore its fruit, not only in the debauchery and gambling that fostered unholy greed and crimes committed to procure the money that was ever vanishing, but in the degradation of honest labour. Pampered menials were arrogant, poor citizens servile. And vast tracts of Italian land bore witness to the mournful fact that the land system, so far from affording a sound basis for social and economic betterment, was itself one of the worst elements of the situation.
At this stage it is well to recall the relation between agriculture and military service, the farmer-soldier ideal. ”

“ For it is promised that the new civilization, recast on the Bolshevik model, will leave no room for wage-service of one man to another.
I am not to criticize this scheme of social and economic life, but to look at it coolly as an illustrative fact. It is surely a significant thing that, while slavery and serfdom are now reckoned as virtually obsolete phenomena of the past, the old distinction, between the man who works himself for himself and the man who works for another, is still before us as the vital line of division in labour-questions. ”

“ In the management of great estates an atmosphere of mistrust is perhaps to some extent unavoidable. In an agricultural system based on slave labour, this mistrust begins at the very bottom of the structure and reaches to the very top, as is shewn by all experience ancient and modern. Industry in slaves, diligence and honesty in agents and stewards, are not to be relied on when these subordinates have no share in the profit derived from the practice of such virtues. ”

“ Farm-work as a means of bringing personal influence to bear, treating body and mind together, a sort of ‘Wisdom while you dig,’ was in such a society a merely fantastic proposal. The importance of farming and food-production was a commonplace, but the vocation of Musonius was moralizing and character-production. There is no reason to think that he had any practical knowledge of agriculture. His austere life proves nothing of the kind. The only remark that shews acquaintance with conditions of landholding is his reference to the farmers who make a living on hired land. ”

“ Whether the man be a client bound to his patron by social custom, or an agent earning a wage, or a slave the property of his master, he is merely a servant in charge. He can be superseded at any moment at the landowner’s will. The free tenant on the other hand is a creature of contract, and his existence presupposes a community in which the sanctity of deliberate bargains is considerably developed. Whether the tenant’s obligation consists in the payment of a fixed rent in money or kind, or in a share of produce varying with the season’s crop, does not matter. ”

“ Then the corruption of officials tainted all departments, and was the canker ever gnawing at the vital forces of the empire. But that this deadly corruption was a sudden growth out of an existing purity is not to be imagined. All this is merely an illustration of that oldest of political truisms, that to keep practice conformable to principle is supremely difficult. The only power that seems to be of any effect in checking the decay of departmental virtue is the power of public opinion. Now a real public opinion cannot be said to have existed in the Roman Empire ”

“ But cultivation by slave labour for the purpose of raising an income for the landlord was, even in its later improved organization, a system implying brutal callousness, if not downright cruelty. Slave stewards and overseers, at the mercy of the master themselves, were naturally less concerned to spare the common hands than to escape the master’s wrath. When writers on agriculture urge that on all grounds it is wise to keep punishments down to a minimum, the point of their advice is surely a censure of contemporary practice. ”

“ We may wonder too what the luxurious but responsible Maecenas thought of the lines contrasting the simple diet and untroubled life of the ox with the excesses and anxieties of man. But, if civilization owed much to the labours of the ox, and if gratitude was due to man’s patient helper, what about the human slave? Is it not a remarkable thing that the Georgics contain not a word of appreciative reference to the myriads of toiling bondsmen whose sweat and sufferings had been exploited by Roman landlords for at least 150 years? ”

“ To reply that what capital wants is not mere slave labour but efficient slave labour, would be no answer. Capital is not, and never was, blind to the inefficiency of slave labour as compared with free labour. In the pursuit of profit it needs a supply of labour at its immediate and certain disposal ”

“ Just so you must not meddle with crops, though grown on your own estate, if your tenant forbids it; and in a season of dearness or dearth you will be like the man in Vergil wistfully gazing at another’s plenteous store, though the land where it grew, the yard where it is stacked, and the granary it is meant to fill, are all your own property. ”

“ Once the great outlay on public works began to fall off, and industries on a larger scale to compete with the individual craftsman, how was the poor citizen to live? Directly or indirectly, the profits of empire supplied the answer. Now it was obvious that the fewer the beneficiaries the larger would be the average dividend of each. So the policy favoured by the poorer classes was a jealous restriction of the franchise. It was not the slave as labour-competitor against whom protection was desired, but the resident freeman of doubtful origin as a potential profit-sharer. ”

“ Christianity might counsel submission to the powers that be: it might recognize slavery as an institution: it might enjoin on the slave to render something beyond eye-service to his legal master. But it could never shake off the fundamental doctrine of the equal position of all men before their Almighty Ruler, and the prospect of coming life in another world, in which the standards and privileges dominating the present one would go for nothing. ”

“ Thus the empire, created by conquest and absorption, administered by bureaucratic centralization, rested on force; a force partly real and still present, partly traditional, derived from a victorious past. The belief in Rome as the eternal city went for much, and we hear of no misgivings as to the soundness of a civilization which expressed itself in a constant excess of consumption over production. Naturally enough, under such conditions, the imperial system became more and more what it really was from the first, a vast machine. ”

“ Aristotle, who was well aware of the merits of the working farmer, the peasant citizen, and recognized that such men had been a sound and stable element in the Athens of former days, would surely not have treated agriculture as a work reserved for servile hands, had he not been convinced that the old rural economy was gone and could never be revived. For, if suggestions from Sparta influenced him when designing Utopian institutions, it is no less clear that the Utopian setting—territory, city, port-town,—are merely modifications of Attica, Athens, Peiraeus. ”

