The Servile State By Hilaire Belloc "... If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course." T.N. Foulis London & Edinburgh 1912 TO E.S.P. Haynes * * * Synopsis of the Servile State Introduction The Subject of this Book:--It is written to maintain the thesis that industrial society as we know it will tend towards the re-establishment of slavery. --The sections into which the book will be divided Section I Definitions:--What _wealth_ is and why necessary to man--How produced--The meaning of the words _Capital_, _Proletariat_, _Property_, _Means of Production_--The definition of the _Capitalist State_--The definition of the _/Servile State/_--What it is and what it is not--The re-establishment of status in the place of contract--That servitude is not a question of degree but of kind--Summary of these definitions. Section II Our Civilisation was originally Servile:--The Servile institution in Pagan antiquity--Its fundamental character--A Pagan society took it for granted--The institution disturbed by the advent of the Christian Church. Section III How the Servile Institution was for a Time Dissolved:--The subconscious effect of the Faith in this matter--The main elements of Pagan economic society--The Villa--The transformation of the agricultural slave into the Christian _serf_--Next into the Christian _peasant_--The corresponding erection throughout Christendom of the /_Distributive State_/--It is nearly complete at the close of the Middle Ages--"It was not machinery that lost us our freedom, it was the loss of a free mind." Section IV How the Distributive State Failed:--This failure original in England--The story of the decline from Distributive property to Capitalism--The economic revolution of the sixteenth century--The confiscation of monastic land--What might have happened had the State retained it--As a fact that land is captured by an oligarchy--England is Capitalist _before_ the advent of the industrial revolution--Therefore modern industry, proceeding from England, has grown in a Capitalist mould. Section V The Capitalist State in Proportion as It Grows Perfect Grows Unstable:--It can of its nature be but a transitory phase lying between an earlier and a later stable state of society--The two internal strains which render it unstable--_(a)_ The conflict between its social realities and its moral and legal basis--_(b)_ The insecurity and insufficiency to which it condemns free citizens--The few possessors can grant or withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors--Capitalism is so unstable that it dares not proceed to its own logical conclusion, but tends to restrict competition among owners, and insecurity and insufficiency among non-owners. Section VI The Stable Solutions of this Instability:--The three stable social arrangements which alone can take the place of unstable Capitalism--The _Distributive_ solution, the _Collectivist_ solution, the _Servile_ solution--The reformer will not openly advocate the Servile solution--There remain only the Distributive and the Collectivist solution. Section VII Socialism is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist Crux:--A contrast between the reformer making for Distribution and the reformer making for Socialism (or Collectivism)--The difficulties met by the first type--He is working against the grain--The second is working with the grain--Collectivism a natural development of Capitalism--It appeals both to Capitalist and Proletarian--None the less we shall see that the Collectivist attempt is doomed to fail and to produce a thing very different from its object--to wit, the Servile State. Section VIII The Reformers and Reformed Are Alike Making for the Servile State:--There are two types of reformers working along the line of least resistance--These are the Socialist and the Practical Man--The Socialist again is of two kinds, The Humanist and the Statistician--The Humanist would like both to confiscate from the owners and to establish security and sufficiency for the non-owners--He is allowed to do the second thing by establishing servile conditions--He is forbidden to do the first--The Statistician is quite content so long as he can run and organise the poor--Both are canalised towards the Servile State and both are shepherded off their ideal Collectivist State--Meanwhile the great mass, the proletariat, upon whom the reformers are at work, though retaining the instinct of ownership, has lost any experience of it and is subject to private law much more than to the law of the Courts--This is exactly what happened in the past during the converse change from Slavery to Freedom--Private Law became stronger than Public at the beginning of the Dark Ages--The owners welcomed the changes which maintained them in ownership and yet increased the security of their revenue--to-day the non-owners will welcome whatever keeps them a wage-earning class but increases their wages and their security without insisting on the expropriation of the owners. Appendix on "Buying-Out" An Appendix showing that the Collectivist proposal to "Buy-Out" the Capitalist in lieu of expropriating him is vain. Section IX The Servile State Has Begun:--The manifestation of the Servile State in law or proposals of law will fall into two sorts--(a) Laws or proposals of law compelling the proletariat to work--(b) Financial operations riveting the grip of capitalists more strongly upon society--As to (a), we find it /already/ at work in measures such as the Insurance Act and proposals such as Compulsory Arbitration, the enforcement of Trades Union bargains and the erection of "Labour Colonies," etc., for the "unemployable"--As to the second, we find that so-called "Municipal" or "Socialist" experiments in acquiring the means of production have /already/ increased and are continually increasing the dependence of society upon the Capitalist. Conclusion * * * The Servile State * * * Introduction The Subject of This Book This book