241. The ordeal. The doctrines and sentiments of this early age were seed planted to produce an immeasurable crop in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when they were brought forth again and quoted with the authority of the church fathers. The ordeal is a question addressed to the superior powers in order to learn the truth. The question is always categorical: Is this man guilty or not? The irrationality is that there is a third possibility which cannot be tested; the superior powers may not answer at all. In the early Middle Ages the ordeal was in common use in all civil and ecclesiastical trials. Experience proved the fallacy of it. We are led to believe that the people of the dark ages, not yet being locked in dogmatism, although stupid and ignorant, were better able to learn from experience than those of later times. Innocent III, in 1212, forbade the use of the ordeal, the occasion being its use by the Bishop of Strasburg against heretics.[543] The Lateran Council of 1215 forbade ecclesiastics to take any part in ordeals. It is perhaps true that torture was introduced from the Roman law after the ordeal was ruled out.[544]

242. Irrationality of torture. Torture was far more irrational than the ordeal. The Roman authorities had recorded warnings of its fallacy.[545] Torture destroys nerve power, will, and consciousness. There comes a point at which the victim will assent to anything to escape pain, or to get a quick and easy death. Therefore "confessions" under torture are of no value. Ulpian said of it, "Res est fragilis et periculosa et quae veritatem fallat."[546] One of the templars said that if he was tortured further he would confess that he had murdered the Saviour. Another said that he would confess anything if he was tortured further, although he was ready to suffer any death for the Order of Templars. He would confess that he had killed the mother of God.[547] A heretic under torture cried out that Christ, if so treated, would be proved a heretic.[548] Bernard Delicieux declared before King Philip that Peter and Paul could be convicted of heresy by the methods of the inquisitors.[549] Count Frederick von Spee, a Jesuit who opposed the witch persecutions, is quoted as saying, in 1631, "Treat the heads of the church, the judges, or me, as you treat those unhappy ones [accused of witchcraft], subject any of us to the same tortures, and you will discover that we are all sorcerers."[550] He quoted an inquisitor who boasted that if he could get the pope on the rack he would prove him a sorcerer.[551] In the thirteenth century "judges were well convinced of the failure of the procedure with its secret and subjective elements, but they could not in any other way cope with crime."[552]

This means, of course, that by long and manifold suggestion certain selected forms of crime had been stigmatized until the masses regarded them with horror. Then the apparatus of the administration of justice was brought to bear to exterminate all who could be charged with them, and when the process was objected to as horrible, it was defended on grounds of necessity to meet the horrible crime. By this action and reaction a great body of interests was enveloped in a special atmosphere, within which any excess of savagery was possible. The societal selection was prosecuted by murder of all dissenters.

243. Inquisitorial procedure from Roman law. The Roman criminal procedure was, in part, inquisitorial.[553] In the later period of the republic a private accuser, who must be an injured party, started and conducted the prosecution, but the magistrates could proceed on their own motion, upon denunciation, or by inquisitorial process. The last method became the custom under the empire. Prosecutions for treason were thus carried on, and by the end of the empire sorcerers and heretics, as hostes publici, like traitors, were thus tried. All citizens were bound to denounce such criminals. This procedure was taken up into the canon law, so that the Christian church inherited a system of procedure as well as the doctrines above stated.[554]

244. Bishops as inquisitors. In the Carolingian period bishops were instructed to seek out heretics and to secure their conversion, but they rarely distinguished themselves by zeal in this matter. The procedure was that of a grand jury set in motion by common report. Lucius III and Barbarossa, acting together in 1184, prepared a decretal in which the duty of bishops was reaffirmed and an attempt was made to give sharper method to their proceedings. They were to seek out heretics, holders of secret conventicles, or any who "in any way differed, in mode of life, from the faithful in general." Those who refused to be disciplined and to conform were to be abandoned to the secular arm for fitting punishment. All civil officers were to swear to enforce laws against heretics. Here we find the fundamental notions of the later Inquisition, but zealous executioners were wanting. If the decretal had been "obeyed strictly and energetically, it would have established an episcopal instead of a papal Inquisition."

245. Definition of heretic. The definition of a heretic just quoted occurs often and is the only one which could be formulated. A person was as liable to be charged with heresy if better than the crowd as if worse. "In fact, amid the license of the Middle Ages ascetic virtue was apt to be regarded as a sign of heresy. About 1220 a clerk of Spire, whose austerity subsequently led him to join the Franciscans, was only saved by the interposition of Conrad, afterwards Bishop of Hildesheim, from being burned as a heretic, because his preaching led certain women to lay aside their vanities of apparel and behave with humility.... I have met with a case, in 1320, in which a poor old woman at Pamiers submitted to the dreadful sentence for heresy simply because she would not take an oath. She answered all interrogations on points of faith in orthodox fashion, but though offered her life if she would swear on the gospels, she refused to burden her soul with the sin, and for this she was condemned as a heretic."[555] "Heretics who were admitted to be patterns of virtue were ruthlessly exterminated in the name of Christ, while in the same holy name the orthodox could purchase absolution for the vilest of crimes for a few coins."[556] There could be no definition of a heretic but one who differed in life and conversation from the masses around him. This might mean strange language, dress, manners, or greater restraint in conduct. Pallor of countenance was a mark of a heretic from the fourth century to the twelfth.[557] In the thirteenth century Franciscans were preeminently orthodox, but when John XXII stigmatized as heretical the assertion that Christ and his Apostles never had any property, they became criminals whom civil officers were bound to send to the stake.[558] John was himself a heretic as to the "beatific vision." He thought that the dead would not enter the presence of God until the judgment day.[559] The Franciscans held that the blood shed by Christ in the Passion lost its divinity, was separated from the Logos, and remained on earth. This was heresy.[560] The Dominicans, with Thomas Aquinas, were heretics as to the immaculate conception.[561] All the disputants on all sides of these questions went into the dispute at the risk of burning or being burned, as the tide should run.

246. The Albigenses. For some reason which is not easy to understand, the Manichaean doctrine took deep root in the Christian church from the fourth century on. To us the doctrine seems ethically bad, but that only shows how little religious dogmas make ethics. The enemies of the Albigenses recognized their high purity of life.[562] They called themselves kathari, or puritans. Popular fanaticism commenced persecution against them in the eleventh century. They were in antagonism to the hierarchy and the Catholic system, especially to papal autocracy. "Even with those abhorred sectaries, the church was wonderfully slow to proceed to extremities. It hesitated before the unaccustomed task. It shrank from contradicting its teachings of charity, and was driven forward by popular fanaticism. The persecution of Orleans, in 1017, was the work of King Robert, the Pious. The burning at Milan, soon after, was done by the people against the will of the archbishop.... Even as late as 1144, the church of Liege congratulated itself on having, by the mercy of God, saved the greater part of a number of confessed and convicted kathari from the turbulent mob which strove to burn them.... In 1145 the zealous populace seized the kathari and burned them, despite the resistance of the ecclesiastical authorities."[563] These cases of lynching are the first cases, in the Middle Ages, of burning heretics. They show that the masses in the Christian church thought that the proper treatment of enemies of God, the church, and all men.

247. Persecution popular. Innocent III began war on the Albigenses at the beginning of the thirteenth century, as rebels and heretics. All Catholics approved what he did, and thought that the Albigenses richly deserved all the treatment they received. The age was not religious, but it had intense religiosity, and the whole religiosity was heated to a high pitch by the contest with the Albigenses. The pride, ambition, and arrogance of the hierarchy and the basest greed and love of plunder of the masses were enlisted against them. Lea's statement is therefore fully justified that "the Inquisition was not an organization arbitrarily devised and imposed upon the judicial system of Christendom by the ambition or fanaticism of the church. It was rather a natural—one may almost say an inevitable—evolution of the forces at work in the thirteenth century, and no one can rightly appreciate the process of its development and the results of its activity without a somewhat minute consideration of the factors controlling the minds and souls of men during the ages which laid the foundation of modern civilization."[564] In the mind of the age "there was a universal consensus of opinion that there was nothing to do with a heretic but to burn him." This was one of those wide and popular notions upon which mores grow, because the folkways are adjusted to it in all departments of life as a rule of welfare. The courts of Toulouse at first, not recognizing the forces against the Albigenses, tried to protect their subjects, but "to the public law of the period [Raymond II of Toulouse] was an outlaw, without even the right of self-defense against the first-comer, for his very self-defense was rated among his crimes. In the popular faith of the age he was an accursed thing, without hope, here or hereafter. The only way of readmission into human fellowship, the only hope of salvation, lay in reconciliation with the church through the removal of the awful ban which had formed half of his inheritance. To obtain this he had repeatedly offered to sacrifice his honor and his subjects, and the offer had been contemptuously spurned.... The battle of toleration against persecution had been fought and lost; nor, with such a warning as the fate of the two Raymonds, was there risk that other potentates would disregard the public opinion of Christendom by ill-advised mercy to the heretic."[565]

248. An annalist of Worms is quoted about Dorso's operations on the upper Rhine in 1231. Dorso burned many persons of the peasant class. The annalist adds, "The people, when they saw this, were favorable to the inquisitors and helped them; and rightly, since those heretics deserved death. Confident in the approval of the masses, they went on to make arrests in towns and villages, as they pleased, and then they said to the judges, without further evidence, 'These are heretics. We withdraw our hands from them.' The judges were thus compelled to burn many. That was not according to the sense of the Holy Scriptures, and the ecclesiastics everywhere were greatly troubled. Since, however, the people took sides with the unjust judges, their will was executed everywhere." "The pitiless and incompetent judges later saw that they could not maintain their conduct without the help of great men, whom they won by saying that they would burn rich people, whose goods the great men should have." "That pleased the great men, who helped them, and called them to their cities and towns." "The people, when they saw this, asked the reason, to which the persecutors answered, 'We would burn a hundred innocent if there was one guilty amongst them.'"[566]

249. It was also true of the persecutions of the philosophers in Mohammedan Spain that they were popular. "The best educated princes allowed themselves to be driven to persecute, in spite of their personal preferences, as a means of winning popularity."[567]

