ost voluminous ethicists have scarcely touched upon
as yet. It is a commonplace saying that each age has its own standards
of right and wrong, but little effort has been made, if we except the
Socialists, to trace this fact to its source, to the economic conditions
prevailing in the different ages.[122] Still less effort has been made
to account for the different standards held by the different social
classes at the same time, and by which each class judges the others. In
our own day the idea of slavery is generally held in abhorrence. There
was a time, however, when it was almost universally looked upon as a
divine institution, alike by slaveholder and slave. It is simply
impossible to account for this complete revolution of feeling upon any
other hypothesis than that slave-labor then seemed absolutely essential
to the life of the world. The slave lords of antiquity, and, more
recently, the Southern slaveholders in our own country, all believed
that slavery was eternally right. When the slaves took an opposite view
and rebelled, they were believed to be in rebellion against God and
nature. The Church represented the same view just as vigorously as it
now opposes it. The slave owners who held slavery to be a divine
institution, and the priests and ministers who supported them, were just
as honest and sincere in their belief as we are in holding antagonistic
beliefs to-day.

What was accounted a virtue in the slave was accounted a vice in the
slaveholder. Cowardice and a cringing humility were not regarded as
faults in a slave. On the contrary, they were the stock virtues of the
pattern slave and added to the estimation in which he was held, just as
similar traits are valued in personal servants--butlers, waiters,
valets, footmen, and other flunkies--in our own day. But similar traits
in the slaveholder, or the "gentleman" of to-day, would be regarded as
terrible faults. As Mr. Algernon Lee very tersely puts it, "The slave
was not a slave because of his slavish ideals and beliefs; the slave was
slavish in his ideals and beliefs because he lived the life of a
slave."[123]

In the industrial world of to-day we find a similar divergence of
ethical standards. What the laborers regard as wrong, the employers
regard as absolutely and immutably right. The actions of the workers in
forming unions and compelling unwilling members of their own class to
join them, even resorting to the bitter expedient of striking against
them wi