II. Liberté compatible avec la manière de vivre des peuples sédentaires qui se font entretenir par d

CHAP. 7: II. Liberty compatible with the way of life of sedentary peoples who live off the labor of slaves.

§ 1. Man first makes his principal nourishment from fruits and wild animals; then from the milk and flesh of the animals he has subjugated; then from the products of the soil that he has his slave cultivate. He passes only with extreme slowness from one of these states to the other; and, however barbarous the last may still be, one is obliged to recognize that it is at a great distance from those that precede it, and that a great space has already been covered on the road of civilization. The savage warrior makes no slaves: his passions are still too impetuous; and, besides, what means would he have to keep them, and to what use would he employ them? The nomadic warrior makes only as many as he can sell: he needs few for the guarding of his herds and for the exploitation of the little land he gives over to culture; but, as the products of the soil enter for a greater part into the nourishment of the barbarian, the number of captives he makes in war becomes more considerable: tillage succeeding pasture, he puts slaves in the place of herds, and ends by making his principal resource the enslavement of his fellows.

I know of no expression proper to designate the state of peoples who are thus fed by men vanquished and chained to the glebe. The name of agricultural peoples that has been given them seems scarcely applicable; this name would belong to the slave who makes the earth fecund rather than to the barbarian who lives by his sweat. In general, it would be more suitable to give to peoples still barbarous names taken from war, than names borrowed from industry. One ought, it would seem, to reserve the latter for nations that have abjured all violence, all brigandage, all forced subjection of one class to another, all spirit of monopoly and domination, and constitutionally founded their existence on labor and the exchange of services.

However, for having no denomination that suits it, the state of which I speak has been no less real, nor less general. There is no nation that, in passing from the wandering life to the sedentary life, has not been at first, and for a very long time, supported by enslaved men. The peoples of antiquity never knew any other manner of living. One sees in Genesis that, in the time of the patriarchs, slavery already existed among the Hebrews, and that Abraham possessed a considerable number of slaves [^165] : it was slaves who provided for the subsistence of the ancient Greeks. Rome had slaves from its origin, and their number there, as among the Greeks, grew, with time, in an almost infinite manner. There were in Athens, in the time of Demetrius of Phalerum, four hundred thousand slaves to feed twenty thousand citizens. Rome, at the end of the republic, counted half as many citizens as slaves. Caesar found slavery established among the Gauls. When the barbarous peoples of the north of Europe established and settled themselves in the south, they everywhere had slaves to work the land and produce the things necessary for their needs. In all parts of the world where Europeans have penetrated: in Africa, in America, in the islands of the South Sea, wherever they have found a beginning of culture, they have seen what useful labor was done executed by men more or less enslaved. I do not know, finally, that ancient history makes known to us, nor that one has discovered in modern times any society having a beginning of industry and agriculture, in which labor was executed by free men, or in which free men had begun by seeking in labor the means of providing for their needs. Everywhere the first disposition of the strong has been to have themselves served by the weak, and the slavery of the useful professions has been the economic regime of every newly settled society [^166] .

§ 2. It seems derisory to ask if liberty is compatible with a social state where half, three-quarters, and sometimes a much more considerable portion of the population thus finds itself the property of the other: thus the question is not to know if this portion of the population is free, but if that which has founded its subsistence on its enslavement can enjoy liberty; if liberty is compatible with the manner of living of peoples who live off the labor of slaves.

Many people perhaps would still decide this question affirmatively. Who has not considered the peoples of antiquity as essentially free peoples? Who has not heard speak of the liberty of the Greeks and the Romans? How long, in the matter of liberty, have we not drawn from them our authorities and our examples? Rousseau somewhere calls the Romans the model of all free peoples. He says, speaking of the Greeks: “Slaves did their work; their great affair was liberty [^167] .” He is so far from considering liberty as irreconcilable with the mode of existence of peoples who have their work executed by slaves, that he quite clearly makes slavery a condition of liberty.

“What!” he asks, “Liberty is maintained only by the support of servitude? Perhaps. All that is not in nature has its inconveniences, and civil society more than all the rest. There are unhappy positions where one can preserve one's liberty only at the expense of that of others, and where the citizen can be perfectly free only if the slave is extremely a slave... As for you, modern peoples,” he adds, “you have no slaves, but you are them; you pay for their liberty with your own [^168] .”

Rousseau had said at first that one could be free only in the savage life, and by abstaining from all industry, from all progress. He now appears to add that if one wishes to live in a state as outside of nature as society, one must at least, to be free, have one's work executed by slaves. Is this new proposition any more admissible than the first?

We have seen that men are free only in proportion to the development they give to their faculties: far, therefore, from their having, in order to enjoy a great liberty, to have themselves fed by slaves, it is evident that if they discharge upon slaves the care of executing their labors, their faculties will remain uncultivated, and that they will acquire only very imperfectly the liberty to make use of them. We have seen that, in society, everyone disposes all the more freely of his forces, the better each knows how to confine the use of them within the bounds of what is not harmful: far, therefore, from it being necessary, in order to be free, to enslave a part of one's fellows, it is visible that he who founds his liberty on the servitude of another thereby establishes only his own servitude, that he places himself in a violent situation where he is ceaselessly obliged to be on guard against those whom he oppresses, and where he is thus more or less deprived of the free disposition of his movements. One can therefore already perceive that peoples who wish to have themselves fed by slaves found their existence on a resource naturally contrary to liberty.

§ 3. I will begin, however, by recognizing that liberty is a little less incompatible with this new mode of existence than with the preceding one, just as it was less so with the latter than with the one that had preceded it. The reason is simple: it is that this new manner of living is a little less violent and less destructive. Man here founding his subsistence on the products of the labor of man, it is impossible that human faculties remain in the same state of inertia and brutishness. Previously, one enslaved one's enemies to make them shepherds; now one enslaves them to make them laborers, artisans, as one will later enslave them to make them rhetoricians, grammarians, teachers. Now, it is easy to see that these new destinations given to the slave render slavery less an enemy of civilization and of liberty. On the other hand, liberty has less to suffer from the consequences of war. In the pastoral state, the warrior wanted to convert everything into pastures and deserts: he razed cities, massacred populations, and spared only the small number of captives whom he believed he was assured of selling, or whom he could employ in the guarding of his herds [^169] . In the present state, he perhaps pillages more, but he destroys less; he enslaves more men, but he does not exterminate as great a number: he commits only the ravages and massacres indispensable to the goal of the war, which is the conquest of the terrain and the reduction of the inhabitants to the state of slaves or tributaries [^170] . It is manifest that this new manner of living, however violent it may be, is nonetheless less contrary to liberty than the preceding one.

