Antiquity has left us some notorious instances of cruelty to domestic slaves, and the stories of a few sensational cases have been preserved; but even the English domestic servant in Christian London in the nineteenth century is exposed to cruelty, and if the records of our law courts survive, posterity on the evidence of a few exceptional cases will be able to pass a stern sentence upon English men and women of today. Could we estimate all the pains of all the operatives in modern England, all the lives that are shortened, or rendered intolerable by disordered health, could we arrive at a clear understanding of all that is suffered by puddlers in iron foundries, by stokers on our great ships, by men and women employed in lead works, in brick works, in chemical works, in numberless other dangerous industries, we might well pause before condemning slavery as the one social condition predominantly productive of human suffering. True, the modern operative is free, but free to do or to be what? The chain is there; it is only a different kind of chain. When St. Paul travelled from Puteoli to Rome, he passed through a country in which a form of slavery was universal, which is commonly held to have been the cruellest known to Italy; he passed by the barracks of the agricultural slaves, and the conditions of travelling were such as to give him every opportunity of making observations; he lived certainly for two years after this date, and possibly much longer, but he nowhere lifts up his voice against slavery in general, or even this particular form of slavery. Not long before St. Paul made this journey, it had been necessary to inspect the slave barracks in the same part of Italy, because free men had acquired the habit of adopting servitude in order to escape military service. In fact that picture of antique slavery which represents it as a scene of whippings and tortures, of rapes and murders, of humiliating or disgusting services exacted by one man from another, and as the exclusive condition under which such things occur, is a false picture. The importance of slavery as a factor in the life of the ancients does not in fact depend so much upon its moral influence upon individuals as upon its political consequences, which were many and far-reaching in their effects.