436 Serfdom 



the soil, and making the support of their rulers the first charge upon 

 their produce, the conquerors provided for their own comfort and 

 became a leisured noble class. In the Greek world we find such aristo- 

 cracies of a permanently military character, as in Laconia and Thessaly. 

 Colonial expansion reproduced the same or very similar phenomena 

 abroad, as in the cases of Heraclea Pontica and Syracuse. The serfdom 

 of such subject populations was a very different thing 1 from slavery. 

 It had nothing domestic about it. There is no reason to suppose that 

 the serf was under any constraint beyond the regular performance of 

 certain fixed duties, conditions imposed by the state on its subjects, 

 not the personal orders of an individual owner. In some cases at least 

 the serf seems to have enjoyed a measure of protection 2 under public 

 law. Whether the original Roman plebs stood on much the same footing 

 as the Greek serfs is perhaps doubtful, but their condition presents 

 certain analogies. The main truth is that the desire of conquerors to 

 profit by the labour of the conquered was and is an appetite almost 

 universal: mojal revulsion against crude forms of this exploitation is 

 of modern, chiefly English, origin ; even now it is in no small degree 

 a lesson from the economic experience of ages. But it is well to re- 

 member that we use 'serfdom' also as the name for the condition of 

 rural peasantry in the later Roman Empire, and that this again is a 

 different relation. For it is not a case of conquered people serving 

 their conquerors. Rather is it an affliction of those who by blood or 

 franchise represent the conquering people. Step by step they sink under 

 the loss of effective freedom, though nominally free, bound down by 

 economic and social forces; influences that operate with the slow cer- 

 tainty of fate until their triumph is finally registered by imperial law. 

 That the institution of Property is a matter of slow growth, is now 

 generally admitted by sincere inquirers. It had reached a considerable 

 stage of development when a clan or household (still more when an 

 individual) was recognized as having an exclusive right to dispose of 

 this or that material object presumably useful to others also. For 

 instance, in the right of an owner to do as he would with an ox or a slave. 

 Individual property in land was certainly a later development, the ap- 

 propriation being effected by a combination of personal acquisitiveness 

 with economic convenience. From my present point of view the chief 

 interest of the property-question is in its connexion with debt-slavery. 

 That farmers, exposed to the vicissitudes of seasons, are peculiarly 

 liable to incur debts, is well known from experience ancient and modern. 

 But ancient Law, if rudimentary, was also rigid ; and tradition depicts 

 for us the small peasant as a victim of the wealthy whose larger capital 



1 Different also from the position of a food-producer class in a great territorial state, being 

 based on local conditions. 



2 Illustrated with great clearness in the provisions of the Gortyn laws. 



