The Servile State — A Closer Reading

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.