250. Theory of persecution. The public opinion of the ruling classes of Europe demanded that heresy should be exterminated at whatever cost, and yet with the suppression of open resistance the desired end seemed as far off as ever.... Trained experts were needed, whose sole business it should be to unearth the offenders and extort a confession of their guilt.... Thus to the public of the thirteenth century the organization of the Inquisition and its commitment to the children of Saint Dominic and Saint Francis appeared a perfectly natural or rather inevitable development arising from the admitted necessities of the time and the instrumentalities at hand.[568]

251. Duties laid on the civil authority. The secular authority accepted the functions allotted to it out of the spirit of the age. To fall into disfavor at Rome was, for a prince, to risk the loyalty of his subjects, with whom it was a point of high importance to belong to a "Christian" state, that is, one on good terms with the church. "We are not to imagine, however, from these reduplicated commands that the secular power, as a rule, showed itself in the slightest degree disinclined to perform the duty. The teachings of the church had made too profound an impression for any doubt in the premises to exist. As has been seen above, the laws of all the states of Europe prescribed concremation as the appropriate penalty for heresy, and even the free commonwealths of Italy recognized the Inquisition as the judge whose sentences were to be blindly executed."[569]

252. "The practice of burning the heretic alive was thus not the creature of positive law, but arose generally and spontaneously, and its adoption by the legislator was only the recognition of a popular custom."[570] "Confession of heresy became a matter of vital importance, and no effort was deemed too great, no means too repulsive, to secure it. This became the center of the inquisitorial process, and it is deserving of detailed consideration, not only because it formed the basis of procedure in the Holy Office, but also because of the vast and deplorable influence which it exercised for five centuries on the whole judicial system of continental Europe."[571] In the second half of the twelfth century burning had become, by custom, the usual punishment for heretics. The purpose was universally regarded as right and pious, and the means was thought wise and correct. Therefore the whole procedure went forward on a course of direct and consistent development.[572] It was first decreed in positive law in the code of Pedro II, of Aragon, in 1197. In the laws of Frederick II, in 1224, the punishment was death by burning or loss of the tongue. In 1231, in Sicily, burning was made absolute. In 1238 the stake was made the law of the empire against heresy. In 1270 Louis IX made it the law of France.[573] "Dominic and Francis, Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas, Innocent III and St. Louis, were types, in their several ways, of which humanity, in any age, might well feel proud, and yet they were as unsparing of the heretic as Ezzelino da Romano was of his enemies. With such men it was not hope of gain or lust of blood or pride of opinion or wanton exercise of power, but sense of duty, and they but represented public opinion from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century."[574] That is to say, that the virtues of the individuals were overruled by the vices of the mores of the age.

253. The shares of the church and the masses. The steps of the process by which the Christian church was made an organization to enforce uniformity of confession by bodily pain, that is, in fact, by murder, demand careful attention. Back of all the popular demands for persecution there was the teaching of the church in antecedent periods and a crude popular logic of detestation and destruction. Then the outbreak of persecution appears as a popular act with lynching executions. At this point the church, by virtue of its teaching and leading functions, ought to have repressed excessive zeal and guided the popular frenzy. It did not do so. It took the lead of the popular movement and encouraged it. This was its greatest crime, but it must be fairly understood that it acted with public opinion and was fully supported by the masses and by the culture classes. The Inquisition was not unpopular and was not disapproved. It was thought to be the proper and necessary means to deal with heresy, just as we now think police courts necessary to deal with petty crimes (see sec. 247). The system of persecution went on to extravagances. The masses disapproved. They could not be held to any responsibility. They turned against the ecclesiastical authorities and threw all the blame on them.

254. The church uses the power for selfish aggrandizement. Things now advanced, therefore, to the second stage. The church authorities accepted the executive duty in respect to the defense of the church and society against heresy. The popular idea was that heresy would bring down the wrath of God on all Christendom, or on the whole of the small group in which it occurred.[575] The church authorities formulated doctrines, planned programmes, and appointed administrative officers. To them the commission laid upon them meant more social power, and they turned it into a measure of selfish aggrandizement. This alienated first all competent judges, and at last the masses.

255. The Inquisition took shape slowly. The Inquisition took shape very gradually through the first half of the thirteenth century. "In the proceedings of this period the rudimentary character of the Inquisition is evident." The mendicant orders furnished the first agents. They were admired and honored by the masses. Gregory IX, in his first bulls (1233), making the Dominicans the official inquisitors, seemed to be uncertain as to the probable attitude which the bishops would adopt to this invasion of their jurisdiction, "while the character of his instructions shows that he had no conception of what the innovation was to lead to." "As yet there was no idea of superseding the episcopal functions." In fact, the mendicant orders supplanted the military orders as papal militia, just as they were later supplanted by the Jesuits, and they very greatly assisted the reorganization of the church into an absolute monarchy under the pope.[576] Frederick II died in 1250. He was the first modern man on a throne. He had aimed to rule all Christendom by despotic methods which he perhaps learned from the Mohammedans. He would have made a monarchy if he had succeeded, which would have anticipated that of Charles V or Philip II by three hundred years.[577] It was the mores of the age which decided between him and the pope. His court was a center of Arabic culture and of religious indifference. There were eunuchs, a harem, astrologers from Bagdad, and Jews richly pensioned by the emperor to translate Arabic works. "All these things were transmuted, in popular belief, into relations with Ashtaroth and Beelzebub."[578] The saying that there had been three great impostors—Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed—was attributed to him, and it appears that his contemporaries generally believed that he first used the statement. The only thing which he left behind was the code of laws which he had made, by way of concession and attempt to buy peace from the popes, by which all civil authorities were made constables and hangmen of the church, to which all dissenters were sacrificed.

256. Formative legislation. In 1252 Innocent IV issued a bull "which should establish machinery for systematic persecution as an integral part of the social edifice in every city and every state." He authorized the torture of witnesses. "These provisions are not the wild imaginings of a nightmare, but sober, matter-of-fact legislation, shrewdly and carefully devised to accomplish a settled policy, and it affords us a valuable insight into the public opinion of the day to find that there was no effective resistance to its acceptance." There is evidence, twenty years later, that the Inquisition "had not been universally accepted with alacrity, but the few instances which we find recorded of refusal show how generally it was submitted to." The institution was in full vigor in Italy, but not beyond the Alps, "yet this was scarce necessary so long as public law and the conservative spirit of the ruling class everywhere rendered it the highest duty of the citizen of every degree to aid in every way the business of the inquisitor, and pious monarchs hastened to enforce the obligations of their subjects." "It was not the fault of the church if a bold monarch like Philip the Fair occasionally ventured to incur divine vengeance by protecting his subjects."[579]

257. Dungeons. It is evident that the lust of blood was educated into the mores by public executions with torture, by obscene adjuncts, by inhuman sports, and by public shows. Cruelty and inhumanity in civil cases were as great as under the Inquisition. A person apprehended on any charge was imprisoned in a frightful dungeon, damp, infested by rats and vermin, generally in chains, and he was often forced to lie in a constrained position. This was a part of the policy which prevailed in the administration of justice. It was intended to break the spirit and courage of the accused. Confinement was solitary, and various circumstances besides pain and hunger were brought to bear on the imagination. It was the rule that every accused person must fast for eight or ten hours before torture. The dungeons were often ingenious means of torture. There was one in the Bastille at Paris, the floor of which was conical, with the point downwards so that it was impossible to sit, or lie, or stand in it. In another, in the Chatelet, the floor was all the time covered by water, in which the prisoners must stand.[580]

258. The yellow crosses. One of the penalties inflicted by the Inquisition causes astonishment and at the same time shows how thoroughly the mass of the population were on the side of the Inquisition until the fifteenth century. Persons convicted of heresy, but coerced to penitence, were forced to wear crosses of cloth, generally yellow, three spans long and two wide, sewed on their garments. Thus the symbol of Christian devotion was turned into a badge of shame.[581] It pointed out the wearer as an outcast. However, it depended on the mass of the population to say what it should mean. How did they treat persons thus marked? They boycotted them. The wearers of crosses could not find employment, or human intercourse, or husbands, or wives. They were actually unable to get the relations with other men and women which are essential to existence.[582] If the people had pitied them, or sympathized with them, they would have shown it by kindness, in spite of ecclesiastical orders. In fact, the cross was a badge of infamy and was enforced as such by public action. "The unfortunate penitent was exposed to the ridicule and derision of all whom he met, and was heavily handicapped in every effort to earn a livelihood."[583] It is evident that the way in which the general public treated the cross-wearers can alone account for the weight which those under this penalty attached to it. "It was always considered very shameful." At Augsburg, in 1393, for seventy gold gulden, the wearing of crosses could be escaped.[584]

259. Confiscation. Another penalty of frightful effect was confiscation. As soon as a man was arrested for heresy, his property was sequestrated and inventoried. His family was thrown on the street. It was out of the Roman law that "pope and king drew the weapons which rendered the pursuit of heresy attractive and profitable." "The church cannot escape the responsibility of naturalizing this penalty in European law as a punishment for spiritual transgressions."[585] "It would be difficult to estimate the amount of human misery arising from this source alone." "The threats of coercion which at first were necessary to induce the temporal princes to confiscate the property of their heretical subjects soon became superfluous, and history has few displays of man's eagerness to profit by his fellow's misfortunes more deplorable than that of the vultures which followed in the wake of the Inquisition to batten on the ruin which it wrought." In Italy the confiscated property was divided into three parts by the pope's order. One part went to the Inquisition for its expenses, one part to the papal camera, and one part to the civil authority. Later, the civil authority generally got nothing. About 1335 a Franciscan bishop of Silva "reproached those of his brethren who act as inquisitors with their abuse of the funds accruing to the Holy Office.... The inquisitors monopolized the whole, spent it on themselves, or enriched their kindred at their pleasure." "Avarice joined hands with fanaticism, and between them they supplied motive power for a hundred years of fierce, unremitting, unrelenting persecution which, in the end, accomplished its main purpose." The confiscations did not concern the populace. They furnished the motive of the great to support the administration of the Inquisition.[586] "Persecution, as a steady and continuous policy, rested, after all, upon confiscation. It was this which supplied the fuel to keep up the fires of zeal, and when it was lacking the business of defending the faith languished lamentably. When katharism disappeared under the brilliant aggressiveness of Bernard Gui, the culminating point of the Inquisition was passed, and thenceforth it steadily declined, although still there were occasional confiscated estates over which king, prelate, and noble quarreled for some years to come."[587] "The earnest endeavors of the inquisitors were directed much more to obtaining conversions with confiscations and betrayal of friends than to provoking martyrdoms.... The really effective weapons of the Holy Office, the real curses with which it afflicted the people, can be looked for in its dungeons and its confiscations, in the humiliating penances of the saffron crosses, and in the invisible police with which it benumbed the heart and soul of every man who had once fallen into its hands."[588] It is evident that these means of tormenting and coercing dissenters went much further to cause them to disappear than autos-de-fe and other executions. The selection of those who submitted, or played the hypocrite, was accomplished in the fifteenth century.