[^158]: Voyage en Syrie, vol. I, p. 396. [^159]: Voyages de Cook, vol. I, p. 127. [^160]: Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, by Gibbon, chap. 9. [^161]: Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, by Gibbon, chap. 9. [^162]: Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, by Gibbon, chap. 50. [^163]: Florus, lib. III, cap. 3. [^164]: Essais, book I, chap. 30. [^165]: Genesis, chap. 14, v. 14. [^166]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, by Fergusson, part II, sect. 2. [^167]: Contrat social, book III, chap. 15. [^168]: Contrat social, book III, chap. 15. [^169]: Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, by Gibbon, chap. 9. [^170]: Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, by Gibbon, chap. 9.Thus experience shows that among peoples whose subsistence is founded on this new means, the species can attain a higher degree of development and liberty than among pastoral nations. The monuments that remain to us of the arts and civilization of the ancients permit no doubt to be raised on this point. One surely cannot deny that the peoples of Greece and of Rome were much more cultivated than any of those of the age I described in my last chapter; that they were better provided with the things necessary for life; that industry and especially agriculture made much greater progress among them; that they had infinitely more extensive commercial relations. These peoples excelled above all in the arts of the imagination and of taste; their poets, their orators, their statuaries, have since been neither surpassed, nor perhaps equaled. Finally, the writings of their philosophers and the monuments of their legislation that time has spared prove that their morals had made, in several respects, progress no less remarkable than their ideas.

§ 4. However, whatever the progress of these peoples may have been, I believe that there is much to discount from the admiration that the world accords them, and that one can admit only with much reserve and great restrictions what is commonly said of their culture and their liberty. I believe this especially with regard to the Romans, of all the peoples of the earth the one that most energetically founded its existence on slavery, and among whom one can best observe all the effects of this way of life.

First, by the sole fact that this people had most of its labors executed by slaves, it seems that it would be to its slaves, and not to it, that one ought to report the glory. Was it truly the Roman people who constructed those numerous monuments of architecture, those sewers, those bridges, those roads, those aqueducts that are attributed to Roman civilization? No: they are, for the most part at least, captives, slaves, who did not belong to the Roman people. It is with the industry and the capital of vanquished nations that Rome executed its most magnificent works. Under its empire, almost nothing truly useful was done that was not executed by enslaved men. The law of Romulus had forbidden the Roman any industrial profession; the liberal arts were long enveloped in the same proscription: it was slaves who practiced medicine; grammar, rhetoric, philosophy were taught by slaves. All that there was in this people of true civilization, all that could survive its violences, it relegated outside the State. Its industry, for its part, was war; its works were pillage and massacres; the monuments it left were ruins, were the impoverishment and depopulation of the universe. Without it, perhaps, we would not have had the debris of a Pantheon or a Colosseum; but who knows what the free and fecund industry of the vanquished nations, by whose hands these lavish edifices were erected, would have transmitted to posterity? There is every reason to believe that, without this people, civilization would have been much more in a position to defend itself against barbarism, when the wandering hordes of the north of Europe came to exercise their frightful devastations in the south; and one can justly impute to its brigandage the long delay that other brigands were able, after it, to place on the progress of the human species [^171] .

Moreover, it is far from being the case that the arts had made true progress among the Romans, at least so long as they had remained faithful to the principle of their institution. They remained barbarians the whole time they were purely military, and they only began to civilize the world after having pillaged and enslaved it. Rome, at the epoch when the Gauls burned it, that is to say, 364 years after its founding, still contained only huts covered with thatch [^172] . Rebuilt then, it was so in a slightly more solid, but not more regular manner. There were no streets, the houses were scattered confusedly, and they were so crudely constructed that, in the time of Pyrrhus, more than a century later, they were still covered only with laths and planks [^173] , and that at the beginning of the empire most were still of wood [^174] . One can judge by this of the state in which industry must have found itself in other respects. It was only under the reign of Augustus that the eternal city began to possess beautiful edifices, and, after having been burned by Nero, that it was built with a veritable splendor [^175] . Letters only began to flourish toward the end of the republic; they shone with great brilliance only under the first emperors; finally, the sciences and the useful arts were not cultivated with great success at any epoch. There is not the slightest comparison to be established between the progress they had made among them, and that which they have made among us; between the agriculture of the Romans and ours, between their commerce and ours, between the manufactures they had and those that we have. It is even to do the Romans much honor to speak of their manufactures. Properly speaking, they had none: they had, so to speak, only a household industry, and each had the ordinary products of his consumption fabricated at home, by the hands of his women and his slaves. Augustus, according to Suetonius, had no clothes but those that his wife and daughters made for him. To take the word manufacture in the extended sense that modern peoples have given it, one can say that there were no manufactures in any State of antiquity.

“I do not recall,” says Hume, “having read in the ancient authors a single passage where the prosperity of a city is attributed to the existence of some kind of factory; and, as for commerce, it was almost limited, where it is said to have most flourished, to the exchange of the productions proper to the soil and climate of each country [^176] .”

What the world has gained since the Romans in enlightenment, in riches, is incalculable: simple bourgeois, in Paris, London, and elsewhere, have more pleasant habitations, more convenient furnishings, clothing as rich and more elegant than the richest patricians of Rome. The Romans, as is known, had no shirt, and wore wool directly on the skin. Linen fabrics were, among them, very rare and of the highest price. There were no glass panes on the windows of the houses: they were closed with netting, linen cloth, horn, or transparent stone. It appears that the same room (atrium) served at once as kitchen, dining room, drawing room, workshop, and gallery. The dishes, the images of the gods, the portraits of ancestors, the fabricated objects, etc., were displayed there simultaneously. The light entered from above, and, as there was no chimney, everything there was ordinarily very smoky. The furniture of the Romans could be distinguished by beauty, elegance, purity of form; but it possessed only to a weak degree that merit of convenience, suitability, fitness for purpose, that the spirit of invention and scientific genius have succeeded in impressing among us upon a multitude of utensils. The Romans had for writing only the bark of the tree called papyrus; they only began to make use of parchment toward the end of the republic, and never knew paper. An iron stylus or a cut reed served them as a pen. They wrote only in capital letters. They were absolutely ignorant of the art of multiplying copies by printing. They had no idea of the establishment of postal services, and had their letters carried by messengers. Most of their arts were in the most complete state of infancy [^177] . Finally, if the progress of morals has followed only from afar, among us, the progress of the arts, if we have less virtue than instruction and well-being, it is nonetheless impossible to deny that we live better than the Romans did, that we know how to make a more just and more moderate use of our forces. It is known that the morals of these masters of the world, at first horribly violent, then became horribly dissolute, and that the most iniquitous of all peoples ended by showing itself the most depraved. In whatever manner, therefore, one considers them, one is led to recognize that they had less true civilization, and, consequently, less true liberty than we.

