Before the epoch of Christianity, the only refuge society offered to the few manumitted slaves and proletarians from the withering pride of social disparagement was what Frenchmen call _communes_, or what we in England would call _municipal institutions_. All ancient history goes to show that _communes_ or _municipalities_, of some kind or other, existed from a very remote period. In these communes or municipalities the progeny and descendants of slaves formed a sort of society amongst themselves, in which they were governed by their own bye-laws, according to the charters they held, or the amount of privileges conceded to them by the governments under which they found shelter. The enormous mass of proletarianism caused by Christianity necessarily enlarged and greatly altered the character of these municipal bodies: one portion of the members became in time opulent burgesses, growing rich by manufactures, commerce, and the professions allied with them; the remainder--the vast majority--became wages-slaves, or else fell into the other degraded sections of proletarianism already described. In our modern society, the pride and exclusiveness of the upstart burgess-class towards their proletarian brethren is not less insulting and obdurate than were the same qualities in the ancient nobles towards the slave-class from which these burgesses are derived. If our modern middle-classes have still to endure an occasional humiliation from aristocratic _morgue_--from the exclusive pretensions of noble blood and ancestral honours--they take care to indemnify themselves largely by similar insolence at the expense of their less fortunate brethren, the working-classes. Indeed, were the latter to be asked which of the two classes, the higher or the middle, they ordinarily experience most courtesy from, they would unhesitatingly make answer, from the higher.