260. Operation of the Inquisition. The Inquisition acted effectively. It kept detailed records and pursued its victims to the third generation.[589] It covered Europe with a network of reports which would rival the most developed modern police systems, "putting the authorities on the alert to search for every stranger who wore the air of one differing in life and conversation from the ordinary run of the faithful." "To human apprehension, the papal Inquisition was well-nigh ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent." Inquisitors were set free from all rules which had been found necessary to save judges from judicial error,[590] and the formularies to guide inquisitors inculcated chicane, terrorism, deception, and brow-beating, and an art of entangling the accused in casuistry and dialectics. A new crime was invented for the cases in which confession could not be obtained: suspicion of heresy, which had three degrees, "light," "vehement," and "violent." Even papal decretals which restrained the effort to destroy the accused could be set aside.[591] Thus the Inquisition cooperated with the criminal law. It operated on the society of Christendom for ten or twelve generations a selection of those who would submit and obey, and an elimination of those who dissented.

261. Success of the Inquisition. That the Inquisition succeeded in its purpose is certain. It forced at least external conformity and silence, especially of the masses. The heterodoxy of the Middle Ages "is divisible into two currents, of which one, called the 'eternal gospel,' includes the mystical and communistic sects which, starting from Joachim de Florus, after having filled the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ... was carried on, in the fourteenth, by the German mystics; the other, summed up in the blasphemy that there had been three great impostors [Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed], represents materialistic infidelity, due to a study of the Arabs, and skulking under the name of Averroes."[592] Of these two schools of heretics the former was the more popular and tenacious. It is not to be understood that the masses ever recognized their own handiwork in the Inquisition, or the popes of the fifteenth century. On the contrary, the sequence goes on to the fourth stage in which the masses, seeing the operation of ambition, venality, and despotism in the officers of the institution created to meet a popular demand, denounce it and turn against it to destroy it.

262. Torture in civil and ecclesiastical trials. (See sec. 237 ff.) In the course of its work the Inquisition had introduced torture into the administration of Christian justice and into the mores. The jurists were all corrupted by it. They supposed that, without torture, no crimes could be detected or punished, and this opinion ruled the administration of justice on the continent until the eighteenth century.[593] Lea finds the earliest instances of legal torture in the Veronese Code of 1228, and in the Sicilian Constitutions of 1231;—work of the rationalist emperor, Frederick II, but it was "sparingly and hesitatingly employed." Innocent IV adopted it in 1252, but only secular authorities were to use it. This was to save the sanctity of ecclesiastics. In 1256 Alexander IV, "with characteristic indirection," authorized inquisitors and their associates to absolve each other, and grant dispensations for irregularities. This gave them absolute liberty, and they could inflict or supervise torture.[594] There were other "poses," such as the prohibition to shed blood, i.e. to break the skin, and the rule to ask the civil power, when surrendering the victim to it, not to proceed to extremes, although it was bound to burn the victim. As the system continued in practice its methods were refined and its experts were trained. Any one who was charged must be convicted if possible. The torture produced permanent crippling or maiming. It would not do to release any one so marked with the investigation and then acquitted. Hence more and more frightful measures became necessary. Nevertheless cases occurred in which the accused held out beyond the power of the persecutors.[595] At Bamberg, in 1614, a woman seventy-four years old endured torture up to the third grade. After three quarters of an hour on the "Bock" she fell dead. The verdict was that she had cleared herself, by enduring the torture, of the "evidence" against her, and would have been freed if she had lived. She was to have Christian burial, and a document attesting this finding was to be given to her husband and children. Some jurists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were led to doubt about torture, but they almost all agreed that it was necessary "in some cases." These were the reformers who were careful not to be extremists. We are told that Peter of Ravenna, in 1511, urged the abolition of torture, and that Louis Vivez, a Spaniard, took the same position a little later. Neither won any attention.[596] In the Carolina, Charles V's law book of 1532, which was in general savage in its penalties, torture was to be applied only in cases punishable by death or life imprisonment, and only on strong prima facie evidence of guilt. Confession under torture was to have no weight unless confirmed after an interval. These restrictions were not observed in practice.[597] There are very many cases on record in which it was afterwards proved that many persons had suffered torture and cruel execution, upon confession, who were innocent of all crime.[598]

263. The selection accomplished. Thus the apparatus and devices for putting down dissent and enforcing submission to such authority as the great number were willing to recognize had attained a superficial success. Opposition was silenced. Dissent was made so dangerous that no one dared express it, except here and there a hero, and outward conformity to church discipline was almost universal. The mores also underwent influence from a societal power which was great and pervading. The external and artificial character of the conformity was so well known that a name was given to it,—implicita fides,—and this was discussed as to its nature and value. The mores are gravely affected by implicita fides when it is held by a great number of persons.[599] The selection which had destroyed honest thinkers and sincere churchmen had cultivated a class of smooth hypocrites and submissive cowards. In the fifteenth century the whole of Christendom had accepted the church system with its concepts of welfare and its dictates of duty, and had adopted the ritual means of holiness and salvation which it prescribed. In fact, at no other time were men ever so busy as then with "good works," or so fussy about church ritual. Everybody was anxious not to be a heretic. At the same time the whole mediaeeval system was falling to pieces, and the inventions and discoveries were disproving all received and approved ideas about the world and welfare in it. Gross sensuality and carnal lust got possession of society, and the church system was an independent system of balancing accounts with the other world. The theater declined into obscenity and coarseness, and the popular pulpit was hardly better.[600] The learned world was returning to classical paganism. The popes had their children in the Vatican and publicly married them there. Under Sextus IV the courtesans at Rome paid a tax which produced 20,000 ducats per annum. Prelates owned brothels. Innocent VIII tried to stop the scandal. In 1490 his vicar published an edict against all concubinage, but the pope forced him to recall it because all ecclesiastics had concubines. There were 6800 public meretrices at Rome besides private ones and concubines. Concubinage was really tolerated, subject to the payment of an amercement.[601] The proceedings under Alexander VI were only the culmination of the license taken by men who were irresponsible masters of the world, and who showed the insanity of despotism just as the Roman emperors did.[602] The church had broken down under the reaction of its own efforts to rule the world. It had made moral hypocrisy and religious humbug characteristic of Christians, for he who indulges in sensual vice and balances it off by ritual devices is morally subject to the deepest corruption of character. The church system had corrupted the mores by adding casuistry and dialectic smartness to the devices for regulating conduct and satisfying interests. The men of the Renaissance, especially in Italy, acted always from passionate motives and went to great excess. Their only system of conduct was success in what they wanted to do, and so they were often heroes of crime. Yet they all conformed to church ritual and discipline.

264. A great undertaking like the suppression of dissent by force and cruelty cannot be carried out in a great group of states without local differentiation and variation. To close the story, it is worth while to notice these variations in England, Spain, and Venice.

265. Torture in England. The Inquisition cannot be said to have existed in the British Islands or Scandinavia. The laws of Frederick II had no authority there. In England, in 1400, the death penalty for heresy was introduced by the statute de heretico comburendo. In 1414 a mixed tribunal of ecclesiastics and laymen was established to search out heretics and punish them. It was employed to suppress Lollardry. Under Edward VI these laws were repealed; under Mary they were renewed. In the first Parliament of Elizabeth they were repealed again, except the statute of 1400, which was repealed in 1676, when Charles II wanted toleration for Roman Catholics. Then the ecclesiastical courts were restricted to ecclesiastical penalties.[603] Torture was never legal in England. The use of it was pushed to the greatest extreme when Clement V and Philip the Fair were seeking evidence against the templars. Then the pope wrote a fatherly letter of expostulation to Edward of England, because of the lack of this engine in his dominions.[604] Cases of torture no doubt occurred. The star chamber had an inquisitorial process in which the rack seems to have been used. Barbaro, a Venetian ambassador in the sixteenth century, reported the non-use of torture as an interesting fact in English mores. He says the English think that it often forces untrue confession, that it "spoils the body and an innocent life; thinking, moreover, that it is better to release a criminal than to punish an innocent man."[605] From the thirteenth century it was forbidden to keep a prisoner in chains. In other countries this was the rule, and ingenuity was expended to fasten the prisoner in a most uncomfortable position.[606] The last case of the rack in the star chamber was that of Peacham, in 1614.[607] The last execution for heresy in the British Islands was that of a medical student at Edinburgh, eighteen years of age, named Aikenhead, in 1696.[608] The greatest cruelty in England was "pressing" prisoners to compel them to plead because, if they did not plead, the trial could not go on.

It follows that the repressive system of the mediaeval church did not produce effects on the mores in England.

