The Same Subject Continued. It cannot be doubted, that an entirely direct leap from complete servitude to complete freedom may be attended by many evils. No man is “born free,”(438) but only with a faculty for freedom; but this faculty must be developed. The knowledge and respect for law, and the self-control, which are the conditions and limits of freedom, are never acquired without labor, seldom without the making of grave mistakes, and never except through the practice of them. As a rule, both parties, masters as well as servants, would like to get rid immediately of all the inconveniences of the former condition and yet continue to enjoy its advantages. The servant, for instance, will now yield no more the specific obedience of former times, but demands still specific mildness from the land-owner, or loaner of capital, his former master. It is inevitable that there should be complaints on both sides.(439) But in the higher stages of economic culture, the relation of paternal protection and childlike obedience between the different classes of the people, which, even in medieval times, never obtained in all its purity, is certainly unrecallable. Hence it is, that all hope of a better condition of things is based only on this, that the lower classes may as soon as possible attain to true independence.(440) Section LXXV. The Same Subject Continued. Even in antiquity, the principal nations of the world could not keep the humanizing influence of civilization from making itself felt on their slaves. And if they did not go so far as to bring about the total abolition of slavery, it is unhesitatingly to be attributed to their religious inferiority.(441) In Athens, during the Peloponnesian war, it was almost impossible to distinguish the slaves from the poorer freemen by their looks or dress. Their treatment was mild in proportion as desertion was easier by reason of the smallness of the state or the frequency of war. It was forbidden to beat them; and only a court of justice could punish them with death.(442) Emancipation, in individual cases, was very frequent, and the names of Agoratos and of the law-reviser Nicomachos show how great a part an emancipated slave might play in the nation.(443) The helot system of the Lacedemonians preserved much longer a great deal more of medieval barbarism; but even here, we may infer from the frequent uprisings and emancipations of the helots, from their services in war etc., that their lot was made less hard than it had been.(444)