is written to maintain and prove the following truth:-- That our free modern society in which the means of production are owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium /by the establishment of compulsory labour legally enforcible upon those who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those who do/. With this principle of compulsion applied against the non-owners there must also come a difference in their status; and in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided into two sets: the first economically free and politically free, possessed of the means of production, and securely confirmed in that possession; the second economically unfree and politically unfree, but at first secured by their very lack of freedom in certain necessaries of life and in a minimum of well-being beneath which they shall not fall. Society having reached such a condition would be released from its present internal strains and would have taken on a form which would be stable: that is, capable of being indefinitely prolonged without change. In it would be resolved the various factors of instability which increasingly disturb that form of society called _Capitalist_, and men would be satisfied to accept, and to continue in, such a settlement. To such a stable society I shall give, for reasons which will be described in the next section, the title of THE SERVILE STATE. I shall not undertake to judge whether this approaching organisation of our modern society be good or evil. I shall concern myself only with showing the necessary tendency towards it which has long existed and the recent social provisions which show that it has actually begun. This new state will be acceptable to those who desire consciously or by implication the re-establishment among us of a difference of status between possessor and non-possessor: it will be distasteful to those who regard such a distinction with ill favour or with dread. My business will not be to enter into the discussion between these two types of modern thinkers, but to point out to each and to both that that which the one favours and the other would fly is upon them. I shall prove my thesis in particular from the case of the industrial society of Great Britain, including that small, alien, and exceptional corner of Ireland, which suffers or enjoys industrial conditions to-day. I shall divide the matter thus:-- (1) I shall lay down certain definitions. (2) Next, I shall describe the institution of slavery and /The Servile State/ of which it is the basis, as these were in the ancient world. I shall then: (3) Sketch very briefly the process whereby that age-long institution of slavery was slowly dissolved during the Christian centuries, and whereby the resulting medieval system, based upon highly divided property in the means of production, was (4) wrecked in certain areas of Europe as it approached completion, and had substituted for it, in practice though not in legal theory, a society based upon /Capitalism/. (5) Next, I shall show how Capitalism was of its nature unstable, because its social realities were in conflict with all existing or possible systems of law, and because its effects in denying _sufficiency_ and _security_ were intolerable to men; how being thus _unstable_, it consequently presented a _problem_ which demanded a solution: to wit, the establishment of some stable form of society whose law and social practice should correspond, and whose economic results, by providing _sufficiency_ and _security_, should be tolerable to human nature. (6) I shall next present the only three possible solutions:-- (_a_) Collectivism, or the placing of the means of production in the hands of the political officers of the community. (_b_) Property, or the re-establishment of a Distributive State in which the mass of citizens should severally own the means of production. (_c_) Slavery, or a Servile State in which those who do not own the means of production shall be legally compelled to work for those who do, and shall receive in exchange a security of livelihood. Now, seeing the distaste which the remains of our long Christian tradition has bred in us for directly advocating the third solution and boldly supporting the re-establishment of slavery, the first two alone are open to reformers: (1) a reaction towards a condition of well-divided property or the _Distributive State_; (2) an attempt to achieve the ideal _Collectivist State_. It can easily be shown that this second solution appeals most naturally and easily to a society already Capitalist on account of the difficulty which such a society has to discover the energy, the will, and the vision requisite for the first solution. (7) I shall next proceed to show how the pursuit of this ideal Collectivist State which is bred of Capitalism leads men acting upon a Capitalist society not towards the Collectivist State nor anything like it, but to that third utterly different thing--the _Servile State_. To this eighth section I shall add an appendix showing how the attempt to achieve Collectivism gradually by public purchase is based upon an illusion. (8) Recognising that theoretical argument of this kind, though intellectually convincing, is not sufficient to the establishment of my thesis, I shall conclude by giving examples from modern English legislation, which examples prove that the Servile State is actually upon us. Such is the scheme I design for this book. Section One Definitions Man, like every other organism, can only live by the transformation of his environment to his own use. He must transform his environment from a condition where it is less to a condition where it is more subservient to his needs. That special, conscious, and intelligent transformation of his environment which is peculiar to the peculiar intelligence and creative faculty of man we call the _Production of Wealth_. _Wealth_ is matter which has been consciously and intelligently transformed from a condition