266. The Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition is an offshoot and development of that of the mediaeval church. The latter was started in Aragon and Navarre in 1238.[609] In the latter half of the fourteenth century Eymerich (author of the Directorium Inquisitorum) conducted an inquisition in Aragon against Jews and Moors. In Castile, in 1400, an inquisition was in activity.[610] None of these efforts produced a permanent establishment. In the reign of Isabella, Cardinal Mendoza organized the Inquisition as a state institution to establish the throne.[611] The king named the inquisitors, who need not be ecclesiastics. The confiscated property of "heretics" fell to the state. Ecclesiastics were subject to the tribunal. The church long withheld approval from this inquisition, because it was political in origin and purpose, and was created outside the church organization and without church authorization. The populace also opposed it. This union of church and populace forced the grandees to support it.[612] The punishments "implied confiscation of property. Thus whole families were orphaned and consigned to penury. Penitence in public carried with it social infamy, loss of civil rights and honors, intolerable conditions of ecclesiastical surveillance, and heavy pecuniary fines. Penitents who had been reconciled returned to society in a far more degraded condition than convicts released on ticket of leave. The stigma attached in perpetuity to the posterity of the condemned, whose names were conspicuously emblazoned upon church walls as foemen to Christ and to the state."[613] When "the Spanish viceroys tried to introduce the Spanish Inquisition at Naples and Milan, the rebellious people received protection and support from the papacy, and the Holy Office, as remodeled in Rome, became a far less awful engine of oppression than that of Seville."[614] The Spanish Inquisition went on to a new form, free from papal and royal control and possessing a "specific organization."[615] "Like the ancient councils of the time of the Goths, the Inquisition is an arm which serves, in the hands of the monarch, to finish the subjugation of the numerous semi-feudal nobles created by the conquest, because before the faith there are no privileged persons, and no one is sheltered from the ire of the terrible tribunal. Its intervention is so absolute, and its dedication to its function so extravagant, that, rendering itself more Catholic than the pope, it usurps his authority and revolts against the orders of the pontiff, giving to the peninsular church the character of a national church, with the king at the head as pontiff, and the inquisitor by his side as chief prelate."[616] The peculiar character of the Spanish Inquisition as a state institution and a civil engine should never be forgotten. It was very different from the papal Inquisition. The creature also ruled its creator, for it controlled the state in the direction of its own institutional character and purposes. The Spanish Inquisition, therefore, offers us the extreme development of the movement which started in the popular tastes, ideas, and wishes of the twelfth century, when it was employed for the selfish purposes of rulers. It presents the extreme case of a positive institution, born from the mores and winning independent power and authority over all interests. It very deeply affected Spanish mores. It had no great effect of societal selection.

267. Inquisition in Venice. The Inquisition in Venice took on a form which was to some extent peculiar. The Venetian political system was secret, suspicious, and despotic. It would not admit any interference from outside. Venice always pretended to hold off church authority. In fact, however, she could not maintain this attitude. The Inquisition won control of many subjects beyond heresy or only constructively heresy.[617] Fra Paolo Sarpi[618] made a collection of Venetian laws which show the jealousy of ecclesiastical interference, or which nullified the ordinances made in Rome. "The position of the republic was indefensible under the public law of the period. It was so administering its own laws as to afford an asylum to a class universally proscribed, and refusing to allow the church to apply the only remedy deemed appropriate to this crying evil. It therefore yielded to the inevitable, but in a manner to preserve its own autonomy and independence."[619] "The truth is that, in regard both to the Holy Office and the index, Venice was never strong enough to maintain the independence which she voted."[620] In 1573 Paolo Veronese was summoned by the Holy Office to explain and justify his picture of the Supper, now in the Louvre. He had put in a man at arms, a greyhound, and other figures which the inquisitors thought irrelevant and unfit. He was ordered to change the picture within three months. He put Magdalen in the place of the greyhound.[621] It is impossible to make a definite statement of the results of the Venetian effort to resist the church system, but that such an effort was made in Italy is an important historical fact.

268. Use of the Inquisition for political and personal purposes. In spite of the religiosity of the age there were princes and factions which cared more for political power than for theological questions. When the power of the Inquisition was established many ecclesiastical and civil persons desired to employ its agency for their personal or party ends. Boniface VIII, in the bull Unam Sanctam, laid down in full force the doctrine of papal supremacy and independence. Any one who resisted the power lodged by God in the church resisted God, unless, like the Manichaeans, he believed in two principles, in which case he was a heretic. If the pope errs, he can be judged by God alone. There is no earthly appeal. "We say, declare, define, and pronounce, that it is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subjected to the Roman pontiff." "It was soon perceived that an accusation of heresy was a peculiarly easy and efficient method of attacking a political enemy."[622] John XXII, in his quarrel with Visconti, trumped up charges of heresy which won public opinion away from Visconti, disassociated his friends, and ruined him. Heresy and damnation were used to and fro, as interest dictated, and only for policy.[623] This is the extreme development of the action against dissenters in its third stage, the abuse of power for selfish purposes. "Heretic" became an epithet of immense power in factional quarrels, and the Inquisition was a weapon which any one could use who could seize it. Hence effects on the mores were produced in an age when factions were numerous and their quarrels constant. In these cases, however, the selectional effect was only against the personal enemies of the powerful, and was not a societal effect at all.

269. We have distinguished four stages in the story of the attempt to establish religious uniformity under papal control in the Middle Ages. I. The church taught doctrines and alleged facts about the wickedness of aberrant opinions. II. The masses, accepting these teachings, built deductions upon them, and drew inferences as to the proper treatment of dissenters. They put the inferences in effect by lynching acts. III. The leaders of society accepted the leadership of these popular movements, and the church went on to teach hatred of dissenters and extreme abuse of them. It elevated persecution to a theory of social welfare by the extermination of dissenters, reduced the views and notions of the masses to dogmas, and led in selection by murder. IV. These ideas and practices were then vulgarized by the masses again. Trial by torture, bloody executions, and finally witchcraft persecutions were the results in the next stage. Witchcraft persecutions were not selective. They are well worth study as the greatest illustration of the degree of aberration which the mores may undergo, but they lie aside from the present topic. In savage life alleged witchcraft is punished with great torture and a painful death,[624] but nothing of the kind is found in any of the great religions except Latin Christianity.

[373] Burckhardt, Kulturgesch. Griechenlands, I, 211.

[374] JAI, XI, 44.

[375] Ratzel, Voelkerkunde, II, 163.

[376] Britisch Guiana, II, 428.

[377] Grupp, Kulturgesch. der Roem. Kaiserzeit, I, 32.

[378] Scherr, Kulturgesch., 109.

[379] Rudeck, Oeffentl. Sittlichkeit, 45.

[380] Deutsches Leben, 285, 297, 332.

[381] Lippert, Kulturgesch., I, 370.

[382] Bur. Ethnol., V, 488.

[383] Cary and Tuck, Chin Hills, I, 173.

[384] JAI, XVI, 87; cf. Fritsch, Eingeb. Sued-Afr., 170.

[385] Bijdragen tot T.L. en V.-kunde, XXXV, 67.

[386] JAI, XIII, 280.

[387] Austral. Assoc. Adv. Sci., 1892, 622.

[388] Hagen, Unter den Papuas, 241.

[389] Ibid., 213.

[390] Woodford, Naturalist among Headhunters, 178.

[391] Paulitschke, Ethnog. N.O. Afrikas, I, 93.

[392] Anthropology, 243.

[393] JAI, XVII, 235.

[394] Buettner, Das Hinterland van Walfischbai, 235.

[395] South Africa, I, 298.

[396] Schweinfurth, Heart of Afr., I, 153.

[397] JASB, III, 370.

[398] Finsch, Samoafahrten, 90.

[399] Schwaner, Borneo, I, 221.

[400] Ratzel, Voelkerkunde, II, 570.

[401] Pommerol, Une Femme chez les Sahariennes, 243.

[402] Smithson. Rep., 1895, 594.

[403] Umschau, IV, 789.

[404] Yriarte, La Vie d'un Patricien de Venise, 58.

[405] Ibid., 53.

[406] Du Camp, Paris, VI, 388.

[407] Galton, Human Faculty, 6, 8.

[408] Century Magazine, XLII, 89.

[409] Deutsche Frauenwelt, II, 65.

[410] Patrick in Psych. Rev., VIII, 113.

[411] Orat., XXXVI.

[412] Beloch, Griech. Gesch., II, 29.

[413] Boissier, Relig. Rom., I, 211.

[414] Dill, Last Century of the Western Empire.

[415] Gregorovius, Lucret. Borgia, 99.

[416] De Maulde la Claviere, Les Femmes de la Renaissance, 457.

[417] Erasmus, De Civil. Morum Pueril., I, i, 1.

[418] De Maulde, 470.

[419] Austr. Ass. Adv. Sci., 1892, 62; JAI, XIII, 280.

[420] Pischon, Einfluss d. Islam, 1.

[421] Das Freie Wort, II, 312.

[422] Holtzmann, Indische Sagen, I, 247.

[423] Burckhardt, Griech. Kulturgeschichte, I, 171; II, 365.

[424] Becker-Hermann, Charikles, III, 318.

[425] Burckhardt, II, 365.

[426] Uhlhand, Dichtung und Sage, 232.

[427] Weinhold, Deutsche Frauen, I, 162.

[428] Michael, Gesch. d. Deutschen Volkes, II, 209-214.

[429] Suetonius, Tiberius, 58.

[430] Manning, Trans. of Xiphilin, II, 83; Xiphilin's Epitome, published in 1551.

[431] Satires, VIII, 146.

[432] Nat. Quaest., IV, 13; Ep., 78.

[433] Hist. Nat., XXXIII, 4.

[434] N. Y. Times, August 18, 1903. (Cf. sec. 483.)

[435] Achelis, Die Ekstase, 113.

[436] Regnard, Sorcellerie, 45.

[437] Lecky, Eur. Morals, I, 391.

[438] Gibbon, Chap. XXI.

[439] Lea, Inquis., II, 518

[440] Friedmann, Wahnideen im Voelkerleben, 224.

[441] Kugler, Kreuzzuege, 7.

[442] Michael, Gesch. d. Deutschen Volkes, II, 80.

[443] Michael, Gesch. d. Deutschen Volkes, II, 255-258.

[444] Lea, Inquis., II, 381, 393.

[445] Lea, Inquis., I, 147.

[446] Lea, Inquis., I, 268.

[447] Lea, Sacerd. Celib., 377.

[448] Nouv. Mem. de l'Acad. des Sciences, Lettres, et Beaux Arts de Belgique, XXIII, 30.

[449] Carmichael, In Tuscany, 224.

[450] See the Fioretti de Francisco.

[451] Michael, Gesch. d. Deutschen Volkes, II, 97.

[452] Goetz, in Hist. Vierteljahrschrift, VI, 19.

[453] Lea, Inquis., III, 172, 179.

[454] Lea, Inquis., III, 33.

[455] Ibid., 51, 59.

[456] Haureau, Bernard Delicieux, 142.

[457] Lea, Inquis., III, 34.

[458] Ibid., 29.

[459] Symonds, Renaissance, I, 394.

[460] Renan, Averroes, 259 ff.

[461] Lecky, Eur. Morals, I, 414, 417.

[462] Hansen, Zauberwahn, etc., 227.

[463] N. Y. Times, January 9, 1898.

[464] Lea, Inquis., II, 373.

[465] Friedmann, Wahnideen im Voelkerleben, 207.

