In an interesting chapter Varro advises that the vilicus should be carefully selected, and should be conciliated by being allowed a wife and the means of accumulating a property (peculium); he even urges that he should enforce obedience rather by words than blows.[371] But of the condition of the ordinary slave on the farm this is the only hint he gives us, and it never seems to have occurred to him, or to any other Roman of his day, that the work to be done would be better performed by men not deprived by their condition of a moral sense; that slave labour is unwillingly and unintelligently rendered, because the labourer has no hope, no sense of dutiful conduct leading him to rejoice in the work of his hands.  Nor did any writer recognise the fact that slaves were potentially moral beings, until Christianity gave its sanction to dutiful submission as an act of morality that might be consecrated by a Divine authority.[372]

Lastly, it is not difficult to realise the mischievous effects of such a slave system as the Roman upon the slave-owning class itself.  Even those who themselves had no slaves would be affected by it; for though, as we have seen, free labour was by no means ousted by it, it must have helped to create an idle class of freemen, with all its moral worthlessness.  Long ago, in his remarkable book on The Slave Power in America before the Civil War, Professor Cairnes drew a striking comparison between the “mean whites” of the Southern States, the result of slave labour on the plantations, and the idle population of the Roman capital, fed on cheap corn and ready for any kind of rowdyism.[373] But in the case of the great slave-owners the mischief was much more serious, though perhaps more difficult to detect.  The master of a horde of slaves had half his moral sense paralysed, because he had no feeling of responsibility for so many of those with whom he came in contact every day and hour.  When most members of a man’s household or estate are absolutely at his mercy, when he has no feeling of any contractual relation with them, his sense of duty and obligation is inevitably deadened, even towards others who are not thus in his power.  Can we doubt that the lack of a sense of justice and right dealing, more especially towards provincials, but also towards a man’s fellow-citizens, which we have noticed in the two upper sections of society, was due in great part to the constant exercise of arbitrary power at home, to the habit of looking upon the men who ministered to his luxurious ease as absolutely without claim upon his respect or his benevolence? or that the recklessness of human life which was shown in the growing popularity of bloody gladiatorial shows, and in the incredible cruelty of the victors in the Civil Wars, was the result of this unconscious cultivation, from childhood onwards, of the despotic temper?[374] Even the best men of the age, such as Cicero, Caesar, Lucretius, show hardly a sign of any sympathy with, or interest in, that