in which it is less to a condition in which it is more serviceable to a human need. Without _Wealth_ man cannot exist. The production of it is a necessity to him, and though it proceeds from the more to the less necessary, and even to those forms of production which we call luxuries, yet in any given human society there is a certain _kind_ and a certain _amount_ of wealth without which human life cannot be lived: as, for instance, in England to-day, certain forms of cooked and elaborately prepared food, clothing, warmth, and habitation. Therefore, to control the production of wealth is to control human life itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist. Wealth can only be produced by the application of human energy, mental and physical, to the forces of nature around us, and to the material which those forces inform. This human energy so applicable to the material world and its forces we will call _Labour_. As for that material and those natural forces, we will call them, for the sake of shortness, by the narrow, but conventionally accepted, term _Land_. It would seem, therefore, that all problems connected with the production of wealth, and all discussion thereupon, involve but two principal original factors, to wit, _Labour_ and _Land_, But it so happens that the conscious, artificial, and intelligent action of man upon nature, corresponding to his peculiar character compared with other created beings, introduces a third factor of the utmost importance. Man proceeds to create wealth by ingenious methods of varying and often increasing complexity, and aids himself by the construction of _implements_. These soon become in each new department of the production as truly necessary to that production as _labour_ and _land_. Further, any process of production takes a certain time; during that time the producer must be fed, and clothed, and housed, and the rest of it. There must therefore be an _accumulation of wealth_ created in the past, and reserved with the object of maintaining labour during its effort to produce for the future. Whether it be the making of an instrument or tool, or the setting aside of a store of provisions, _labour_ applied to _land_ for either purpose is not producing wealth for immediate consumption. It is setting aside and reserving somewhat, and that _somewhat_ is always necessary in varying proportions according to the simplicity or complexity of the economic society to the production of wealth. To such wealth reserved and set aside for the purposes of future production, and not for immediate consumption, whether it be in the form of instruments and tools, or in the form of stores for the maintenance of labour during the process of production, we give the name of _Capital_. There are thus three factors in the production of all human wealth, which we may conventionally term _Land_, _Capital_, and _Labour_. When we talk of the _Means of Production_ we signify land and capital combined. Thus, when we say that a man is "dispossessed of the means of production," or cannot produce wealth save by the leave of another who "possesses the means of production," we mean that he is the master only of his labour and has no control, in any useful amount, over either capital, or land, or both combined. A man politically free, that is, one who enjoys the right before the law to exercise his energies when he pleases (or not at all if he does not so please), but not possessed by legal right of control over any useful amount of the means of production, we call _proletarian_, and any considerable class composed of such men we call a _proletariat_. _Property_ is a term used for that arrangement in society whereby the control of land and of wealth made from land, including therefore all the means of production, is vested in some person or corporation. Thus we may say of a building, including the land upon which it stands, that it is the "property" of such and such a citizen, or family, or college, or of the State, meaning that those who "own" such property are guaranteed by the laws in the right to use it or withhold it from use. _Private property_ signifies such wealth (including the means of production) as may, by the arrangements of society, be in the control of persons or corporations _other_ than the political bodies of which these persons or corporations are in another aspect members. What distinguishes private property is not that the possessor thereof is less than the State, or is only a part of the State (for were that so we should talk of municipal property as private property), but rather that the owner may exercise his control over it to his own advantage, and not as a trustee for society, nor in the hierarchy of political institutions. Thus Mr Jones is a citizen of Manchester, but he does not own his private property as a citizen of Manchester, he owns it as Mr Jones, whereas, if the house next to his own be owned by the Manchester municipality, they own it only because they are a political body standing for the whole community of the town. Mr Jones might move to Glasgow and still own his property in Manchester, but the municipality of Manchester can only own its property in connection with the corporate political life of the town. An ideal society in which the means of production should be in the hands of the political officers of the community we call _Collectivist_, or more generally _Socialist_.