§ 5. Not only was the Roman people not industrious, enlightened, moral, and consequently free, to the same degree that we are, but it was not even possible for it to be so. The obstacle was in the way of life it had adopted, and in the social state that had to be its consequence. It was naturally impossible that a people that had founded its existence on the pillage and successive enslavement of all others could grow much in civilization, and ever enjoy a very great liberty.

Such a manner of providing for its needs demanded a perpetual war; it was in the object of the association; it tended, moreover, to perpetuate itself; and, when the Romans would not have made it to renew or increase their provisions of foodstuffs and slaves, they would have made it to forestall the vengeances and reprisals with which they were perpetually threatened [^178] .

Thus vowed to an eternal war, their social state had to be assorted to their destination. The population en masse received, from the beginning, a wholly military organization: it was divided into tribes, curiae, decuriae; then into classes and centuries, and these divisions, all military, were commanded by tribunes, curions, decurions, centurions, who had over it all the authority of military chiefs [^179] . The senate, composed of the richest and most distinguished officers, was in a way the general staff of the army; the consuls, chosen from among the superior officers, were its generals in chief; the soldiers, that is to say almost all the citizens, swore to the consuls to assemble at the first order, and to never leave the army without permission [^180] . This oath was perhaps less energetic than that of the Tartars; but it was no less obligatory, and, in fact, it invincibly subordinated the people to its chiefs.

This subordination was further strengthened by the establishment of patronage and clientage. All citizens were obliged to choose for themselves, in the patrician caste, protectors who were to defend their lawsuits, but to whom they were chained by the tightest bonds: so that each individual, already subordinated as a soldier, was so again as a client...

An even more rigorous dependence was established within families. Each house, domus, was a domination; each head of a house, dominus, was invested with a boundless power. The father was at once the pontiff, the sovereign, the judge of his entire family; he could condemn his children to prison, to the whip, to exile, to slavery, to death. Finally, this power, which nothing limited, and from which one could not escape during the father's life, extended at once to the mother, to the children, to the grandchildren, to all posterity. The wife, in marrying, became in a way the daughter of her husband, and the sister of her own children; she lost the possession of all she had, and could acquire nothing that was not acquired by the husband: everything in the house fell under the power of the father of the family.

Powerfully fortified by the institution of patronage and of paternal power, the military subordination established among the Romans was further strengthened by the establishment of the censors, officers of a high rank, who were specially charged with taking the census of the army, and with maintaining therein the rigidity of morals and the inflexibility of discipline [^181] .

“Among other powers,” says Plutarch, “a censor has law to inquire into the life and to reform the morals of each one; because the Romans esteemed that it should not be licit for each one to marry, to live at home in private, nor to make banquets and feasts at his fancy [^182] .”

Besides these extraordinary powers over private life, the censors had immense ones over public life. They could expel senators from the senate, knights from the equestrian order, and strike simple individuals from the list of citizens [^183] .

Care was also taken to maintain the military spirit, by preventing the Romans from being able to occupy themselves with any manual labor. The industrial professions, which were qualified as sordid arts (sordidæ artes), were severely forbidden to them; and, at the same time, military service was for them of such a strict obligation, that the citizen who would have refused to take up arms, or who would only have neglected to have himself inscribed on the census books, would have been stripped of his goods, beaten with rods and sold as a slave beyond the Tiber [^184] .

It is thus that their social state was assorted to the way of life they had adopted, and that everything tended to render them strong for war, for conquest, for brigandage. This must be well understood to have the key to their institutions: they essentially had for their object to impress the highest possible degree of energy upon the violent arts on which they had founded their existence. It is to misinterpret, I believe, their fundamental laws, to claim, with Montesquieu and other publicists who came after him, that the equality of goods, the agrarian laws, censorship, the unlimited jurisdiction of the father of the family were natural consequences of the republican forms of their government. I do not believe that Condorcet, M. de Sismondi, and M. de Constant have explained these institutions in a happier manner, when they said that the ancients attached importance only to the exercise of the rights of the city, and that it was in the interest of their political activity that they had consented to sacrifice all individual independence. On the one hand, it is not very exact to say that the agrarian laws, ostracism, censorship, etc., enter by necessity into the constitution of republican government; and, on the other hand, it is not believable that peoples submitted themselves to the harshest constraints for the sole pleasure of being in a republic and of taking an active part in the exercise of collective power. Thus, when the Roman citizens consented to render themselves slaves of the political body of which they were members, they had more serious and more solid motives than those that the celebrated writers I have just named attribute to them; if they were willing to bend to such a regimen, it is because they felt that their life was at stake; it is because, having vowed themselves to the conquest and enslavement of other peoples, they needed to adopt the order most proper to ensure the success of their perilous expeditions [^185] .

§ 6. That, in this state, the Roman nation found itself very strongly organized for domination, I grant. But of what liberty was it susceptible? One sees first that it could not enjoy that which is given by the development of intelligence and industry. This development was not compatible with the way of life it had adopted; and, moreover, we have just said that it had forbidden itself all the labors that could have given it birth. The Roman, to be fit for war, needed to remain coarse, brutal, superstitious. It would have been to diminish his capacity for brigandage to let him give himself over to the study of the sciences or the practice of the arts, and the first care to be had was doubtless to preserve him carefully from all culture: thus nothing was neglected to maintain him in a favorable stupefaction. Rome, after five hundred years of existence, was scarcely less ignorant and less fierce than under its first kings; and such was, when Diogenes and Carneades appeared within its walls, the horror that was still had there of all instruction, that Cato hastened to propose to the senate to dismiss these philosopher-ambassadors, and that, in an insensate diatribe against enlightenment, this old fanatic forgot himself so far as to treat Socrates as a babbler and a seditious man [^186] .