[466] Ibid., 209.

[467] Gibbon, Chap. XXI.

[468] Lecky, Eur. Morals, I, 391.

[469] Antiq., XVIII, 1.

[470] Regnard, Sorcellerie, etc.

[471] Harnack, Dogmengesch. (3rd ed.), I, 319.

[472] Jastrow and Winter, Gesch. d. Hohenstaufen, II, 241.

[473] Scherr, Deutsche Kultur und Sittengesch., 183.

[474] Mayer, Oesterreich, I, 156.

[475] Pietschmann, Phoenizier, 223 note.

[476] Hopkins, Religions of India, 537.

[477] Monier-Williams, Brahmanism and Hinduism, 55.

[478] Wilkins, Modern Hinduism, 90.

[479] Rockhill, Through Mongolia and Tibet, 135.

[480] Lecky, Eur. Morals, II, 329.

[481] Lea, Sacerd. Celibacy, 81.

[482] Ibid.

[483] Sac. Celib., 250, 252.

[484] Canon Law, can. XIII, dist. lvi.; Aquinas, Sum., II, 2, qu. 186, art. 4, sec. 3.

[485] Lea, Sac. Celib., 187.

[486] Ibid., 213. This is a good example of the change in notions of good arguments (sec. 194).

[487] Ibid., 244, 249.

[488] Ibid., 235.

[489] Ibid., 198.

[490] Ibid., 326; Canon Law, Gratian's Com. on can. I, dist. xxvii.

[491] Lea, Sac. Celib., 271.

[492] Ibid., 356.

[493] Ibid., 350.

[494] Ibid., 355.

[495] Ibid., 416.

[496] Ibid., 209.

[497] Ibid., 356 ff.

[498] D'Ancona, Orig. del teatro Ital., II, 73.

[499] Deutsch, Abelard, 44, 106, 111.

[500] Hausrath, Abelard, 28, 32.

[501] Hall, Elizabethan Age, 103.

[502] Lea, Sac. Celib., 488.

[503] Ibid., 150.

[504] Della Inquisizione di Venezia, Opere IV, 51.

[505] Symonds, Renaissance, I, 372.

[506] Lenient, La satire au M. A., 41.

[507] Winckler, Gesetze Hammurabis, 19.

[508] Ibid., 26.

[509] Mueller, Hammurabi, 131.

[510] Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, III, 666.

[511] Jewish Encyc., VI, s.v. "Herod I."

[512] Suetonius, Caligula, 27.

[513] Cod. Theod., IX, 9.

[514] Cod. Justin., I, 9.

[515] Cod. Theod., VI, 2.

[516] In 1899 a German officer was condemned to death by a court martial for killing a half-breed subordinate with great torture. The emperor reduced the punishment to fifteen years' imprisonment, and in May, 1902, granted the prisoner a full pardon.—Assoc. Press, December 24, 1899; N. Y. Times, May 24, 1903.

[517] Lecky, Morals, I, 407.

[518] Cod. Justin., I, 5, sec. 4.

[519] Iroquois Book of Rites, 97.

[520] Elsberg, Elizabeth Bathory.

[521] 1 Cor. v. 1; 1 Tim. i. 20; Gal. i. 8.

[522] Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, II, 539.

[523] Mahaffy, Soc. Life in Greece, 226.

[524] Nicias, ad fin.

[525] Quint. Curt. Rufus, Alexander, VI, 11.

[526] Hist. Eccles., III.

[527] Gibbon, Chap. XVII; Hansen, Zauberwahn, etc., 108.

[528] Heyer, Priesterschaft und Inquis., 16-18; Lea, Inquis., I, Chap. V.

[529] Hansen, Zauberwahn, Inquisition, und Hexenprocess im M. A., 110, 113.

[530] Lea, Inquis., I, 421.

[531] Ibid., 308.

[532] Lecky, Morals, II, 190.

[533] Reich, Der Mimus, I, 90-96.

[534] Lecky, Morals, I, 437.

[535] Ibid., 408.

[536] Ibid., 436.

[537] Ibid., 455.

[538] Ibid., 466.

[539] Ibid., II, 238.

[540] Ibid.

[541] Reich, Der Mimus, I, 192.

[542] Lea, Inquis., II, 493.

[543] Ibid., I, 306.

[544] Ibid., 421.

[545] Digest, XLVII, 18, espec. sec. 23.

[546] Digest, XLVII, 18, espec. sec. 23.

[547] Schotmueller, Untergang der Templer, 141, 311, 352.

[548] Flade, Inquisitionsverfahren in Deutschland, 84.

[549] Lea, Inquis., II, 87.

[550] Scherr, Kulturgesch., 383.

[551] Janssen, Gesch. d. Deutschen Volkes, VIII, 541.

[552] Hansen, Zauberwahn, 110.

[553] Mommsen, Roem. Strafrecht, 349.

[554] Hansen, Zauberwahn, etc., 100; Lea, Inquis., I, 311.

[555] Lea, Inquis., I, 87.

[556] Ibid., III, 641.

[557] Ibid., I, 110, 371.

[558] Ibid., 541.

[559] Ibid., III, 454, 594.

[560] Ibid., II, 171.

[561] Ibid., III, 596.

[562] Ibid., I, 101.

[563] Lea, Inquis., I, 218.

[564] Ibid., iii.

[565] Lea, Inquis., I, 207.

[566] Michael, Gesch. d. Deutschen Volkes, II, 326.

[567] Renan, Averroes, 35.

[568] Lea, Inquis., I, 537.

[569] Ibid., 537.

[570] Lea, Inquis., I, 222.

[571] Ibid., 410.

[572] Hansen, Zauberwahn, etc., 223.

[573] Lea, Inquis., I, 220; Hansen, Zauberwahn, etc., 223.

[574] Lea, Inquis., I, 234.

[575] Lea disputes this as to the educated clergy, while admitting it as to the masses, which is the essential point here (Lea, Inquis., I, 237).

[576] Burckhardt, Renaissance, 3.

[577] Jastrow and Winter, Hohenstaufen, II, 298.

[578] Renan, Averroes, 288.

[579] Lea, Inquis., I, 224, 309-313, 322, 327-330, 337-342.

[580] Lacroix, Middle Ages, I, 407; Flade, Inquisitionsverfahren, 86.

[581] Lea, Inquis., I, 467.

[582] Ibid., 470.

[583] Ibid., 464, 467-470.

[584] Flade, Inquisitionsverfahren, 111.

[585] Lea, Inquis., I, 501.

[586] Lea, Inquis., I, 511-513, 519-521, 533.

[587] Ibid., 529.

[588] Ibid., 551.

[589] Lea, Inquis., I, 366.

[590] Ibid., 405.

[591] Ibid., 364-366, 405, 433, 493; II, 96.

[592] Renan, Averroes, 292.

[593] Lea, Inquis., I, 560.

[594] Ibid., 421.

[595] Cases given by Janssen, Gesch. d. Deutschen Volkes, VIII, 629.

[596] Janssen, VIII, 467.

[597] Scherr, Kulturgesch. Deutschlands, 624; Janssen, Gesch. d. Deutschen Volkes, VIII, 467.

[598] Janssen, VIII, 467.

[599] Harnack, Dogmengesch., III, 453.

[600] Lenient, La Satire en France, 309, 315.

[601] Burchard, Diarium, II, 442.

[602] See Burchard, III, 167, 227.

[603] Lea, Inquis., I, 352.

[604] Ibid., III, 300; Schotmueller, Untergang der Templer, I, 388.

[605] Venetian Ambass., I, 11, 233.

[606] Lea, Inquis., I, 488.

[607] Inderwick, The King's Peace, 172.

[608] Lea, Inquis., I, 352.

[609] Hansen, Zauberwahn, etc., 338.

[610] Ibid., 338.

[611] Lea, Inquis. in Spain, 158.

[612] Heyer, Priesterschaft und Inquis., 42.

[613] Symonds, Catholic Reaction, I, 185.

[614] Ibid., 199.

[615] Ibid., 179.

[616] Oliveira Martins, Civilisacao Iberica, 268.

[667] Symonds, Catholic Reaction, I, 205.

[618] Opere, IV, 7 ff.

[619] Lea, Inquis., II, 250.

[620] Symonds, Catholic Reaction, I, 207.

[621] Yriarte, Patricien de Venise, 162, 439.

[622] Lea, Inquis., III, 191-192, 238.

[623] Ibid., 198. Collected cases in Fra Paolo Sarpi, Della Inquis. de Venezia, Opere, IV, 24.

[624] Fritsch, Eingeb. Sued-Afr., 99.



CHAPTER VI

SLAVERY

Origin and motives.—Slavery taught steady labor.—Servitude of group to group.—Slavery and polygamy.—Some men serve others.—Freedom and equality.—Figurative use of "slave."— Ethnography of slavery.—Family slavery.—Slavery amongst North American savages.—Slavery in South America.—Slavery in Polynesia and Melanesia.—Slavery in the East Indies.—Slavery in Asia.—Slavery in Japan.—Slavery in higher civilization.— Slavery amongst Jews.—Slavery in the classical states.— Slavery at Rome.—Slave revolts.—Later Roman slavery.—Slaves in the civil wars; clientage.—Manumission. Natural liberty.— Slavery as represented in the inscriptions.—Rise of freedom in industry.—Freedmen in the state.—Philosophers opponents of slavery.—The industrial colleges.—Laws changed in favor of slaves.—Christianity and slavery.—The colonate.— Depopulation.—Summary view of Roman slavery.—The Therapeuts.—Slavery amongst the Germanic nations.—The sale of children.—Slavery and the state.—Slavery in Europe. Italy in the Middle Ages.—Slavery in France.—Slavery in Islam.— Review of slavery in Islam.—Slavery in England.—Slavery in America.—Colonial slavery.—Slavery preferred by slaves.—The future of slavery.—Relation of slavery to the mores and to ethics.