[1] A society in which private property in land and capital, that is, the ownership and therefore the control of the means of production, is confined to some number of free citizens not large enough to determine the social mass of the State, while the rest have not such property and are therefore proletarian, we call _Capitalist_; and the method by which wealth is produced in such a society can only be the application of labour, the determining mass of which must necessarily be proletarian, to land and capital, in such fashion that, of the total wealth produced, the Proletariat which labours shall only receive a portion. The two marks, then, defining the Capitalist State are: (1) That the citizens thereof are politically free: _i.e._ can use or withhold at will their possessions or their labour, but are also (2) divided into capitalist and proletarian in such proportions that the State as a whole is not characterised by the institution of ownership among free citizens, but by the restriction of ownership to a section markedly less than the whole, or even to a small minority. Such a _Capitalist State_ is essentially divided into two classes of free citizens, the one capitalist or owning, the other propertyless or proletarian. My last definition concerns the Servile State itself, and since the idea is both somewhat novel and also the subject of this book, I will not only establish but expand its definition. The definition of the Servile State is as follows:-- "_That arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labour we call_ /The Servile State/." Note first certain negative limitations in the above which must be clearly seized if we are not to lose clear thinking in a fog of metaphor and rhetoric. That society is not servile in which men are intelligently constrained to labour by enthusiasm, by a religious tenet, or indirectly from fear of destitution, or directly from love of gain, or from the common sense which teaches them that by their labour they may increase their well-being. A clear boundary exists between the servile and the non-servile condition of labour, and the conditions upon either side of that boundary utterly differ one from another, Where there is _compulsion_ applicable by _positive law_ to men of a certain _status_, and such compulsion enforced in the last resort by the powers at the disposal of the State, there is the institution of _Slavery_; and if that institution be sufficiently expanded the whole State may be said to repose upon a servile basis, and is a Servile State. Where such formal, legal status is absent the conditions are not servile; and the difference between servitude and freedom, appreciable in a thousand details of actual life, is most glaring in this: that the free man can refuse his labour and use that refusal as an instrument wherewith to _bargain_; while the slave has no such instrument or power to bargain at all, but is dependent for his well-being upon the custom of society, backed by the regulation of such of its laws as may protect and guarantee the slave. Next, let it be observed that the State is not servile because the mere institution of slavery is to be discovered somewhere within its confines. The State is only servile when so considerable a body of forced labour is affected by the compulsion of positive law as to give a character to the whole community. Similarly, that State is not servile in which _all_ citizens are liable to submit their energies to the compulsion of positive law, and must labour at the discretion of State officials. By loose metaphor and for rhetorical purposes men who dislike Collectivism (for instance) or the discipline of a regiment will talk of the "servile" conditions of such organisations. But for the purposes of strict definition and clear thinking it is essential to remember that a servile condition only exists by contrast with a free condition. The servile condition is present in society only when there is also present the free citizen for whose benefit the slave works under the compulsion of positive law. Again, it should be noted that this word "servile" in no way connotes the worst, nor even necessarily a bad, arrangement of society, This point is so clear that it should hardly delay us; but a confusion between the rhetorical and the precise use of the word servile I have discovered to embarrass public discussion of the matter so much that I must once more emphasise what should be self-evident. The discussion as to whether the institution of slavery be a good or a bad one, or be relatively better or worse than other alternative institutions, has nothing whatever to do with the exact definition of that institution. Thus Monarchy consists in throwing the responsibility for the direction of society upon an individual. One can imagine some Roman of the first century praising the new Imperial power, but through a muddle-headed tradition against "kings" swearing that he would never tolerate a "monarchy." Such a fellow would have been a very futile critic of public affairs under Trajan, but no more futile than a man who swears that nothing shall make him a "slave," though well prepared to accept laws that compel him to labour without his consent, under the force of public law, and upon terms dictated by others. Many would argue that a man so compelled to labour, guaranteed against insecurity and against insufficiency of food, housing and clothing, promised subsistence for his old age, and a similar set of advantages for his posterity, would be a great deal better off than a free man lacking all these things. But the argument does not affect the definition attaching to the word servile. A devout Christian of blameless life drifting upon an ice-flow in the Arctic night, without food or any prospect of succour, is not so comfortably circumstanced as the Khedive of Egypt; but it would be folly in establishing the definition of the words "Christian" and "Mahommedan" to bring this contrast into account. We must then, throughout this inquiry, keep strictly to the economic aspect of the case. Only when that is established and when the modern tendency to the re-establishment of slavery is clear, are we free to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the revolution through which we are passing. It must further be grasped that the essential mark of the Servile Institution does not depend upon the ownership of the slave by a particular master. That the institution of slavery tends to that form under the various forces composing human nature