It is true that, despite these admonitions from Cato and the old senators who, like him, held firm for the maintenance of ignorance and the old morals, there happened in Rome what had happened in Greece, after a series of happy wars, that is to say, when they had beaten, pillaged, enslaved their enemies, and had procured for themselves by these honest means leisure and riches, having nothing better to do, they had the desire to study. But as the manner of living remained the same, as the same contempt was preserved for the labors of industry, the effects of this new passion were only very mediocrely advantageous. They studied, as was done in Greece, as a pastime, without any view to useful application, or only with views of ambition. They learned rhetoric, dialectics; they disputed over the sovereign good; they practiced seducing the multitude by the artifice of language and of studied discourses; they had legists, orators, sophists, poets, musicians; but, as for truly enlightened men capable of making useful applications of their knowledge, hardly any could be formed: it is only among industrious peoples that studies, well directed, can produce true enlightenment, and that they lead to happy applications [^187] .Let us add that, in the time when the warlike life of the Romans prevented in them the development of all industry, the regime of slavery produced the same effect among their slaves, and that thus they deprived themselves of the faculty of serving themselves, without truly acquiring that of being served by others. One knows what the effects of servitude are on the enslaved man: if it brutalizes the master, it brutalizes the slave far more surely. In slavery, man has almost no interest in developing his forces: the fear of punishment, far from exciting him to show his power, counsels him on the contrary to disguise it: “he would put himself in the wrong by a work of supererogation; he would, in showing his capacity, only raise the measure of his duties. An inverse ambition is thus established, and industry aspires to descend rather than to ascend [^188] .”

Thus, wherever the Romans substituted slaves for free men, one saw it decline very rapidly. Agriculture was equally in decadence. Every time, says Hume, that the agronomists of antiquity complain of the diminution of wheat in Italy, they do not fail to attribute this decrease in territorial wealth to the introduction of servile exploitation [^189] . Slavery had, in this regard, such effects, that Italy ended by becoming almost as unproductive as the Roman countryside is today, and that instead of exporting wheat, as it had done for some time, it was obliged to count for its subsistence on the harvests of Barbary, Egypt, and Sicily [^190] .

The effects of slavery did not stop there. The population declined no less rapidly than the means of subsistence. In vain did the Roman legions engage in the slave trade and send to Italy entire nations reduced to servitude; they could not suffice for the frightful consumption of men that slavery and misery caused, and the number of artisans and cultivators went on ceaselessly decreasing. It was the same with free men: it was necessary to draw citizens from without, as one drew from it foodstuffs and slaves; and the sovereign people, recruited at first in Italy, was then recruited in the provinces, and then among the barbarians.

“The entire nation,” says a publicist, “disappeared little by little by the effect of this odious regime. One no longer found Romans except in Rome, Italians except in the great cities. A few slaves still guarded a few herds in the countryside; but the rivers had broken their dikes, the forests had extended into the meadows, and the wolves and boars had retaken possession of the ancient domain of civilization [^191] .

Such were, relative to industry, to wealth, to population, the effects of war and of slavery.

§ 7. Add that this system, so contrary to the industry of the Romans, was no less fatal to their morals.

I know that peoples who found their existence on the spoliation and enslavement of other nations can sometimes reconcile a great rigidity of morals with the taste for brigandage. So long as these peoples have to do with poor populations, who have few things to give them, and who know how to energetically defend what they possess, it is necessary by necessity that they accustom themselves to living on little. But this frugality is not ordinarily a very meritorious virtue; it lasts only as long as it is forced [^192] ; and if the same peoples succeed in subjugating opulent nations, and in placing themselves in a situation where they can enjoy with some security the fruit of their rapines, one will see them give themselves over to incredible profusion, orgies, and debauchery. This is what all histories of military races show, and the Roman more than any other. The Romans were models of temperance and even of austerity, so long as they had to fight only the Aequi, the Volsci, the Latins, the Samnites, who, ceaselessly defeated, ceaselessly returned to the charge, and who sold them very dearly victories that produced nothing. But when they had finally submitted Italy, when they had vanquished Carthage, when they no longer had any enemies capable of resisting them, when they were tranquil in their power and had brought to Rome the spoils of the earth, they fell into a horrible dissolution of morals. These disorders were the entirely natural consequence of their mode of existence. It was not their riches that corrupted them, as has been so much written, and as is still repeated: it was the manner in which they had procured them. Men enjoy with moderation only the goods they have acquired with honor. It is with booty taken in war as it is with money won at gambling, as with sums extorted from the nations one oppresses: one almost always dissipates in a shameful manner what one has procured in a shameful manner. It is not possible that men depraved enough to found their existence on pillage, theft, the levying of illegitimate tributes, should be at the same time pure enough to make a moral use of goods so immorally acquired.

The way of life of the Romans therefore did not only make of them ignorant men; it tended to make of them also dissolute men, and one understands well enough that it could not procure for them the kind of liberty that is born of the good use one makes of one's faculties in relation to oneself.

§ 8. Finally, it could still less give them that which results for men from the inoffensive use they make of their faculties among themselves.

Far from using their forces thus, the Romans made the most unjust and most aggressive use of them. Their very object was the spoliation and enslavement of the world. Now, it was not possible that they should thus do violence to the entire universe, without placing themselves in an extremely violent situation.

We have seen in what manner they needed to be ordered to make war with success. Wishing to enslave others, they were obliged to begin by enchaining themselves. They needed, as in an army, to be classed, regimented, subordinated to one another, to multiply above themselves arbitrary and unlimited powers, to renounce all individual independence, to exist in a way only in abstraction and as a member of the organized mass of which they were a part; to submit, finally, to the most tyrannical wills of this mass of men, or rather to those of the ambitious men it gave itself for directors and for masters.

This was the price at which the Romans could despoil and enslave other peoples. The more they wished to be strong for domination, the less liberty they could have. Liberty did not enter into the object of their institution; it was not possible; it would even have been fatal; for it would have weakened the warlike spirit and relaxed the nerve of discipline. It would have been against nature to wish to give independence to individuals in a social state where individuals, always engaged in military expeditions, needed, by that very fact, to form a compact and very strongly constituted mass.

