Stoicism and Christianity 449 



force in promoting criminal designs. Such cases only served to justify 

 the cruel execution of cruel laws for protecting masters and the state 

 in general from the imminent slave-peril. If we turn from the city, in 

 which what passed for politics ran its troubled and futile course, to the 

 countryside, we are at once in a scene from which all political life had 

 departed. The farmer-citizens grew fewer and fewer, and the great 

 majority of them were virtually disfranchised by distance. Nor were 

 they likely to favour any movement that seemed to be for the benefit 

 of slaves. 



The establishment of the Empire did not, indeed could not, produce 

 any material change in the way of arousing effective sentiment hostile 

 to slavery. But it did much to promote internal order and far-reaching 

 peace. Under the new model of government the corrupt circles of 

 nobles and greedy capitalists were no longer in absolute control of the 

 civilized world, and it might seem that there was now some chance of 

 dealing with the canker of slavery. But no such movement was the 

 result. Old notions remained in full vigour. Augustus had his hands 

 too full, and the need of conciliating private interests was too pressing, 

 for him to disturb them, even had he been minded to do so. And who 

 else could take the initiative ? But the fate of two moral influences is 

 worth noting. Stoicism, the creed of not a few ardent spirits, might 

 profess to rise superior to worldly distinctions and advantages and 

 assert the potential dignity of man even in the humblest condition of 

 life. But it was always a creed of the few : its aloofness, tending to 

 a certain arrogance, made it unfitted 1 to lead a great reform: it neither 

 would nor could furnish the machinery of zealous propaganda. In the 

 earlier Empire we find it politically allied with malcontent cliques in 

 which smouldering resentment at the restraints on 'freedom ' expressed 

 itself by idealizing the Republic and hoping for a reaction. Thus it 

 lost itself in impracticable dreams, and the hand of emperors under 

 provocation sometimes fell heavily on its most virtuous men. The 

 spread of Christianity came later, and was not diverted from its aims 

 by a social affinity with the upper classes. Slaves bore no small part 

 in its expansion to the West, and it was free to operate steadily as 

 a humanitarian influence. But its claim to universality naturally ex- 

 posed it to grave suspicion in a world that knew religion only as an 

 affair of each several community, with a sort of overlordship vested in 

 the conquering gods of Rome. Though it was a Church and not 

 a philosophic system, though meant for all mankind and not for a 



1 Compare Wendell Phillips 'Before this there had been among us scattered and single 

 abolitionists, earnest and able men ; sometimes, like Wythe of Virginia, in high places. 

 The Quakers and Covenanters had never intermitted their testimony against slavery. But 

 Garrison was the first man to begin a movement designed to annihilate slavery. ' Speech at 

 G's funeral 1879. 



H. A. 29 