and human society is probable enough. That if or when slavery were re-established in England a particular man would in time be found the slave not of Capitalism in general but of, say, the Shell Oil Trust in particular, is a very likely development; and we know that in societies where the institution was of immemorial antiquity such direct possession of the slave by the free man or corporation of free men had come to be the rule. But my point is that such a mark is not essential to the character of slavery. As an initial phase in the institution of slavery, or even as a permanent phase marking society for an indefinite time, it is perfectly easy to conceive of a whole class rendered servile by positive law, and compelled by such law to labour for the advantage of another non-servile free class, without any direct act of possession permitted to one man over the person of another. The final contrast thus established between slave and free might be maintained by the State guaranteeing to the _un-free_, security in their subsistence, to the free, security in their property and profits, rent and interest. What would mark the slave in such a society would be his belonging to that set or status which was compelled by no matter what definition to labour, and was thus cut off from the other set or status not compelled to labour, but free to labour or not as it willed. Again, the Servile State would certainly exist even though a man, being only compelled to labour during a portion of his time, were free to bargain and even to accumulate in his "free" time. The old lawyers used to distinguish between a serf "in gross" and a serf "regardant." A serf "in gross" was one who was a serf at all times and places, and not in respect to a particular lord. A serf "regardant" was a serf only in his bondage to serve a particular lord. He was free as against other men. And one might perfectly well have slaves who were only slaves "regardant" to a particular type of employment during particular hours. But they would be slaves none the less, and if their hours were many and their class numerous, the State which they supported would be a Servile State. Lastly, let it be remembered that the servile condition remains as truly an institution of the State when it attaches permanently and irrevocably at any one time to a particular set of human beings as when it attaches to a particular class throughout their lives. Thus the laws of Paganism permitted the slave to be enfranchised by his master: it further permitted children or prisoners to be sold into slavery. The Servile Institution, though perpetually changing in the elements of its composition, was still an unchanging factor in the State. Similarly, though the State should only subject to slavery those who had less than a certain income, while leaving men free by inheritance or otherwise to pass out of, and by loss to pass into, the slave class, that slave class, though fluctuating as to its composition, would still permanently exist. Thus, if the modern industrial State shall make a law by which servile conditions shall not attach to those capable of earning more than a certain sum by their own labour, but shall attach to those who earn less than this sum; or if the modern industrial State defines manual labour in a particular fashion, renders it compulsory during a fixed time for those who undertake it, but leaves them free to turn later to other occupations if they choose, undoubtedly such distinctions, though they attach to conditions and not to individuals, establish the Servile Institution. Some considerable number must be manual workers by definition, and while they were so defined would be slaves. Here again the composition of the Servile class would fluctuate, but the class would be permanent and large enough to stamp all society. I need not insist upon the practical effect: that such a class, once established, tends to be fixed in the great majority of those which make it up, and that the individuals entering or leaving it tend to become few compared to the whole mass. There is one last point to be considered in this definition. It is this:-- Since, in the nature of things, a free society must enforce a contract (a free society consisting in nothing else but the enforcement of free contracts), how far can that be called a Servile condition which is the result of contract nominally or really free? In other words, is not a contract to labour, however freely entered into, servile of its nature when enforced by the State? For instance, I have no food or clothing, nor do I possess the means of production whereby I can produce any wealth in exchange for such. I am so circumstanced that an owner of the Means of Production will not allow me access to those Means unless I sign a contract to serve him for a week at a wage of bare subsistence. Does the State in enforcing that contract make me for that week a slave? Obviously not. For the institution of Slavery presupposes a certain attitude of mind in the free man and in the slave, a habit of living in either, and the stamp of both those habits upon society. No such effects are produced by a contract enforceable by the length of one week. The duration of human life is such, and the prospect of posterity, that the fulfilling of such a contract in no way wounds the senses of liberty and of choice. What of a month, a year, ten years, a lifetime? Suppose an extreme case, and a destitute man to sign a contract binding him and all his children who were minors to work for a bare subsistence until his own death, or the attainment of majority of the children, whichever event might happen latest; would the State in forcing that contract be making the man a slave? As undoubtedly as it would not be making him a slave in the first case, it would be making him a slave in the second. One can only say to ancient sophistical difficulties of this kind, that the sense of men establishes for itself the true limits of any