have fallen in the defeat. The famous servile war in the time of Crassus and Pompey, occasioned the slaughter of one hundred and five thousand slaves, besides many others not enumerated. The history of the insurrections of slaves in Italy would fill a volume.

Besides these insurrectionary and political troubles, slavery was the parent of many moral and social evils. We will place this before our readers, from the pen of Mr. George Bancroft, former Secretary of the Navy:

"3. ROMAN SLAVERY IN THE RURAL DISTRICTS.

“When Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, on his way to Spain to serve in the army, before Numantia traveled in Italy, he was led to observe the impoverishment of the great body of citizens in the rural districts. Instead of little farms, studding the country with their pleasant aspect, and nursing an independent race, he beheld nearly all the lands of Italy engrossed by large proprietors, and the plow was in the hands of the slave. In the early periods of the state, Cincinnatus at work in his field was the model of patriotism; agriculture and war had been the labor and office of freemen; but of these, the greater number had now been excluded from employment by the increase of slavery, and its tendency to confer the exclusive possession of the soil on the few. The palaces of the wealthy towered in the landscape in solitary grandeur; the plebeians hid themselves in miserable hovels. Deprived of the dignity of freeholders, they could not even hope for occupation; for the opulent land-owner preferred rather to make use of his slaves, whom he could not but maintain, and who constituted his family. Excepting the small number of the immeasurably rich, and a feeble but constantly-decreasing class of independent husbandmen, poverty was extreme. The King of Syria had reverenced the edicts of the Roman envoys, as though they

had been the commands of Heaven; the rulers of Egypt had exalted the Romans above the immortal gods, and from the fertile fields of Western Africa, Masinissa had sent word that he was but a Roman overseer. Yet a great majority of the Roman citizens, now that they had become conquerors of the world, were poorer than their forefathers, who had extended their ambition only to the plains around Rome.

"4. INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY ON FREE LABOR.

Philanthropy, when it contemplates a slaveholding country, may have its first sympathies excited for the slaves; but it is a narrow benevolence which stops there. The needy freeman is in a worse condition. The slave has his task, and also his home and his bread. He is the member of a wealthy family. The indigent freeman has neither labor, nor house, nor food; and, divided by a broad gulf from the upper class, he has neither hope nor ambition. He is so abject that even the slave despises him. For the interest of the slaveholder is diametrically opposite to that of the free laborer. The slaveholder is the competitor of the free laborer, and by the lease of slaves takes the bread from his mouth. The wealthiest man in Rome was the competitor of the poorest free carpenter. The patricians took away the business of the sandal-maker. The existence of slavery made the opulent owners of bondmen the rivals of the poor-greedy after the profits of their labor, and monopolizing those profits through their slaves. In every community where slavery is tolerated, the poor freeman will always be found complaining of hard times.

"5. INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY ON DOMESTIC LIFE.

"The great servile insurrection was designed to effect the emancipation of slaves, and both were unsuccessful.

But God is just, and his laws are invincible. The social evil next made its effects apparent on the patricians, and began with silent but sure influence to corrupt the virtue of families, and even to destroy domestic life. Slavery tends to diminish the frequency of marriages in the class of masters. In a state where emancipation is forbidden, the slave population will perpetually gain in relative numbers. We will not stop to develop the three or four leading causes of this result-pride and the habit of luxury-the facilities of licentious gratification-the circumscribed limits of productive industry-some of which causes operate exclusively and all of them principally on the free. The position is certain, and is universal; no where was it more amply exemplified than in Rome. The rich preferred the dissoluteness of indulgence to marriage; and celibacy became so general, that the aristocracy was obliged by law to favor the institution which, in a society where all are free, constitutes the solace of labor and the ornament of life. A Roman censor, in an address to the people, stigmatized matrimony as a troublesome companionship, and recommended it only as a patriotic sacrifice of private pleasure to public duty. The depopulation of the upper class was so considerable, that the waste required to be supplied by emancipation; and repeatedly there have been periods when the majority of the Romans had once been bondmen. It was this extensive celibacy and the consequent want of succession that gave a peculiar character to the Roman laws relating to adoption.

"6. INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY ON CIVIC VIRTUE.

"If a mass of slaves could, at any moment, on breaking their fetters, find themselves capable of establishing a liberal government-if they could at once, on being emancipated, or on emancipating themselves, appear pos

sessed of civic virtue, slavery would be deprived of more than half its horrors. But the institution, while it binds the body, corrupts the mind. The outrages which men commit when they first regain their freedom, furnish the strongest argument against the condition which can render human nature capable of such crimes. Idleness, and treachery, and theft are the vices of slavery. The followers of Spartacus, when the pinnacles of the Alps were almost within their sight, turned aside to plunder; and the Roman army was able to gain advantage when the fugitive slave was changed from a defender of personal liberty into a plunderer.

"7. INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY ON PUBLIC MORALS.

"In like manner the effect of slavery became visible on public morals. Among the slaves, there was no such thing as the sanctity of marriage; dissoluteness was almost as general as the class. The slave was ready to assist in the corruption of his master's family. The virtues of self-denial were unknown. But the picture of Roman immorality is too gross to be exhibited. Its excess can be estimated from the extravagance of the reaction. When the Christian religion made its way through the oppressed classes of society, and gained strength by acquiring the affections of the miserable. whose woes it solaced, the abandoned manner of the cities excited the reproof of fanaticism. When domestic life had almost ceased to exist, the universal lewdness could be checked only by the most exaggerated eulogies of absolute chastity. Convents and nunneries grew up at the time when more than half the world were excluded from the rites of marriage, and were condemned, by the laws of the empire, to promiscuous indulgence. Vows of virginity were the testimony which religion bore against the enormities of the age. Spotless purity could

As in

alone fitly rebuke the shamefulness of excess. raging diseases the most violent and unnatural remedies need to be applied for a season, so the transports of enthusiasm sometimes appear necessary to stay the infection of a moral pestilence. Thus riot produced asceticism; and monks, and monkish eloquence, and monastic vows, were the protest against the general depravity of manners."

VI. We will here adduce some of those great legal and moral principles of justice in the Roman code which are at variance with the system of Roman slavery, and with the legal principles on which it is founded. These have, or ought to have, the same weight in forming laws, that postulates and axioms have in geometry, or the fixed principles of any art or science have in discussions on the arts and sciences to which they relate.

1. Without going over the entire range of the civil law we will adduce those we find in the Institutes of Justinian, which are an abridgment of the Pandects and the Code, and contain the leading elements of the Roman law. Although these are already quoted as they occurred in the selections we have given from the Institutes, we will here place them in juxtaposition, so that we may at once see their force and meaning.

"Justice is the constant and perpetual disposition to render to every man his due." (Institutes, Lib. I, Tit. 1.)

The object of the science of law is what is "just and unjust." (Institutes, I, 1, 1.)

"The precepts of the law are, to live honestly, to hurt no one, and to give every one his due." (Institutes, I, 1, 3.)

"Liberty, from which we are denominated free, is the natural power of acting as we please, unless prevented by force or by the law." (Institutes, I, 3, 1.)