I have spoken of the exorbitant powers that the necessity of discipline had caused to be established; but have I enumerated the arbitrary and violent acts that it caused to be committed? A father exiled his children, he inflicted upon them the forced labors of slaves, he condemned them to perish by the hand of the executioner. A censor degraded without formality a senator, a knight, a citizen; he interfered in all the details of private life, and forbade the most innocent acts or commanded those that morally had nothing obligatory about them. Did the last ranks of the army fall into destitution? one proceeded to expropriations to re-establish an impossible equality between fortunes; one decided that no one could possess beyond a certain extent of land, and one took the excess from those who had it to distribute it to the poor citizens. Did war, slavery, vice, misery reduce the number of citizens and soldiers? one made ridiculously vexatious laws to constrain people to marry and to procreate many children. One time, one regulated how one could travel; another time, how one would be clothed; another time, the expense one could make for one's table and the number of guests it would be permitted to receive there. There was really neither property, nor security, nor liberty; no account was taken of that: everything was sacrificed to the maintenance of discipline and to the good constitution of the army.

And it was not only because of this arbitrariness that the Romans were little free. Remark that in submitting to this harsh regime the bulk of the army derived almost no profit from it. In this domination, as in all, the subaltern agents obtained only a very small share of wealth and authority. The spoils of the vanquished enemies were distributed there, as elsewhere the contributions levied on peoples: the large lots were for the general staff of the army, for the consuls, the senate, the patricians; the people, the soldiers, received scarcely enough to live. One would have feared, doubtless, in enriching them, to weaken in them that useful love of conquests and of pillage on which the fortune of the elevated classes depended. Never has an aristocracy made a harsher, more iniquitous, more haughty use of its ascendancy than the Roman aristocracy. Such was the abasement in which it held the people, that marriages between persons of the patrician class and of the plebeian class had ended by being regarded as unions against nature; and that when these sorts of alliances were authorized, it was claimed that monsters would come from them [^193] . Such was the haughtiness of the chiefs, even in the time of the republic, that when a consul happened to pass, every citizen had to move aside from the road, uncover his head, rise from his seat or dismount from his horse. Whoever had neglected to give him these marks of deference and respect would have been promptly recalled to his duty by the lictors: the praetor Lucullus not having risen, at a moment when he was rendering justice, before the consul Acilius, the latter had his curule chair broken on the spot [^194] . There is perhaps no country where a more arbitrary authority was exercised with harsher and more imperious forms. It was properly the regime of a Tartar camp.

Dependent in a thousand respects as individuals, the Romans were not even free as a body of the nation. Their social existence was perpetually threatened, from within by the slaves and the proletarians, from without by the enemies that their ambition ceaselessly stirred up.

One knows what the republic had to fear from the slaves. Despair often gave them arms, says Gibbon, and their uprising more than once put the State on the brink of its ruin. They were judged so formidable that one dared not distinguish them by a particular dress. It was thought that the day they could perceive their number, their masters would be exposed to the greatest perils [^195] . It was necessary to make terrible laws to shelter oneself from their enterprises, and to act with them as with mortal enemies. They could be, for slight failings, tortured, whipped, marked on the face with a hot iron, condemned to turn the millstone [^196] . It was established that if a master was killed in his dwelling, and the murderer was not discovered, all the slaves could be put to death; and Tacitus speaks of a case where four hundred slaves were executed for the sole reason that their master had perished and they had not made known the author of the murder [^197] . These were the extremities to which one was reduced. One feels that such atrocities, far from increasing the security of the citizens, must have completed its destruction: it was, observes Montesquieu, when the Romans had lost for their slaves all the sentiments of humanity that one saw born those servile wars that have been compared to the Punic wars [^198] .

The security of the Roman people, so gravely threatened by its slaves, was even more so by its proletarians. Although in the beginning the lands had been fairly equally divided, there was soon established between fortunes that inevitable inequality, which no good institution could entirely prevent [^199] , but which iniquitous institutions almost always favor; and one saw in Rome, as elsewhere, and in a much more clear-cut manner than elsewhere, the population divided between a small number of rich people and a mass of miserable citizens. In a country where the useful arts had not been debased and abandoned to slaves, this latter class of individuals could have found in industry a resource against indigence, and in becoming less to be pitied it would have been less to be feared. But possessing nothing and engaging in no labor, this beggarly and proud populace could not fail to make itself in the end very formidable. It did not cease to contract debts that it had no means of discharging, and which became between it and its creditors an inexhaustible source of violent quarrels. One was obliged, to stifle its clamors, to give it regular alms which served only to increase it and to render it more and more threatening. Doubtless, in the state of destitution in which it found itself, and in which an avaricious and cruel policy perhaps strove to keep it, it offered to the ambition of the senators a powerful lever for the conquest and oppression of the world; but also what a point of support against the republic did it not present to discontented ambitious men? It could be used for civil war as for foreign war; it was the instrument of intrigues, of conspiracies, of discords; “it became the paid auxiliary of a Marius and a Sulla, of a Caesar and a Pompey, of an Octavius and an Antony;” and after having submitted the universe to Rome, it ended by putting Rome under the feet of the most execrable tyrants.

Finally, while the system of the Romans maintained among them two classes of such formidable enemies, it did not cease to stir up for them from without enemies still more dangerous. The Romans, says Montesquieu, were in an eternal and always violent war; they did not have time to breathe; they had to make a continual effort; exposed to the most frightful vengeances if they were vanquished, they had imposed upon themselves the terrible obligation of always vanquishing; they could make peace only as victors; they were obliged to prodigies of constancy [^200] . One can judge the violence of their situation by that of the laws they had made against anyone who shirked military service... Finally, after having been constantly, during the long course of their triumphs, under the moral oppression of ever-imminent perils, they ended by suffering in their turn as many material violences as they had made others suffer. Victors of the civilized world, they knew only how to deliver it to the yoke of the barbarians. Nothing equaled the degradation, the shame, and the misfortune of their last moments.

§ 9. This is how the Romans were free, these models, according to Rousseau, of all free peoples. We see in summing up that the system of war and slavery on which they had founded their subsistence was directly opposed to the progress of their industry and their ideas, that it tended no less strongly to the depravation of their morals, that it obliged them to submit to the harshest and most arbitrary social regime, that it stirred up for them from within and from without the most dangerous enemies; that finally, after having filled their existence with trouble, corruption, and violence, it ended by bringing about their total destruction [^201] .