object, as of freedom. What freedom is, or is not, in so far as mere measure of time is concerned (though of course much else than time enters in), human habit determines; but the enforcing of a contract of service certainly or probably leaving a choice after its expiration is consonant with freedom. The enforcement of a contract probably binding one's whole life is not consonant with freedom. One binding to service a man's natural heirs is intolerable to freedom. Consider another converse point. A man binds himself to work for life and his children after him so far as the law may permit him to bind them in a particular society, but that not for a bare subsistence, but for so large a wage that he will be wealthy in a few years, and his posterity, when the contract is completed, wealthier still. Does the State in forcing such a contract make the fortunate employee a slave? No. For it is in the essence of slavery that subsistence or little more than subsistence should be guaranteed to the slave. Slavery exists in order that the Free should benefit by its existence, and connotes a condition in which the men subjected to it may demand secure existence, but little more. If anyone were to draw an exact line, and to say that a life-contract enforceable by law was slavery at so many shillings a week, but ceased to be slavery after that margin, his effort would be folly. None the less, there is a standard of subsistence in any one society, the guarantee of which (or little more) under an obligation to labour by compulsion is slavery, while the guarantee of very much more is not slavery. This verbal jugglery might be continued. It is a type of verbal difficulty apparent in every inquiry open to the professional disputant, but of no effect upon the mind of the honest inquirer whose business is not dialectic but truth. It is always possible by establishing a cross-section in a set of definitions to pose the unanswerable difficulty of degree, but that will never affect the realities of discussion. We know, for instance, what is meant by torture when it exists in a code of laws, and when it is forbidden. No imaginary difficulties of degree between pulling a man's hair and scalping him, between warming him and burning him alive, will disturb a reformer whose business it is to expunge torture from some penal code. In the same way we know what is and what is not compulsory labour, what is and what is not the Servile Condition. Its test is, I repeat, the withdrawal from a man of his free choice to labour or not to labour, here or there, for such and such an object; and the compelling of him by positive law to labour for the advantage of others who do not fall under the same compulsion. Where you have _that_, you have slavery: with all the manifold, spiritual, and political results of that ancient institution. Where you have slavery affecting a class of such considerable size as to mark and determine the character of the State, there you have the Servile State. * * * * * To sum up, then:--The /Servile State/ is that in which we find so considerable a body of families and individuals distinguished from _free citizens_ by the mark of compulsory labour as to stamp a general character upon society, and all the chief characters, good or evil, attaching to the institution of slavery will be found permeating such a State, whether the slaves be directly and personally attached to their masters, only indirectly attached through the medium of the State, or attached in a third manner through their subservience to corporations or to particular industries. The slave so compelled to labour will be one dispossessed of the means of production, and compelled by law to labour for the advantage of all or any who are possessed thereof. And the distinguishing mark of the slave proceeds from the special action upon him of a positive law which first separates one body of men, the less-free, from another, the more free, in the function of contract within the general body of the community. Now, from a purely Servile conception of production and of the arrangement of society we Europeans sprang. The Immemorial past of Europe is a Servile past. During some centuries which the Church raised, permeated, and constructed, Europe was gradually released or divorced from this immemorial and fundamental conception of slavery; to that conception, to that institution, our Industrial or Capitalist society is now upon its return. We are re-establishing the slave. * * * * * Before proceeding to the proof of this, I shall, in the next few pages, digress to sketch very briefly the process whereby the old Pagan slavery was transformed into a free society some centuries ago. I shall then outline the further process whereby the new non-servile society was wrecked at the Reformation in certain areas of Europe, and particularly in England. There was gradually produced in its stead the transitory phase of society (now nearing its end) called generally _Capitalism_ or the _Capitalist State_. Such a digression, being purely historical, is not logically necessary to a consideration of our subject, but it is of great value to the reader, because the knowledge of how, in reality and in the concrete, things have moved better enables us to understand the logical process whereby they tend towards a particular goal in the future. One could prove the tendency towards the Servile State in England to-day to a man who knew nothing of the past of Europe; but that tendency will seem to him far more reasonably probable, far more a matter of experience and less a matter of mere deduction, when he knows what our society once was, and how it changed into what we know to-day. Section Two Our Civilisation Was Originally Servile In no matter what field of the European past we make our research, we find, from two thousand years ago upwards, one fundamental institution whereupon the whole of society reposes; that fundamental institution is Slavery. There is here no