The grand error, as has already been said, of the Graeco-Roman or gentile civilization, was in its denial or ignorance of the unity of the human race, as well as the Unity of God, and in its including in the state only a particular class of the territorial people, while it held all the rest as slaves, though in different degrees of servitude.It recognized and sustained a privileged class, a ruling order; and if, as subsequently did the Venetian aristocracy, it recognized democratic equality within that order, it held all outside of it to be less than men and without political rights.Practically, power was an attribute of birth and of private wealth.Suffrage was almost universal among freemen, but down almost to the Empire, the people voted by orders, and were counted, not numerically, but by the rank of the order, and the comitia curiata could always carry the election over the comitia centuriata, and thus power remained always in the hands of the rich and noble few.
The Roman Law, as digested by jurists under Justinian in the sixth Century, indeed, recognizes the unity of the race, asserts the equality of all men by the natural law, and undertakes to defend slavery on principles not incompatible with that equality.
It represents it as a commutation of the punishment of death, which the emperor has the right to inflict on captives taken in war, to perpetual servitude; and as servitude is less severe than death, slavery was really a proof of imperial clemency.But it has never yet been proved that the emperor has the right under the natural law to put captives taken even in a just war to death, and the Roman poet himself bids us "humble the proud, but spare the submissive." In a just war the emperor may kill on the battle-field those in arms against him, but the jus gentium, as now interpreted by the jurisprudence of every civilized nation, does not allow him to put them to death after they have ceased resistance, have thrown down their arms, and surrendered.But even if it did, it gives him a right only over the persons captured, not over their innocent children, and therefore no right to establish hereditary slavery, for the child is not punishable for the offences of the parent.The law, indeed, assumed that the captive ceased to exist as a person and treated him as a thing, or mere property of the conqueror, and being property, he could beget only property, which would accrue only to his owner.But there is no power in heaven or earth that can make a person a thing, a mere piece of merchandise, and it is only by a clumsy fiction, or rather by a bare-faced lie, that the law denies the slave his personality and treats him as a thing.
I the unity of all men had been clearly seen and vividly felt, the law would never have attempted to justify perpetual slavery on the ground of its penal character, or indeed on any ground whatever.All men are born under the law of nature with equal rights, and the civil law can justly deprive no man of his liberty, but for a crime, committed by him personally, that justly forfeits his liberty to society.
These defects of the Graeco-Roman civilization the European nations have in part remedied, and may completely remedy.They can carry out practically the Christian dogma of the unity of the human race, abolish slavery in every form, make all men equal before the law, and the political people commensurate with the territorial people.Indeed, France has already done it.She has abolished slavery, villenage, serfage, political aristocracy, asserted the equality of all men before the law, vindicated the sovereignty of the people, and established universal suffrage, complete social and territorial democracy.The other nations may do as much, but hardly can any of them do more or advance farther.Yet in France, territorial democracy the most complete results only in establishing the most complete imperial centralism, usually called Caesarism.
The imperial constitution of France recognizes that the emperor reigns "by the grace of God and the will of the nation," and therefore, that by the grace of God and the will of the nation he may cease to reign; but while he reigns he is supreme, and his will is law.The constitution imposes no real or effective restraint on his power: while he sits upon the throne he is practically France, and the ministers are his clerks; the council of state, the senate, and the legislative body are merely his agents in governing the nation.This may, indeed, be changed, but only to substitute for imperial centralism democratic centralism, which were no improvement, or to go back to the system of antagonisms, checks and balances, called constitutionalism, or parliamentary government, of which Great Britain is the model, and which were a return toward barbarism, or mediaeval feudalism.