270. Origin and motives. Slavery is a thing in the mores which is not well covered by our definition. Slavery does not arise in the folkways from the unconscious experimentation of individuals who have the same need which they desire to satisfy, and who try in separate acts to do it as well as they can. It is rather due to ill feeling towards members of an out-group, to desire to get something for nothing, to the love of dominion which belongs to vanity, and to hatred of labor. "The simple wish to use the bodily powers of another person, as a means of ministering to one's own ease or pleasure, is doubtless the foundation of slavery, and as old as human nature."[625] "There is an extraordinary power of tyranny invested in the chiefs of tribes and nations of men that so vastly outweighs the analogous power possessed by the leaders of animal herds as to rank as a special attribute of human society, eminently conducive to slavishness."[626] The desire to get ease or other good by the labor of another, and the incidental gratification to vanity, seem to be the fundamental principles in slavery, when philosophically regarded, after the rule of one man over others has become established. The whole group, however, must approve of the custom and must enforce it; otherwise it cannot exist. It appears that slavery began historically with the war captive, if he or she was not put to death, as he was liable to be by the laws of war. Those laws put the defeated, with his wife, children, and property, at the mercy of the victors. The defeated might be tortured to death, as was done amongst the North American Indians, or they might be saved from death by the women. Then they were put to help the women and were rated as women. Slavery, therefore, in its origin, was a humanitarian improvement in the laws of war, and an alleviation of the status of women. It seems to be established that it began where the economic system was such that there was a gain in making a slave of a war captive instead of killing him. It follows that slavery, wherever it has existed, has affected all the mores of the society. It promised great results gratis. It will appear below that it has been a terrible afrit, a demon which promised service but which became a master. When adopted into the folkways it has dominated and given tone and color to them all. That is the reason for giving it a place here.

271. Slavery taught steady labor. It seems to be also right to understand that slavery proved to be a great schoolmaster to teach men steady work. If that view is correct, we must understand that no men would do any hard, persistent work if they could help it. The defeated were forced to it, and learned to submit to it. Then they helped the whole society up to a higher status, in which they also shared.[627] Von Goetzen gives some proof of this when he states that he and his troop of carriers sat by the camp fire evenings and that one after another told his life. "Nearly all had been, as children, brought from the inner country to the coast by slave dealers. Now they were proud of this slavery, proud of belonging to the 'cultivated' and of not being any longer 'wild' men."[628] In that view slavery is a part of the discipline by which the human race has learned how to carry on the industrial organization. There are some tasks which have been very hard and very disagreeable. Comrades in an in-group have never forced these on each other. It seemed to be good fun, as well as wise policy, to make members of a rival out-group do these tasks, after defeating them in war. For women the grinding of seeds (grain) always was a heavy burden until modern machinery brought natural powers to do it. For men the rowing of boats (galleys) has been a very hard kind of work.[629] After slavery came to exist it was extended to other cases, even to some classes of cases in the in-group. Of these cases the first was that of debt. Amongst the Eveans a debtor who cannot pay is put to death. This, however, is a very exceptional rule.[630] The course of thought is, that a debtor has used another man's product and is bound to replace it. He therefore falls into servitude to his creditor in fact, whether it is so expressed or not. He must live on and work for the creditor. Another case in which slavery was introduced was that of crime. The criminal fell under obligations of restitution of value to an individual or to the whole (chief). Other cases of extension of slavery will appear below. We have many cases of groups exploited by other groups. The former are then inferior and despised groups who are tyrannized over by others who have beaten them in war or easily could do so.

272. Servitude of group to group. Agriculture is a peaceful occupation, the pursuit of which breeds out the physical strength of nomadism. The cases in which nomads rule over tillers belong, in general, under this head, more especially because such a difference in the economy of life produces mutual contempt and hatred. The Israelites entered Canaan as nomads, and their relation to the Canaanites was that which is here described. Another case is presented by the smiths, who generally appear as the earliest handicraftsmen, but are regarded with doubt and suspicion. They are not slaves, but they are treated as outcasts. Very often, in case of conquest by an invading tribe, the smiths remain under the invaders as a subject and despised caste. The Masarva are descendants of Betchuanas and Bushmen. They stand in a relation of slaves to the Betchuanas, Matabele, and Marutse, in whose land they dwell, except that they may not be sold.[631] The Vaganda are subject to the Vahuma.[632] The latter keep out of sight, being inferior in civilization but greater in power. Von Goetzen also met with the Vahuma as rulers over the Vahuta, i.e. "belongers," as they called them.[633] The Arabs hold the negroes of Borku in subjection and rob them of the date harvest.[634] In other parts of the same district a nomad section rules over a settled section of the same population.[635] Nomads hold themselves to be the proper ones to rule.[636] The Hyksos's invasion of Egypt is a case of the subjection of tillers by nomads, attended by all the contempt of men on one grade of civilized effort for those on another.[637] The combination of the two, the nomads forming the ruling caste of military nobles, forms a strong state.[638] The Tuaregs of the Sahara do not allow the inhabitants of Kauar to raise vegetables or grains, but force them to buy the same of them (the Tuaregs), which they bring to them from the Sudan to buy salt, which the Kauar dwellers must have ready.[639] The Akarnanians, in 1350, sold themselves to the barbarians, in a body, in order to escape want.[640] The Masai are another group of warriors and raiders. The Varombutta do their hunting and tilling for them.[641] The Makololo hold the Makalaka in similar serfdom, but the subjection is easy and the servitude light, because the subject individuals can easily run away.[642] The Hupa of California hold their neighbors in similar subjection and in tributary servitude.[643] Other cases are furnished by the Vanyambo, west of the Victoria Nyassa,[644] and the Djur, who long served the Nubians as smiths.[645] It gives us pleasure to learn that, about sixty years ago, the inferior tribes on Uvea (Tai), of the Loyalty group, revolted against the dominant tribe and nearly exterminated it.[646]

273. Slavery and polygamy. Such instances show us the existence in human nature of a tendency of stronger groups to exploit weaker ones in the struggle for existence; in other words, slavery or forced labor is one way in which, in elementary civilization, the survival of the fittest group is brought about. The slavery of individuals has not the same definite result on the competition of life. "We find polygamy and slavery continually at work dissolving the cohesion of old political institutions in the old civilized races of Asia and Africa. In an uncivilized society, like that of Zululand, they prevent such cohesion ever taking place. They help to keep the Kaffir tribes in perpetual unrest and barbarism, by destroying the germs of civilization and preventing its growth."[647] That the two have this effect in common may very probably be true, but in many respects they are antagonistic to each other. Slavery meets the necessity for many laborers which may otherwise be a cause for polygamy. Wherever slavery exists it affords striking illustrations of the tendency of the mores towards consistency with each other, and that means, of course, their tendency to cluster around some one or two leading ones. Africa now furnishes the leading proofs of this. The negro society is one in which physical force is the chief deciding element. The negroes have enslaved each other for thousands of years. Very few of them have ever become slaves to whites without having been previously slaves to other negroes. In 1875 it was reckoned that twenty thousand persons, chiefly women and children whose male relatives had generally been killed, were taken into slavery from around Lake Nyassa. The difficulties and expense of the slave trade in that region became so great that it could not be carried on except by alliance with one tribe which defeated and enslaved another and sold the survivors. The Arabs opened paths for ivory hunting. The slave dealers used these means of communication. They established garrisons in order to exploit the territory, and ended by depopulating it.[648] Junker argues earnestly against the impression which has been established in Europe that Arabs are chiefly to blame for slavery. "There are places in Africa where three men cannot be sent on a journey together for fear two of them may combine and sell the third."[649]

274. Some men serving others. Freedom and equality. Figurative use of "slavery." Must we infer, then, that there is a social necessity that some men must serve others? In the New Testament it is taught that willing and voluntary service of others is the highest duty and glory of human life. If one man's strength is spent on another man's struggle for existence, the survival of the former in the competition of life is impaired. The men of talent are constantly forced to serve the rest. They make the discoveries and inventions, order the battles, write the books, and produce the works of art. The benefit and enjoyment go to the whole. There are those who joyfully order their own lives so that they may serve the welfare of mankind. The whole problem of mutual service is the great problem of societal organization. Is it a dream, then, that all men should ever be free and equal? It is at least evident that here ethical notions have been interjected into social relations, with the result that we have been taught to think of free and equal units willingly serving each other. That, at least, is an idealistic dream. Yet it no more follows from the fact that slavery has done good work in the history of civilization that slavery should forever endure than it follows from the fact that war has done good work in the history of civilization that war is, in itself, a good thing. Slavery alleviated the status of women; the domestication of beasts of draft and burden alleviated the status of slaves; we shall see below that serfs got freedom when wind, falling water, and steam were loaded with the heavy tasks. Just now the heavy burdens are borne by steam; electricity is just coming into use to help bear them. Steam and electricity at last mean coal, and the amount of coal in the globe is an arithmetical fact. When the coal is used up will slavery once more begin? One thing only can be affirmed with confidence; that is, that as no philosophical dogmas caused slavery to be abolished, so no philosophical dogmas can prevent its reintroduction if economic changes should make it fit and suitable again. As steam has had put upon it the hard work of life during the last two hundred years, the men have been emancipated from ancient hard conditions and burdens, and the generalities of the philosophers about liberty have easily won greater and greater faith and currency. However, the mass of mankind, taught to believe that they ought to have easy and pleasant times here, begin to complain again about "wages slavery," "debt slavery," "rent slavery," "sin slavery," "war slavery," "marriage slavery," etc. What men do not like they call "slavery," and so prove that it ought not to be. It appears to be still in their experience that a free man is oppressed by contracts of wages, debt, rent, and marriage, and that the cost of making ready for war and of warding off sin are very heavy. Political institutions readjust and redistribute the burdens of life over a population, and they change the form of the same perhaps, but the burdens are in the conditions of human life. They are always present, and political institutions never can do away with them at all. Therefore slavery, if we mean by it subjection to the conditions of human life, never can be abolished.

