, was not a step towards the suppression of
slavery, but a natural and inevitable sequence of the institution
itself,--an outlet for excess in an epoch overabundant in slaves: a
means of renewing the mass, corrupted by the deleterious influence
of its own condition, before it should be totally ruined. As water,
diverted from its free course, becomes impure in the basin which
imprisons it, and when released, will still retain its impurity; so
it is not to be thought that instincts perverted by slavery, habits
depraved from childhood, could be reformed and redressed in the slave
by a tardy liberation. Thrust into the midst of a society itself
vitiated by the admixture of slavery, he only became more
unrestrainedly, more dangerously bad. Manumission was thus no remedy
for the deterioration of the citizens: it was powerless even to better
the condition of the slave."[364]

3. The ethical aspect of Roman slavery. What were the moral effects of
the system (1) on the slaves themselves; (2) on the freemen who owned
them?

First, as regards the slaves themselves, there are two facts to be
fully realised; when this is done, the inferences will be sufficiently
obvious. Let us remember that by far the greater number of the
slaves, both in the city and on the land, were brought from countries
bordering on the Mediterranean, where they had been living in some
kind of elementary civilisation, in which the germs of further
development were present in the form of the natural ties of race and
kinship and locality, of tribe or family or village community, and
with their own religion, customs, and government. Permanent captivity
in a foreign land and in a servile condition snapped these ties once
and for all. To take a single appalling instance, the 150,000 human
beings who were sold into slavery in Epirus by the conqueror of Pydna,
or as many of them as were transported out of their own country--and
these were probably the vast majority,--were thereby deprived for the
rest of their lives of all social and family life, of their ancestral
worship, in fact of everything that could act as a moral tie, as a
restraining influence upon vicious instincts. With the lamentable
effect of this on the regions thus depopulated we are not here
concerned, but it was beyond doubt most serious, and must be taken
into account in reckoning up the various causes which later on brought
about the enfeeblement of the whole Roman Empire.[365] The point for
us