for freedom, until it pleased their masters or owners to give them up to the general for a sum of money; and had it not been for the subscription of the cities, the slaves would have reconciled themselves to their lot of slavery as to a thing quite natural and proper under the circumstances. After this, let it not be said that it was the force of law or the strength of governments that maintained slavery in ancient times. No; it was the universality of the public opinion in its favour. Had it been otherwise, the slaves might have emancipated themselves in any of those revolutionary crises which were of such frequent occurrence, and when neither law nor government had any force adequately to cope with them. But, even in their own most successful insurrections against the tyranny of their masters, they never dreamt (as we have seen) of abolishing slavery. Nay, on one occasion, when Marius, unable to cope with Sylla’s faction for want of sufficient troops, solicited the slaves to rise in behalf of the democratic party, and offered them their liberty if they would but join his ranks, only three individuals, we are told, out of the whole slave population gave in their names to be enrolled. In the following chapter we shall endeavour to account for this, and show that, as a general rule, the slaves acted wisely, in preferring to remain slaves (when they knew so little of real liberty) to becoming “free and independent labourers,” without arms, votes, lands, money, or credit, after British fashion. [Illustration: Decoration] CHAPTER VII. COMPARISON OF ANCIENT WITH MODERN SLAVERY. Forces which overthrew Chattel Slavery--Advantages of real Slaves over Freed-Men and Wages-Slaves--Natural Fecundity esteemed a Blessing, not a Curse--Condition of American Slaves under Slavery. Having seen how firmly rooted was the institution of direct human slavery in the public opinion of the ancient world, let us now inquire what was the potent force or combination of forces which subverted that opinion, and which operated the mighty changes that afterwards took place in the social relation of man to man. By these changes, we mean the manumission of the slave-class, the consequent formation of proletarianism, and, in course of time, the universal substitution of indirect or disguised for direct or personal slavery--an order of things which has ever since prevailed, and which, at the moment we write, imposes upon the vast majority of every “civilized” country a bondage more galling and intolerable than was the personal servitude of man to man under the ancient system.