275. Ethnographical illustrations of slavery. In Togo male slaves work in the fields where yams are cultivated. Each carries a basket in which he has a chicken, which will live on worms and insects in the field. The slave is soon married. He has two days in the week to work for himself. One of his grown boys can replace him on the other four. He can buy a slave to replace him. Thus they often attain to wealth, freedom, and power. A female slave, if married to a free man, becomes free. This form of slavery is only a mode of service. The slave lives with the family, and enjoys domestic consideration. There is also debt slavery, the whole family being responsible for the debt of a member.[650] Klose, however, describes the ruin wrought by slave raids. "Murder and incendiarism are the orders in this business. Great villages and districts are made deserts and are depopulated by the raids." "It is not in negro nature to subject one's self voluntarily to labor. The negro wants to be compelled to work." The fetich priest gives him a harmless drink, which is to be fatal to him if he tries to run away.[651] The Ngumba in south Kamerun hold their slaves in huts near their own houses. A mishandled slave can leave his master and demand the protection of another. A debtor who cannot pay becomes slave of his creditor until the debt is paid in value, but this does not free him. He can pay also by his wife or daughter.[652] Amongst the Ewe-speaking tribes a woman who is condemned to a fine may sell or pawn her children, if her husband will not give her the amount to be paid. The husbands often hold back until the women pawn the children to them, whereby they obtain complete control of the children.[653] Their slaves are criminals and debtors, or, if foreigners, are victims of war or of kidnapping. They are not regarded with contempt, are well treated, do not have as hard a lot as an English agricultural laborer, and often attain to wealth and honor. The master-owner may not kill a slave.[654] In Bornu the women slaves find favor in the eyes of their masters, and by amiability win affection. If they have children they win a firm position, "for only the most stringent circumstances could compel a Moslem, whose ideas are reasonably correct, to sell the mother of his children."[655] The Somal and Afar do not deal much in slaves. They use women and a pariah class. A Somal is never slave to a Somal, and war captives are not made slaves. Also amongst the Galla it appears that debtor slavery does not exist. Criminal slavery does, however, exist, and is used by the chiefs. It is honorable to treat slaves well. In Kaffa the slaves are lazy and pretentious, because they know that their owners do not look to them for labor, but speculate on their children, whom they will sell.[656] In general, in East Africa, the master-owner has not the power of life and death, and the slave has a right of property. "A headman (of a village) in debt sells first his slaves, then his sisters, then his mother, and lastly his free wives, after which he has nothing left."[657] Stuhlmann[658] says that slaves in Uganda are well treated, as members of the family. Brunache[659] says the same of the Congo tribes so far as they have not been contaminated by contact with whites. This may be regarded as characteristic of African slavery. The Vanika of eastern Africa are herding nomads. They cannot use slaves, and make war only to steal cattle.[660] Bushmen love liberty. They submit to no slavery. They are hunters of a low grade. They hate cattle, as the basis of a life which is different from (higher than) their own. They massacre cattle which they cannot steal or carry away.[661] Mungo Park described free negroes reduced to slavery by famine.[662] In Ashanti a man and a woman discovered in the act in the bush, or in the open air, are slaves of him who discovered them, but they are redeemable by their families.[663] Ashanti slavery is domestic and very mild. The slave marries his master's daughter and plays with the master. He also eats from the same dish.[664] Slavery of this form is never cruel or harsh. Debt slavery is harder, for the services of the pawn count for nothing on the debt.[665] The effect of the abolition of slavery in Algeria was stupor amongst master-owners and grief amongst slaves. The former wondered how it could be wrong to care for persons who would have been eaten by their fellow-countrymen if they had succumbed to the hard struggle for existence at home. The latter saw themselves free—really free—in the desert, with no supply of food, clothing, or other supplies, and no human ties.[666] In all families of well-to-do people little negroes are found. The author saw one who told her that the lady of the house had suckled him.[667] It is reported from eastern Borneo that a white man could hire no natives for wages. They thought it degrading to work for wages, but if he would buy them they would work for him.[668] In spite of what has been said above about slavery on the west coast of Africa it is to be remembered that the master-owner has the power of life and death and that he often uses it. If he is condemned to death for a crime, he can give a slave to be executed in his place.[669] In eastern Angola, if a woman dies in childbirth, her husband has to pay her parents. If he cannot, he becomes their slave.[670] In South Africa Holub found that the fiercest slave chasers were blacks, who had slaves at home and treated them worse than Mohammedans ever did.[671] Formerly a Kaffir would work in the diamond mines for three marks a day until he got money enough to buy cattle and to buy a woman at home, a European suit, a kettle, and a rifle. Then he went home and set up an establishment. Then he would return to earn more and buy more wives, who would support him to his life's end.[672] The stronger Hottentot tribes hold classes of their own population, or mountain Damara and Bushmen, in servitude, although no law defines a "slave." Those people hold the treatment they receive to be due to their origin. Amongst all South African tribes the rich exert their power to subjugate the poor, who hang upon them in a kind of clientage, hoping to receive something. Cruelty and even murder are not punished by the judges.[673]

276. Family slavery. The savage form of slavery in Africa furnishes us one generalization which may be adopted with confidence. Whenever slaves live in a family, sharing in the family life and associating freely with the male members of it in work, religion, play, etc., the slavery is of a very light type and implies no hardship for the slave.

277. Slavery in North America among savages. Slavery is believed to have existed amongst the Indians of Virginia. "They made war, not for land or goods, but for women and children, whom they put not to death, but made them do service."[674] The young men and slaves worked in the fields of the Mississippi valley. The latter were not overworked.[675] The Algonquins made slaves of their prisoners, especially of the women and children.[676] The Illinois are represented as an intermediate party who got slaves in the South and sold them in the West.[677] The Wisconsin tribes used to make captives of Pawnees, Osages, Missouris, and Mandans. When Pawnees were such captives (slaves) they were treated with severity.[678] In the Gulf region of North America slavery was common from the earliest times. That slaves might not escape, a sinew in the leg was cut, by the Six Nations.[679] On the northwestern coast of North America slavery was far more developed than east of the Rocky Mountains. In Oregon and Washington slavery was interwoven with the social polity. Slaves were also harshly treated, as property, not within the limits of humanity. For a man to kill a half dozen of his own slaves was a sign of generous magnanimity on his part. One tribe stole captives from its weaker neighbors. Hence the slave trade is an important part of the commerce of all the tribes up to Alaska.[680] In 1841 it was reckoned that one third of the entire population from northern British Columbia to southern Alaska were "slaves of the most helpless and abject description." "The great supply was obtained by trade with the southern Indians, in which the Tsimshian acted as middlemen. They were kidnapped or captured by the southern Indians from their own adjacent tribes and sold to the Tsimshian, who traded them to the northern Thlinkit and interior Tinne tribes for furs." "Slaves did all the drudgery, fished for their owner, strengthened his force in war, were not allowed to hold property or to marry, and when old and worthless were killed. The master's power was unlimited." The slave must commit any crime at the command of the master. The slaves were set free at some ceremonies, but they were put to death at the funerals of chiefs, or as foundation sacrifices, or in reparation for insults or wrongs. The northern Indians were more warlike and would not make good slaves. The Oregon flatheads were docile and industrious.[681] The Chinooks became the wealthiest tribe in the region by acting as middlemen to sell war captives taken inland as far from home as possible.[682] Amongst the Thlinkits slaves are forbidden to wear the labret, and sex intercourse with a slave woman disgraces a free man.[683] "Amongst the early Central Americans the slave who achieved any feat of valor in war received his liberty and was adopted by the Capulli, or clan."[684] In Mexico there were slaves of three classes,—criminals, war captives, and persons who had voluntarily sold themselves or had been sold by their parents. The captor generally sacrificed a prisoner, but might hold him as a slave. Those who sold themselves did so to get a fund for gambling. There was a public slave mart at Azcapuzalco. The system is described as kind, but slaves might lose their lives through the act of the master at feasts or funerals.[685] "Actual slavery of the Indians in Mexico continued as late as the middle of the seventeenth century."[686] It is evident that slavery existed all over North and Central America, but was more developed on the Pacific coast than in the Mississippi valley. The meat eaters of the buffalo region had less opportunity to use the institution.[687]

278. Slavery in South America. In South America we also meet with at least one case of a tribe, or part of a tribe, which is in clientage to another tribe. This is a subdivision of the third rank of the Mbaya, who voluntarily entered into a relation of clientage to the Mbaya, giving them service under arms, and in house and field, without being their slaves, being protected in return by the powerful and feared tribe.[688] The Guykurus carry on frequent wars to get captives, whom they keep in stringent servitude. "There is, perhaps, no tribe of South American Indians, among whom the state of slavery is so distinctly marked as among them." Slaves and free do not intermarry, lest marriage be profaned. There is no way in which a slave may become free.[689] The Guykurus are the strongest tribe in the valley of the Paraguay. They have horses and were called by the Portuguese Cavalleiros.[690] In Brazil it was thought that the cultivation of the country was impossible unless the Indians were made slaves. The early laws and orders of the kings of Portugal seem to reveal a sincere desire to control greed and cruelty. In 1570 private slave raids were forbidden and slavery was confined to those captured in public and just war. Lisbon, however, became a great slave mart by the law that slaves passing from one colony (Africa) to another (America) must pass through Lisbon and pay a tax there. Peter Martyr is quoted that slavery was necessary for Indians who, if they had no master, would go on with their old customs and idolatry. Slavery killed them, however. It did not make them laborers.[691] In general, in the valley of the Yapura, in the first half of the nineteenth century, slaves were war captives who were very unkindly treated.[692] The aborigines began to sell their war captives to Europeans soon after the latter arrived. They wanted rosewood especially, and they took Indians to Africa as slaves.[693] Boggiani[694] expresses the opinion in regard to the savages of the Chaco, as the meadow region on the Paraguay river is called, that slavery amongst a people of more civilized mores, is, for them, "an incalculable benefit," and that "to hinder slavery, in such circumstances, would be a capital error." "It is necessary to force them to come out of their brutelike condition, and to awaken their intelligence, which is not wanting, if they receive practical and energetic direction." Bridges[695] says that one Fuegian is thrown into clientage to another by their mode of life. "For a young man, with no wife and few relatives, must live with some one who can protect him, and with whom he can live in comfort, whose wife or wives can catch fish for him, etc."

279. Slavery in Polynesia and Melanesia. Polynesia, Melanesia, and the East Indies, especially the last, present us pictures of a society which is old and whose mores have been worn threadbare, while their stage of civilization is still very low. Codrington[696] says: "There is no such thing as slavery, properly so called. In head-hunting expeditions prisoners are made for the sake of their heads, to be used when occasion requires, and such persons live with their captors in a condition very different from that of freedom, but they are not taken or maintained for the purposes of slaves." Ratzel[697] says: "Slavery prevailed everywhere in Melanesia, originating either in war or debt. Sometimes it was hard; sometimes not." Somerville says that "slaves are kept chiefly for their heads, which are demanded whenever any occasion necessitates them, such as the death of the owner." He is speaking of the Solomon Islands.[698] What Finsch says of the Melanesians may be extended to all the inhabitants of the South Sea islands.[699] They will not work because they do not need to. They have few wants. Pfeil wants to make the people of German Melanesia work, in order that they may contribute to the tasks of the human race. The problem presents one of the great reasons for slavery in history.