“ Evidently subsequent to the abolition of debt-slavery, it died out in Italy, perhaps partly owing to the troublesome friction that would surely arise in enforcing the obligation.
It is natural to ask, if we find small trace of eagerness to labour in person on the land, and ample tradition of readiness to devolve that labour on slaves and subjects, how comes it that we find agriculture in honour, traditionally regarded as the manual labour beyond all others not unworthy of a freeman? To reply that human life is supported by the produce of the land is no sufficient answer. ”

“ Accustomed as we are nowadays to continual agitations for increase of wages and reduction of working hours, with centuries of strange experience in the working of Poor-laws, we are in no danger of undervaluing the importance of the wage-earner in our social fabric. We are rather in danger of forgetting other (and perhaps not less vital) considerations, under pressure of the material claims of the labourer and his hire. Power goes by votes; the handworker is now a voter; and the voice of the handworker is loud in the land. No scheme is too wild to find advocates ”

“ My first business is therefore to inquire what the tradition of early times amounts to, and how far it may reasonably be taken as evidence of fact. And it must be borne in mind that my subject is not the technical details of agriculture in general, but the nature of the labour employed in agriculture. In ages when voluntary peace between empires and peoples on bona fide equal terms was never a realized fact, and as yet hardly a dream, the stability of a state depended on the strength of its military forces,—their number, efficiency, and means of renewal. ”

“ That tenant farmers with their families usually supplied labour as well as management, is surely not to be doubted. That, in the times when we begin to hear of this class as non-exceptional, they also employed slave labour, is attested: that we do not hear of them as engaging free wage-earners, may or may not be an accidental omission.
Labour, simply as labour, without regard to the possible profit or loss attending its results, was no more an object of desire, engaged in for its own sake, in ancient times than it is now. ”

“ The charm of country life and pursuits remained as an ineffective ideal. Greek philosophers were impressed with the virtues of farmer-folk, virtues social moral and ultimately political. From them Cicero and others learnt to praise rustic life: the Gracchi made vain efforts to revive it: the poets, led by Vergil, pictured the glories of old Italian agriculture: but the aspirations were vain. The ‘classical’ civilization was urban in its growth, and urban it remained. Writers on agriculture might lament that free men, capable of tilling the land, loitered idly in the city. ”

“ That mankind had to make a fresh start in the Middle Ages, ancient civilization having run its course and failed, is a proposition dangerously true. If it implies that the ‘free’ labour of modern times is not a direct development from ancient slavery, so far good. If we are to hold that ancient slave labour and modern free labour, when and so far as each is a factor of economic importance, are practically identical phenomena of capitalism eager to make a profit [455] out of cheap labour, we may ask—is the parallelism so exact as it is thus represented to be? ”

“ Now, if a man gave himself in bondage to a creditor until such time as his debt should be discharged, he became that creditor’s slave for a period that might only end with his own life. Here we have another way in which the man of property could get the disposal of regular labour without buying a slave in the market or turning to work himself. ”

“ Cultivation of land (including the keeping of live stock) is an honourable pursuit. That good health, sustenance, even comfort and profit, are its natural attendants, is not doubted. But the position of the labouring hands is painful and mean, so much so that a common punishment for urban house-slaves was to send them to work on a farm. The rustic slave’s lot differed for the better from that of the mine-slave in the healthier nature of the occupation, but in little else. And this degradation inevitably reacted on the estimate of rustic wage-earners, whenever employed. ”

“ The owner drew a steady income from his capital sunk in slaves, and the system was thus convenient to all parties. We may add that, by causing a slave to take thought for his own future, this plan encouraged him to take reasonable care of his own health, and so far retarded his progressive deterioration as an investment; while his owner stood to recover the slave’s hoarded wage-portion in the form of redemption-money on manumission of his worn-out slave. There is reason to think that slave labour under these conditions was often more efficient than free. ”

“ It is no great stretch of imagination to suggest that, as the supply of slaves fell off, it was the policy of owners to turn their slave-property to the best possible account. When a steward or a gang-foreman was no longer in his prime, able (as Columella enjoins) to turn to and shew the common hands how work should be done, how could he best be utilized? A simple plan was to put him on a small farm with a few slave labourers. This would secure the presence of a tenant whose dependence was certain from the first, while a younger man could be promoted to the arduous duties of the big Home Farm. ”

“ The power to migrate or emigrate with the view of ‘bettering himself’ is conferred on the wage-earner by modern facilities for travel, and new countries readily absorb additional labour. But experience has shewn that free bargaining for wages is not seldom illusory, since the man of capital can bide his time, while the poor man cannot. Still, when every allowance has been made on this score, it is true that the modern labourer, through freedom of movement, has far more power of self-disposal than the wage-earner of the Greco-Roman world. ”

“ If he was not a master’s slave for good and all, he would be passing from master to master, ever freshly reminded of the fact that his daily necessities subjected him to the will of others, nullifying his freeman’s power of self-disposal. ”

“ But to philosophers and statesmen of antiquity they appeared as an all-important class, not only as producers of food but as a solid element of population, promoting the stability of state governments. This stability was favourable to continuity of policy and enabled all interests to thrive in peace. Have the development of machinery and transport in recent times so far altered the conditions of agriculture that this is no longer the case? In other words, is the agricultural labourer, the present wage-earner, to supersede the peasant landholder as the dominant figure of rustic life? ”