distinction between the highly civilised City-State of the Mediterranean, with its letters, its plastic art, and its code of laws, with all that makes a civilisation--and this stretching back far beyond any surviving record,--there is here no distinction between that civilised body and the Northern and Western societies of the Celtic tribes, or of the little known hordes that wandered in the Germanies. _All_ indifferently reposed upon slavery. It was a fundamental conception of society. It was everywhere present, nowhere disputed. There _is_ a distinction (or would appear to be) between Europeans and Asiatics in this matter. The religion and morals of the one so differed in their very origin from those of the other that every social institution was touched by the contrast--and Slavery among the rest. But with that we need not concern ourselves. My point is that our European ancestry, those men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and never doubted but that it was normal to all human society. It is a matter of capital importance to seize this. An arrangement of such a sort would not have endured without intermission (and indeed without question) for many centuries, nor have been found emerging fully grown from that vast space of unrecorded time during which barbarism and civilisation flourished side by side in Europe, had there not been something in it, good or evil, native to our blood. There was no question in those ancient societies from which we spring of making subject races into slaves by the might of conquering races. All that is the guess-work of the universities. Not only is there no proof of it, rather all the existing proof is the other way. The Greek had a Greek slave, the Latin a Latin slave, the German a German slave, the Celt a Celtic slave. The theory that "superior races" invaded a land, either drove out the original inhabitants or reduced them to slavery, is one which has no argument either from our present knowledge of man's mind or from recorded evidence. Indeed, the most striking feature of that Servile Basis upon which Paganism reposed was the human equality recognised between master and slave. The master might kill the slave, but both were of one race and each was human to the other. This spiritual value was not, as a further pernicious piece of guess-work would dream, a "growth" or a "progress." The doctrine of human equality was inherent in the very stuff of antiquity, as it is inherent in those societies which have not lost tradition. We may presume that the barbarian of the North would grasp the great truth with less facility than the civilised man of the Mediterranean, because barbarism everywhere shows a retrogression in intellectual power; but the proof that the Servile Institution was a social arrangement rather than a distinction of type is patent from the coincidence everywhere of Emancipation with Slavery. Pagan Europe not only thought the existence of Slaves a natural necessity to society, but equally thought that upon giving a Slave his freedom the enfranchised man would naturally step, though perhaps after the interval of some lineage, into the ranks of free society. Great poets and great artists, statesmen and soldiers were little troubled by the memory of a servile ancestry. On the other hand, there was a perpetual recruitment of the Servile Institution, just as there was a perpetual emancipation from it, proceeding year after year; and the natural or normal method of recruitment is most clearly apparent to us in the simple and barbaric societies which the observation of contemporary civilised Pagans enables us to judge. It was poverty that made the slave. Prisoners of war taken in set combat afforded one mode of recruitment, and there was also the raiding of men by pirates in the outer lands and the selling of them in the slave markets of the South. But at once the cause of the recruitment and the permanent support of the institution of slavery was the indigence of the man who sold himself into slavery, _or was born into it_; for it was a rule of Pagan Slavery that the slave bred the slave, and that even if one of the parents were free the offspring was a slave. The society of antiquity, therefore, was normally divided (as must at last be the society of any servile state) into clearly marked sections: there was upon the one hand the citizen who had a voice in the conduct of the State, who would often labour--but labour of his own free will--and who was normally possessed of property; upon the other hand, there was a mass dispossessed of the means of production and compelled by positive law to labour at command. It is true that in the further developments of society the accumulation of private savings by a slave was tolerated and that slaves so favoured did sometimes purchase their freedom. It is further true that in the confusion of the last generations of Paganism there arose in some of the great cities a considerable class of men who, though free, were dispossessed of the means of production. But these last never existed in a sufficient proportion to stamp the whole State of society with a character drawn from their proletarian circumstance. To the end the Pagan world remained a world of free proprietors possessed, in various degrees, of the land and of the capital whereby wealth may be produced, and applying to that land and capital for the purpose of producing wealth, _compulsory_ labour. Certain features in that original Servile State from which we all spring should be carefully noted by way of conclusion. First, though all nowadays contrast slavery with freedom to the advantage of the latter, yet men then accepted slavery freely as an alternative to indigence. Secondly (and this is most important for our judgment of the Servile Institution as a whole, and of the chances of its return), in all those centuries we find no organised effort, nor (what is still more significant) do we find any _complaint of conscience_ against the institution which condemned the bulk of human beings to forced labour. Slaves may be found in the literary exercises of the time bewailing their lot and joking about it; some philosophers will complain that an ideal society should contain no slaves; others will excuse the establishment of slavery upon this plea or that, while granting that it offends the dignity of man. The greater part will argue of the State that it is necessarily Servile. But no one, slave or free, dreams of abolishing or even of changing the thing. You have no martyrs for the case of "freedom" as against "slavery." The so-called Servile wars are the resistance on the part of escaped slaves to any attempt at recapture, but they are not accompanied by an accepted affirmation that servitude is an intolerable thing; nor is that note struck at all from the unknown beginnings to the Catholic endings of the Pagan world. Slavery is irksome, undignified, woeful; but it is, to them, of the nature of things. You may say, to be brief, that this arrangement of society was the very air which Pagan Antiquity breathed. Its great works, its leisure and its domestic life, its humour, its reserves of power, all depend upon the fact that its society was that of the Servile State. Men were happy in that arrangement, or, at least, as happy as men ever are. The attempt to escape by a personal effort, whether of thrift, of adventure, or of flattery to a master, from the Servile condition had never even so much of driving power behind it as the attempt many show to-day to escape from the rank of wage-earners to those of employers. Servitude did not seem a hell into which a man would rather die than sink, or out of which at any sacrifice whatsoever a man would raise himself. It was a condition accepted by those who suffered it as much as by those who enjoyed it, and a perfectly necessary part of all that men did and thought. You find no barbarian from some free place astonished at the institution of Slavery; you find no Slave pointing to a society in which Slavery was unknown as towards a happier land. To our ancestors not only for those few centuries during which we have record of their actions, but apparently during an illimitable past, the division of society into those who must work under compulsion and those who would benefit by their labour was the very plan of the State apart from which they could hardly think of society as existing at all. Let all this be clearly grasped. It is fundamental to an understanding of the problem before us. Slavery is no novel experience in the history of Europe; nor is one suffering an odd dream when one talks of Slavery as acceptable to European men. Slavery was of the very stuff of Europe for thousands upon thousands of years, until Europe engaged upon that considerable moral experiment called _The Faith_, which many believe to be now accomplished and discarded, and in the failure of which it would seem that the old and primary institution of Slavery must return. For there came upon us Europeans after all those centuries, and centuries of a settled social order which was erected upon Slavery as upon a sure foundation, the experiment called the Christian Church. Among the by-products of this experiment, very slowly emerging from the old Pagan world, and not long completed before Christendom itself suffered a shipwreck, was the exceedingly gradual transformation of the Servile State into something other: a society of owners. And how that something other did proceed from the Pagan Servile State I will next explain. Section Three How the Servile Institution Was for a Time Dissolved The process by which slavery disappeared among Christian men, though very lengthy in its development (it covered close upon a thousand years), and though exceedingly complicated in its detail, may be easily and briefly grasped in its main lines. Let it first be clearly understood that the vast revolution through which the European mind passed bet ween the first and the fourth centuries (that revolution which is often termed the Conversion of the World to Christianity, but which should for purposes of historical accuracy be called the Growth of the Church) included no attack upon the Servile Institution. No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any human right. The emancipation of Slaves was indeed regarded as a good work by the Faithful: but so was it regarded by the Pagan. It was, on the face of it, a service rendered to one's fellowmen. The sale of Christians to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilisation to force men away from Civilisation to Barbarism. In general you will discover no pronouncement against slavery as an institution, nor any moral definition attacking it, throughout all those early Christian centuries during which it none the less effectively disappears. The form of its disappearance is well worth noting. It begins with the establishment as the fundamental unit of production in Western Europe of those great landed estates, commonly lying in the hands of a single proprietor, and generally known as /Villae/. There were, of course, many other forms of human agglomeration: small peasant farms owned in absolute proprietorship by their petty masters; groups of free men associated in what was called a Vicus; manufactories in which groups of slaves were industrially organised to the profit of their master; and, governing the regions around them, the scheme of Roman towns. But of all these the Villa the dominating type; and as society passed from the high civilisation of the first four centuries into the simplicity of the Dark Ages, the Villa, the unit of agricultural production, became more and more the model of all society. Now the Villa began as a considerable extent of land, containing, like a modern English estate, pasture, arable, water, wood and heath, or waste land. It was owned by a dominus
{'title': 'The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}