“The Origin of a Working Class. Perhaps the most important result of the change which produced the agricultural stage was the growth of slavery as an institution. As we have said, slavery had its beginnings in the preceding periods [hunting and pastoral], but it is only in the agricultural stage that it becomes an important, almost a fundamental, economic institution. Tending the herds did not call for persistent labor, but the prose of tilling the soil is undisguised work, and primitive men were not fond of work.... It is not strange then that they should have saved the lives of men conquered in battle with the design of putting upon them the tasks of tilling the soil.” On the origin of slavery the eminent French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde, writes:[344] “What do all our modern inventions amount to in comparison with this capital invention of domestication. This was the first decisive victory over animality. Now, of all historic events the greatest and most surprising is, unquestionably, the one which alone made history possible, the triumph of man over surrounding fauna [animals of the region].... To us the trained horse that is docile under the bit is merely a certain muscular force under our control.... The idea of reducing men to slavery, instead of killing and eating them, must have arisen after the idea of training animals instead of feeding on them, for the same reason that war against wild beasts must have preceded that against alien tribes. When man enslaved and domesticated his own kind, he substituted the idea of human beasts of burden for that of human prey.” And this from Wallis:[345] “But whatever its merits, the consideration of slavery introduces a much larger subject—the place of class relations in social development as a whole. In its material aspect, property in men is an institution by means of which one class of people appropriates the labor product of another class without economic repayment. _This relation is brought about [also] by other institutions than slavery._ For instance, if a class engross the land of a country and force the remainder of the population to pay rent, either in kind or in money, for the use of the soil, such a procedure issues, like slavery, in the absorption of labor products by an upper class without economic repayment. “We have observed the origin of the social cleavage into upper and lower strata on this general basis at the inception of social development. If we scrutinize the field carefully, it is evident that one of the greatest and far reaching facts of ancient civilization, as it emerges from the darkness of prehistoric times, as well as one of the most considerable facts of subsequent history is just _this cleavage into two principal classes_.” Herbert Spencer has written:[346] “The sequence of slavery upon war in ancient times is shown us in the chronicle of all races....