alk, run, and show their paces like
horses for sale. Many had their ears bored--a sign of servitude from the
time of Moses--and others were seamed with scars of the cruel lash.
This, however, lessened their market value, as it was evidence of their
intractable and troublesome character.

Slavery was, at the time of which we write, one of the greatest evils of
the Roman empire. It was a deadly canker, eating out the national life.
It cast a stigma of disgrace on labour, and prevented the formation of
that intelligent middle class which is the true safeguard of liberty.
Never in the history of the world was society so based upon the abject
misery of vast multitudes of human beings. The slaves outnumbered, many
times, their masters. They were forbidden to wear a peculiar garb, lest
they should recognize their numbers and their strength, and rise in
universal revolt. As it was, servile insurrections were of frequent
occurrence. But they were crushed and punished with ruthless severity.
In one slave revolt, 60,000 of these wretched beings were slain. The
first question about a man's property was, _"Quot pascit servos?"_--"How
many slaves does he keep?" Ten was considered the least number
consistent with any degree of respectability. Four hundred slaves
deluged with their blood the funeral pyre of Pedanius Secundus. Vidius
Pollio fed his lampreys with the bodies of his human chattels. A single
freed-man left over 4,000 at his death. Some 2,000 men were lords of the
Roman world, and the great mass of the rest were slaves. Their condition
was one of inconceivable wretchedness. They had no rights of marriage,
nor any claim to their children. Their food was a pound of bread a day,
with a little salt and oil. Flesh they never tasted, and even wine,
which flowed like water, almost never. Colossal piles, built by their
blood and sweat, attest to the present day the bitterness of their
bondage. The lash of the taskmaster was heard in the fields, and
crosses, bearing aloft their quivering victims, polluted the wayside.

This dumb, weltering mass of humanity, crushed by power, and led by
their lusts, became a hot-bed of vice, in which every evil passion grew
apace. To these wretched beings came the gospel of liberty, with a
strange, a thrilling power. The oppressed slave, in the intervals of
toil or torture, caught with joy the emancipating message, and sprang up
enfranchised by an immortalizing hope. He exulted in a new-found freedom