now you hope for a second Spartacus? Or will you yourself lead a
rebellion of the slaves? You are the man for it, and I can be secret."

"If it has to be, why not?" he replied, and his eyes sparkled with a
strange fire. But seeing that she shrank from him, a smile passed over
his countenance, and he added in a soothing tone: "Do not be alarmed, my
child; what must come will come, without another Spartacus, or bloodshed,
or turmoil. And you, with your clear eyes and your kind heart, would you
find it difficult to distinguish right from wrong, and to feel for the
sorrows of others--? Yes, perhaps! For what will not custom excuse and
sanctify? You can pity the bird which is shut into a cage too small for
it, or the mule which breaks down under too heavy a load, and the cruelty
which hurts them rouses your indignation. But for the man whom a terrible
fate has robbed of his freedom, often through the fault of another, whose
soul endures even greater torments than his despised body, you have no
better comfort than the advice which might indeed serve a philosopher,
but which to him is bitter mockery: to bear his woes with patience. He is
only a slave, bought, or perhaps inherited. Which of you ever thinks of
asking who gave you, who are free, the right to enslave half of all the
inhabitants of the Roman Empire, and to rob them of the highest
prerogative of humanity? I know that many philosophers have spoken of
slavery as an injustice done by the strong to the weak: but they shrugged
their shoulders over it nevertheless, and excused it as an inevitable
evil; for, thought they, who will serve me if my slave is regarded as my
equal? You only smile at this confusion of the meditative recluses, but
you forget"--and a sinister fire glowed in his eyes--"that the slave,
too, has a soul, in which the same feelings stir as in your own. You
never think how a proud man may feel whose arm you brand, and whose very
breath of life is indignity; or what a slave thinks who is spurned by his
master's foot, though noble blood may run in his veins. All living
things, even the plants in the garden, have a right to happiness, and
only develop fully in freedom, and under loving care; and yet one half of
mankind robs the other half of this right. The sum total of suffering and
sorrow to which Fate had doomed the race is recklessly multiplied and
increased by the guilt of men themselves. But the cry of the poor and
wretched has gone up to heaven, and no