280. Slavery in the East Indies. The chief of Chittagong[700] wrote to the English governor, in 1774, that slavery in his district was due to the sale of himself by any person who was destitute, and had no friends or position. He and his wife must serve the master and his wife in any desired way, including services which a free servant would not perform, "through fear of demeaning himself and disgracing his family." Abolition of this slavery would produce complaints by the masters, and would not please the servants who are used to it. "Until lately the universal custom prevailed in the hills of having debtor slaves." The debtor gave one of his children or a female relative to serve as a menial until the debt should be paid. The pawned persons "were treated as members of the creditor's family and never exposed to harsh usage." The effect of interference by the English was that the wives and daughters of the great men suddenly had to do all the housework. "Debtor and creditor lost confidence in each other."[701] "There is a detestable and actual slavery in these hills, which is now only carried on by independent tribes, beyond English jurisdiction. This is the captivity to the bow and spear,—men and women taken prisoners by force in war, and sold from master to master. The origin of this custom was the want of women."[702] In the Chin hills there are slaves who are war captives, or criminals, or debtors, and others who are voluntary slaves, or slaves by birth. The master had full power of life and death, but, in fact, slaves were well treated. The people made raids on the Burmese lowlands and seized captives who were held for ransom. A slave man cohabits with a slave woman and brings up his children with affection "in the same humble, but not necessarily unhappy, position as his own."[703] In Ceylon there were slave persons of all ranks. Those of royal rank were princes who were prisoners or criminals. Any one might obtain slaves by purchase, or accept voluntary slaves who looked to him for good support.[704] A Malay will buy of a chief a number of war captives whom he takes to an island. Then he goes to a Chinaman and tells him that the slaves want to work on that island, but still owe the speaker the cost of transportation. The Chinaman pays this and gives to the slaves, on credit, clothes, etc., including money with which to gamble. Wages are low and interest high. They never can pay their debts and get their freedom again. This kind of slave trade has depopulated northern Nias.[705] On Sumatra, when a debtor is called upon to pay and cannot, or when he dies and does not leave enough property to pay his debts, his children fall into semi-slavery. They can perhaps persuade some one to pay their debts and accept their services. If their master formally three times demands payment of them which they cannot give, they fall into full slavery. Slavery exists in the Malay seaport towns, but not in the rural districts, where life is too simple.[706] In times of famine and want parents sell their children into slavery for a little rice. Children, especially daughters, constitute a large part of the fortune of a house father.[707]

At Koetei, on the Mahakkam in Borneo, all well-to-do people have debtors in pawn, whose position is somewhat better than that of slaves. The debtors seem content and submissive. Captives taken on head-hunting expeditions are held as slaves until human sacrifices are wanted.[708] The souls of all those who are put to death at the death of a Dyak rajah become his servants in the other world. In this world the killer can command, as his fetich, the soul of the killed. On the death of a great man his debtor slaves are bound to the carved village post, which indicates the glory of head-hunting, and are tortured to death.[709] "Slavery is greatly practiced" on Timorlaut. A thief, debtor, slanderer, or defamer may become the slave of the one he has wronged. The slave trade is also active between the islands.[710] The slaves of the sea Dyaks adopt their customs and become contented. Sometimes they win affection and are adopted, freed, and married to free women. Slaves and masters eat together the same food in the rural villages.[711] Among the land Dyaks slaves, by destitution and debt, "are just as happy as if perfectly free, enjoying all the liberty of their masters, who never think of ill-using them."[712] In old times one who set a house on fire was liable to become the slave of any one who was burned out.[713] Slaves on Timor do not seem to care for liberty. Their livelihood would not be so certain. There is a kind of slavery to the kingdom, not to any individual, but the slave cannot be sold by the king.[714] In the Barito valley a debtor slave has to do any kind of work. He may be punished by blows, or fines added to his debt, which may also be increased by any breaches of customs, or by the value of broken tools or vessels. A month after a child is born to him ten gulden are added, also expenses of education when the child is ready to go to work. He may be slain at a feast of the dead by his master. The owner can torment the debtor by new fines, and keep up the debt or even increase it.[715] In the Katingan valley there are no debtor slaves, because after three years a debtor who cannot pay becomes an hereditary slave, and cannot get his liberty even if he should get the means to pay his debt.[716] If he ever gets the means to pay and attempts to free himself he is compelled to pay fees, taxes, and customary dues to the "spirits of the house," etc. When he leaves his master's house he must not return to it for a year or two, nor eat anything brought from it—"to prove his independence." Then he gives a feast and becomes free.[717] "Slavery and pawnship are, in the nature of the case, the same."[718] The Dyaks put their Eden on a cloud island. They have a myth that the daughters of the great Being let down seven times seven hundred cords of gold thread in order to lower mortals upon a mountain, but the mortals were overhasty and tried to lower themselves by bamboos and rattans. The god, angry at this, condemned them to slavery. The myth, therefore, accounts for a caste of slaves. Formerly also war captives and criminals who could not pay fines became slaves. Debts cause men to fall into pawnship. Extravagant living, and gambling, lead to this condition. If a man becomes pawn for a debt his whole household goes with him. All have to work very hard to try to satisfy a greedy master. The pawn is entitled to one tenth of the harvest, or of the gain by trade. Free men despise pawns.[719] Wilken[720] says of the Bataks that a slave, by diligence and thrift, can always buy himself. In addition to all the ill chances of gambling, extravagance, making love to another man's wife, etc., by which a man may become a debtor slave, customs exist which are traps for the unwary. Sago and rice are left in the woods, in some islands, until wanted. If a man passes the store, he is supposed to take away the spirit of the goods. If caught, he and all his family become slaves. If a man dies who was wont to fish at a certain place, the place becomes taboo to his ghost. Any one who fishes there becomes a slave to his family. Also, if a district is in mourning, any one who breaks the mourning customs is made a slave.[721] The education of the Chinese in ethical doctrines has made slavery amongst them slight and mild. It is attributed to poverty, which forces parents to sell their daughters.[722] The owners must provide female slaves with husbands, and the law forbids the separation of husband and wife, or of parents and little children.[723] It appears that slavery is forbidden by law, but is tolerated in the case where the parents are poor. Boys once enslaved continue in bondage and their children follow them, but there is no legal possession. Girls become free at marriage.[724]

281. Slavery in Asia. Slavery in Asia is of a kind which puts the slave largely at the mercy of his owner, but the mores have taught the slave owner to use his power with consideration. This is generally, not universally, true. Nivedita says[725] that "slavery in Asia, under the regime of great religious systems, has never meant what Europe and America have made of it.... It is a curious consequence of this humanity of custom [or rather, of the judgment in the mores as to the wisest course of conduct in a class of cases] that the word 'slave' cannot be made to sting the Asiatic consciousness as it does the European."

282. Slavery in Japan. In Japan slavery was a common punishment, in early times, for crime. Debtors unable to pay became slaves of their creditors, and thieves were made slaves of those whom they had robbed. The attempt to introduce Christianity into Japan and the resistance to it led to the slavery of many Christian converts, if they refused after torture to recant. This was an alternative to death. Slaves were tattooed with marks to show ownership. "Slaves were bought and sold like cattle in early times, or presented as tribute by their owners,—a practice constantly referred to in the ancient records." Their sex unions were not recognized. "In the seventh century, however, private slaves were declared state property, and great numbers were then emancipated, including nearly all,—probably all, who were artisans, or followed useful callings. Gradually a large class of freedmen came into existence, but until modern times the great mass of the common people appear to have remained in a condition analogous to serfdom."[726]

283. Slavery in higher civilization. It appears quite clear that men in savagery and barbarism used each other, if they could, to serve their interests, and slavery resulted. The hardships of life caused it. The rules of war were "Woe to the vanquished!" and "To the victors the spoils." Debt was a relation which might come about between two men from incidents in the struggle for existence, or from loans of money and goods. All mischance might be converted into lack of resources (money and goods), and he who borrowed fell into dependence and servitude. All violations of custom and law led to fines; all need of civil authority made it necessary to pay fees. The debtor pledged his future working time. His relation to his creditor was personal. That he was a borrower proved that he had nothing which could form a property security. The laws of Hammurabi provide that a debtor may give his wife and children as pawn slaves, but only for three years. In the fourth year the creditor was to set them free. The pawn persons were to be well treated. A slave given in pawn might be sold, but not if it was a female slave with children.[727] To aid or conceal a fugitive slave was a capital offense.[728] Many Chaldean contracts have been found in which the debtor bound himself to work for the creditor until he should pay the debt.[729] It appears that the Babylonian slaves could form a peculium and carry on business with it as a capital, paying their owners a tax upon it.[730]

284. Slavery amongst Jews. The Jewish law had a provision like that in the law of Hammurabi, except that the limit was six years instead of three. A debtor was not to be a slave, but to give service until the year of jubilee.[731] In 2 Kings iv. 1 the widow tells Elisha that her husband's creditors will come and take her two sons to be bondmen. The creditors of some of the Jews who returned from exile threatened to make them debtor slaves. Nehemiah appealed to them not to do so.[732] In Matt. xviii. 25 the man who could not pay was to be sold with his wife and children. Kidnapping was punishable by death.[733] In Job xxxi. 15 we find the ultimate philosophico-religious reason for repudiating slavery: "Has not He who made me made him [the slave] also in his mother's womb?" The laws of the "Book of Covenants" begin with laws about slaves.[734] A male slave, with his wife, is to be freed in the seventh year, unless he prefers to remain a slave. A man may sell his daughter into slavery, i.e. to be a concubine. There was no difference in principle between a daughter given to wife and one sold to be a concubine. In Deut. xv. 12 the female slave is also set free in the seventh year, and persons so freed are to be given gifts when they depart. The slaves were war captives, or bought persons, or criminals.[735] The lot of slaves was not hard. The owners had not the power of life and death. The slave could acquire property.[736] If the slave was an Israelite he was protected by especial restrictions on the master in behalf of fellow-countrymen.[737]