The great disadvantage of the slave-owning state is clearly apparent: in it the mass of men are degraded: they are not citizens: they cannot exercise their own wills. This is so evident and great an evil that it must be set against all the advantages we are about to notice. Slavery is a most unhappy condition in so far as it wounds human honour and offends human dignity; and that is why the Christian religion gradually dissolved slavery in the process of many centuries: slavery is not sufficiently consistent with the idea of man’s being made in the image of God. Slavery can also be materially unhappy, if the masters are cruel or negligent. The great mass of slaves in such a society might be, at the caprice of their masters, very unhappy; and under bad phases of those societies they _were_ very unhappy. But we must not be misled by the ideas that have grown up around the word “slave” in the modern mind. Because we have no one in England to-day who is called a slave and bought or sold as a slave, and no one is yet compelled by law to work for another man, therefore we regard slavery as something odd and alien; and because it is natural to dislike things which are odd and alien, unaccustomed, we think of slavery as something simply bad. That is a great mistake. The Servile State had--and, if it comes back, will have again--two great advantages: which were _personal security_ and _general stability_. _Personal security_ means a condition in which everybody, master and man, is free from grave anxiety upon the future: can expect regular food and lodging and a continuance of his regular way of life. _General stability_ means the continuance of all society in one fashion, without the violent ups and downs of competition and without the friction of unwilling, constantly interrupted labour--as in strikes and lock-outs. In the Servile State work always got done and was done regularly. The owners knew “where they were.” With so much land and so many slaves they were sure of a certain average annual produce. On the whole it was to the advantage of a man to keep his slaves alive and fairly well fed and housed. Also, the human relation came in, and a man and his slave, in the better and simpler forms of the Servile State, would often be friends and were usually in the same relation as people are to-day with their dependents. For instance: in well-to-do houses of the Servile State we know from history that certain slaves were often the tutors of the children, and thus had a very important and respectable position, and there were other slaves who acted as good musicians and architects and artists. There was always the feeling of a fixed social difference between slave and free, but this did not necessarily nor perhaps usually lead to great unhappiness.