§ 10. It would be easy for me, if I wished to insist on the subject I am treating, to show that slavery had at first been as fatal to the Greeks as it was later to the Romans.

The citizens of the Greek cities, provided by slaves with the things necessary for life, and freed in this regard from all labor and all care, employed their time in war, in the exercise of the rights of the city, in the pursuit of magistracies, in struggles of ambition, in intestine quarrels; or else they divided their leisure between the exercises of gymnastics and the study of the sciences they called liberal, that is to say, of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, music, and a few other arts, which they cultivated only as a pastime and solely for their pleasure.

This manner of being, which at first formed warriors and later rhetoricians, sophists, poets, artists, opposed insurmountable obstacles to the true development of the peoples who had adopted it. It was destructive of all peace and all order; it allowed for the progress of neither population, nor wealth, nor morals, nor the useful arts, nor true knowledge. Thus the Greeks never acquired these elements of strength and liberty except in a very imperfect manner. They consumed their lives in quarrels or in vain disputes. They were at first entirely military, and then, when war had enriched them, they gave themselves over to dangerous pleasures and to frivolous exercises, in which they lost their ancient warlike energy, without acquiring the strength, the instruction, the wealth, the good moral habits that the practice of industry would have given them. This is what explains in part their fall and that of most of the peoples of antiquity: it is the history of all military societies [^202] .

§ 11. One circumstance prevents slavery from being as fatal in America as it was in Europe in antiquity; it is the manner in which one procures slaves there. They are obtained by commerce, and not by war; they are bought, and not conquered. The Creoles are not, as the Greeks and Romans were, military peoples, devoted to brigandage and domination; their title is that of planters, of colonists; they are entrepreneurs of industry; only their workers are slaves bought from kings of Africa, who make war for them.

[^188]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, by Fergusson, part. II, sect. 2. [^189]: Essais moraux et politiques, vol. I, p. 415. [^190]: Gibbon, Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, chap. 2. [^191]: Revue encyclopédique, t. XL, p. 121. [^192]: Esprit des Lois, book V, chap. 3. [^193]: Titus Livius, book IV, chap. 6. [^194]: Valerius Maximus, book II, chap. 2. [^195]: Seneca, De Clementia, book I, chap. 24. [^196]: Esprit des Lois, book XV, chap. 16. [^197]: Tacitus, Annales, book XIV, chap. 43. [^198]: Esprit des Lois, book XV, chap. 16. [^199]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, by Fergusson, part. III, sect. 2. [^200]: Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la décadence des Romains, chap. 1. [^201]: Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, by Gibbon, chap. 9. [^202]: Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, by Gibbon, chap. 9.This way of life is less bad than that of the ancients: there is less external war and internal discord, which ambition must have continually stirred up among men for whose activity there was, in each State, only a single career open, that of government. However, slavery still has, in the parts of America where it exists, very grave consequences; it is for the inhabitants a cause of inactivity, of carelessness, of incapacity; it corrupts their morals, it compromises their security; finally, it has this particular and terrible quality, that one cannot quite know how to destroy it, and that this shameful plague of America seems to be forever incurable. The gradual abolition of slavery would have been easy among the ancients, where the masters had for slaves men of their color and of their race. But what is to be done where the slaves are of another race and another color? To remove them while emancipating them? that, in many cases, would be impracticable: there are countries in America where they form almost the entirety of the working class and the bulk of the population. To emancipate them and keep them? but what would be, in the midst of a people of blacks delivered from the bonds of servitude, and become gradually proprietors and citizens, the fate of the small number of whites who had been their masters, especially if these whites feared to degrade themselves by allying with them, and would not suffer the mixing of the races [^203]? One will turn for a long time in the difficulties of this question before finding a good way out of it; it is the despair of the most enlightened statesmen of North America.

§ 12. I will not follow the effects of slavery in all the countries where it has existed; as it was not established in similar circumstances, and has not been the same everywhere, one feels that its results must have varied greatly. But slavery has general effects that are reproduced equally everywhere; everywhere it has the effect of stupefying and depraving the populations it supports, of opposing the progress of their industry, of their private morals, of their social habits, and of thus preventing in them the development of the causes from which we know all liberty flows.

“In a hot climate,” says Mr. Jefferson, “no man works if he can compel another to work for him.” This is true in all possible climates. Wherever men can compel others to work for them, it is very rare that they instruct themselves, that they become industrious, that they render themselves capable of anything useful. “Inactivity of the mind,” as an economist observes, “is the consequence of that of the body: with whip in hand, one is dispensed from intelligence.”

I add that it is no easier for these men to acquire morals than industry; they are in a position that tends directly to corrupt their morals. A master can with impunity abuse the women he holds in servitude: how could he be continent? What he harvests has cost him no effort: how would he use it with measure? He lives in a habitual state of idleness: how would he not have the vices that indolence and idleness engender [^204]?

Finally, if it is difficult, in such a situation, to contract good personal habits, it is perhaps more so still to form good social habits.

“The commerce between the master and the slave,” says Jefferson, “is a continual exercise of the most violent passions on the part of the former, and of the most abject submission on the part of the latter. Our children, who have this spectacle before their eyes, soon follow the example that is given them. The head of the family flies into a rage against his slave: the child observes him; he imitates in the movements of his face the features of the irritated master, and soon takes on the same air in the circle of young slaves who surround him. He thus learns to give free rein to his most dangerous passions; and raised in the practice of injustice, exercised daily in tyranny, he remains, so to speak, marked by their most odious traits. The man placed in such circumstances would be a prodigy if he preserved the goodness of his character and his morals [^205].”

In sum, ignorance, incapacity, softness, ostentation, iniquity, violence, this is what slavery naturally tends to give to the populations that make it their resource.

§ 13. And yet it is true to say that, when this new mode of existence came to be established among men, one was closer to liberty than one had been in previous epochs, where the most general custom was still to massacre prisoners. The slaves, servi, were, as the word indicates, men who had been preserved, servati, and the act of making serfs, which seems to us with reason the most savage thing in the world, was, in the beginning, an act of humanity and a trait of civilization [^206].

The destination given to the slaves rendered this trait still more favorable to liberty. At the age of society that I am describing, the man of war did not preserve his prisoners to associate them with his brigandage or to make them simple keepers of herds, he preserved them to apply them to the cultivation of the soil, to the exercise of various trades and, little by little, to all those labors from which has emerged in time the civilization of the human species.

In truth, these men did not work for themselves; they worked only under constraint; but it was still better that they be enslaved, than if they had been killed, and that everything had remained, as before, in brigandage. In the bosom of such a barbarism, the introduction of slavery was a happy innovation, and the custom of condemning the vanquished to labor was, without contradiction, a great step towards liberty. The essential thing was that, in one way or another, industry should become the principal resource.

Doubtless, it would have been still better if all had ceased to make war, and if, instead of seeking to enslave one another, each had subjected himself to labor; but it was not in the nature of the species to make such a great progress all at once; such a change was still very far from being possible; it was a great deal that one ceased to exterminate prisoners, and that one took it into one's head to reduce them to servitude.

I do not even know, to tell the truth, if it was not indispensable to begin there. Besides the fact that at an age of society where passions were still so ardent, no one perhaps would have spontaneously and of his own free will condemned himself to the patient labors of the sedentary life, he who would have done so would have infallibly, and after a very short time, become the prey of the peoples who remained barbarous. It was therefore necessary, even with the intention of civilizing oneself, if one could have been preoccupied with such a care from then on, to limit oneself to reserving for useful occupations the enemies one had vanquished, and to continue oneself to remain fit for war.

Surely, this was not advancing much; but perhaps it was all that one could do, and this little was already something. Not only, through the institution of slavery, were there men usefully occupied; but these men could work with some security under the protection of their masters, who, in oppressing them for their own account, were nonetheless interested in preserving them from all foreign trouble. In addition, by the effect of this protection and of the fixity of the establishments, some accumulations became possible, and this prepared many other progresses.

Moreover, these slaves, who at first work only for others, will one day work for themselves. They are weak, they will become strong; they are at the sources of life, of light, of wealth, of power: it is only necessary to inspire in them the desire to draw from them, and the masters themselves will one day feel the need to inspire this desire in them. Wishing to stimulate their activity, they will relax their chains a little; they will leave them a part of the wealth they have created. The latter will conserve these feeble products; they will increase them by labor and by saving, and one day the slowly accumulated fruits of their peculium will suffocate those of violence and usurpation. Slaves in antiquity, the men of industry will be no more than tributary serfs in the Middle Ages; then they will become the freedmen of the communes, then the third estate, then the whole of society.

It is here, it is among the peoples maintained by slaves, it is in the very bosom of slavery that the industrious life really begins, the only one, as we shall soon see, where men can give a great scope to their faculties, acquire good moral habits, prosper without doing each other mutual harm; the only one, consequently, where they can become truly free.

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Notes

[^166]: M. Comte would seem not to adopt this idea. He posits as fact that civilization first developed in the countries most favorable to cultivation, and he seems to suppose that it developed there freely, that there were at first no slaves, that all men there devoted themselves to labor; but that industry, having given rise in them to qualities different from those needed for warfare, they were subsequently unable to defend themselves against peoples placed in less favorable circumstances who had preserved the habits and talents of barbarism. Hence, according to M. Comte, the origin of slavery. It was at first the work of civilization, which then reacted against it, and little by little became strong enough to destroy it. [^168]: Id., ib. [^169]: Voltaire says, speaking of Genghis Khan: “In his conquests he did nothing but destroy, and if one excepts Bokhara and two or three other cities whose ruins he permitted to be rebuilt, his empire, from the frontiers of Russia to those of China, was a devastation.” (Ess. on Morals, ch. 60.) [^170]: All the Romans demanded was to force their enemies to surrender. Thus they condemned those who laid down their arms to a less rigorous slavery than those they took on the battlefield or after the assault of a city. The former, whom they called dedititii [surrendered peoples], retained a kind of liberty; the latter were sold as slaves. (Tit.-Liv., book 5, ch. 22, and book 7, ch. 31.) [^171]: Before the Romans, Italy, Greece, Sicily, Asia Minor, Spain, Gaul, and Germania were full of small peoples and teemed with inhabitants..... All these small republics were swallowed up in a great one, and one saw the universe imperceptibly become depopulated... “I will be asked,” says Livy, “where the Volsci could have found enough soldiers to make war, after having been so often vanquished. There must have been an infinite people in those lands, which would today be but a desert, without a few Roman SOLDIERS and SLAVES.—The oracles have ceased, says Plutarch, because the places where they spoke “are destroyed: one would scarcely find three thousand men of war in Greece today.—I will not describe, says Strabo, Epirus and the surrounding places, because these countries are entirely deserted. This depopulation, which began long ago, continues every day, so that the Roman soldiers have their camp in the abandoned houses. Strabo finds the cause of this in Polybius, who says that Paulus Aemilius, after his victory, DESTROYED SEVENTY CITIES OF EPIRUS, AND CARRIED OFF ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND SLAVES... One would have said that the Romans had conquered the world only to weaken it and deliver it defenseless to the barbarians.” (Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, book XXVIII, ch. 18, 19 and 23.) [^172]: Adam’s Roman Antiquities, vol. II, p. 389 of the Fr. transl. [^173]: Id., ibid. [^174]: Ibid. [^175]: Id., pp. 389 and 390. [^176]: Essays, vol. I, part 2, Essay XI, p. 434. [^177]: V. Adam’s Roman Antiquities. [^178]: From the reign of Numa to that of Augustus, in an interval of seven hundred years, the temple of Janus was closed only twice: the first time under the consulate of Manlius, at the end of the first Punic war, and the second time under Augustus himself, after the battle of Actium. (Tit.-Liv., I, 10.) [^179]: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, b. 2, ch. 3, § 1.—Tit.-Liv., I, 42 and 43. [^180]: Livy, III, 20; XXII, 38. [^181]: The censors were former generals who had passed through all the ranks of the army. They were ordinarily taken from consular families. (Livy, IV, 8; VII, 22.) [^182]: Plutarch’s Illustrious Men, life of Marc. Cat. [^183]: Senatu ejiciebant, equum adimebant, tribu movebant, ærarium faciebant. (Tit.-Liv.) [They expelled men from the Senate, took away their horse, moved them from their tribe, and made them aerarii (the lowest class of taxpayer).] [^184]: Cic., pro Caecina, 34. Tit.-Liv., IV, 53. [^185]: M. de Constant finds that, while appearing here to refute Condorcet, M. de Sismondi, and himself, I am really only taking possession of their ideas. It seems to me, with all due respect to him, that this is to correct his predecessors, not to plunder them. I agree with M. de Constant neither on the goal he supposes for the activity of the ancient peoples, nor on the meaning of the institutions by which he claims they tended toward this goal. He believes that for the Romans it was a matter of political liberty: I believe it was a matter of making conquests, of practicing brigandage. He believes it was to be politically free that they had renounced all individual independence: I believe it was to be stronger as an army. What relation is there between his ideas and those I am developing? If it had been a matter for the ancients only of playing, so to speak, at national sovereignty, of amusing themselves by making laws and rendering judgments, they would not have needed for that to submit to so many constraints, to so many tyrannical institutions: they could have, like us, made political activity serve to protect private independence. But it was a matter of warring, of invading territories, of subjugating populations, and for that one could not too much constrain individuals, nor subject the entire body of citizens to too severe a discipline. [^186]: Plut., life of Marc. Cat. [^187]: V. further on, chap. XI. [^188]: Bentham, Treatise on Legislation, vol. II, p. 183 et seq. [^189]: Essay XI, p. 504. [^190]: Roman Antiquities, vol. II, 429. [^191]: Sismondi, New Principles of Political Economy, vol. I, p. 113. Inquiries conducted by England show us to what extent slavery is fatal to the population in the colonies. In Tortola, Demerara, and Jamaica, the black population diminishes continually and can only be maintained at the same level by the slave trade. The average loss, for all the English colonies, minus Barbados and the Bahama islands, is eighteen thousand slaves every three years. And the proof that this decrease in the black population is due solely to its state of servitude is that it has made considerable progress in Haiti since it was emancipated there. At the beginning of the French revolution, the total population of the latter island was only six hundred and sixty-five thousand souls, and despite the series of bloody expeditions that devastated it from that time until 1809 when the French expedition was expelled, the population there now rises to more than nine hundred and thirty-five thousand souls. (See the Edinburgh Review of July 1825.) [^192]: Here is what a skilled painter of morals says, speaking of the Scottish Highlanders, at a time when war was still their principal industry: “Waverley could not believe his eyes; he could not reconcile this singular voracity (of the Highlanders) with what he had heard of their frugal life; he was unaware that their sobriety was only apparent and forced, and that, like certain animals of prey, the Highlanders knew how to fast when necessary, reserving the right to compensate for this abstinence when they found the opportunity.” (Waverley, or Scotland Sixty Years Since.) This is the frugality we admire in the first Romans and in the heroic times of Greece: this is what we call "the 'beautiful antique'." The morals described here by Walter Scott are entirely in the taste of those of Homer's heroes. [^193]: Proles secum ipsa discors. (Livy.) [^194]: Adam’s Roman Antiquities, vol. I, pp. 163 and 164. [^195]: Hist. of the Dec. of the Rom. Emp., vol. I, ch. 2. [^196]: Ibid. Rom. Ant., vol. I, p. 56. [^197]: Annals, XIV, 42. [^198]: Spir. of the Laws, book 15, ch. 16. [^199]: V. further on, ch. 12. [^200]: Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans, passim. [^201]: One of my critics, le Producteur, has strongly protested against this explanation of the economic regime of the Romans and the consequences of this regime. He, for his part, sees in this people's long effort to conquer the world nothing but an immense enterprise of philanthropy, a vast and noble attempt in favor of civilization. The great task that its genius had embraced was in conformity with the most general need of humanity; it was the necessary condition for all subsequent progress, etc. So it was to ensure the future progress of civilization that the Romans began by stifling it wherever it had arisen, that they destroyed a multitude of small republics in Italy, that they overthrew Carthage, that they subjugated Greece, that they massacred millions of men, that they reduced an even greater number to servitude. At the bottom of all this, according to le Producteur, was a great philanthropic thought. The Romans were animated by the general sentiments that dominated their time, and the only thing that distinguishes them from the other peoples of that age is to have conceived more virilely the passions that then reigned. (V. le Prod., vol. II, p. 462 et seq.) [^203]: See Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, p. 212. [^204]: The moral and religious state of the whites (in Jamaica) is, like that of the blacks, as bad as can be imagined. Almost all the whites attached to the plantations live publicly in concubinage with black women or women of color: in this respect, the corruption is general. Instead of being called to the holy duties of maternity, young female slaves are delivered, from the most tender age, and prostituted by their masters to the friends they wish to please. Of twenty whites who disembark in the colony, nineteen have their morals ruined before they have spent a month there... Among the slaves, marriage has no laws; the women say they are not foolish enough to stick to a single man; thus their engagements with the other sex are only temporary and have nothing obligatory in their eyes... Any foreigner who comes to visit a planter and who sleeps at his house is in the habit, when going to bed, of having a young black girl brought to him with as little ceremony as he would ask for a candle; and when he does not ask for one, one is offered to him; it is a customary politeness. Thus acts to which, in all civilized societies, the most shameless libertines only indulge in under the shadow of mystery, are committed in the open, and are fashionable even within the most honorable families.” (From The Present State of Slavery in the United States and the West Indies, by Cooper. I lack this work, and I cite it from the Rev. Brit., vol. 7, p. 129.) [^205]: Notes on Virginia, p. 212. The cruelty of the treatment almost always inflicted upon enslaved men stems from the particular nature of this species of serfs, who are much more generous and more difficult to subdue than the other animals devoted to domestic servitude. A master can, strictly speaking, treat his horse, his dog, his donkey humanely: he need not fear that those slaves will conspire and revolt; but he cannot be so tranquil about the submission of the beings like himself whom he holds in bondage: as their nature is nobler, he feels he has more to do to subjugate them, and he treats them with inhumanity precisely because they are men. There are slave owners who would rightly pass for furious madmen, worthy of being forever interdicted, if they took it into their heads to treat their beasts as they sometimes treat their people. [^206]: Servi autem ex eo appellati sunt quod imperatores captivos vendere, ac per hoc servare, nec occidere solent. Justin., Instit. lib. I, tit. 3, § 3.