of many centuries had to intervene, before what seemed so very nearly won, in the early Church, could be finally established.

We can see how the different races of the barbarians, one by one, abandoned their savage slave customs. Even as early as 662, among the Alamanni, the slaves working on the Church estates were given, in addition to the Sunday day of rest, three whole days out of the six working days, in which to till their own plots of land. This action of the Church was copied by the nobles and men of wealth, and thus by slow degrees the final step of slave emancipation was reached among the Northern barbarian races.

It is impossible, at this point, to do more than merely refer to one terrible later relapse into a new slave trade, with far more appalling suffering even than that of the Roman mines and galleys. This was the negro slavery which devastated Western Africa from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The one point that here needs emphasis is the fact that the change in European society, which brought about the abolition of negro slavery, was first wrought within. It was in the hearts of Clarkson and Wilberforce and a host of other workers, that the 'one incompatible idea' was implanted. It was only through this inner change of heart that the outward act of slave emancipation was effected.

The slow but certain solution of this old-world labour problem, by means of an ultimate revolution in the

inner hearts of mankind, should give us hope and encouragement in the face of that greatest Indian labour problem of our own age and generation-the problem of the depressed classes. The difficulties of the pariahs and namasudras, the millions of untouchables of India, can never be solved by external benefactions and charities, by patronising schools, by proselytising missions, or by political propaganda. The goal will be reached only by the renewed implanting, within the whole Indian community, of the 'one incompatible idea' of the brotherhood of man, which caste has tended to destroy.

THE

CHAPTER II

THE ROMAN WORLD

THE PROBLEM OF PROPERTY

HE question next in importance to that of slavery, which the Christian religion was called upon to

face, was its relation to trade, property and

wealth, the problem of Capital.

Among the ancient Jews, as among other great Eastern nations, an elaborate social organisation, which was codified in religious law, made any capitalistic system of trade and industry, carried out on an extensive scale, impossible. We shall come across the question of usury in a later chapter of this book. Here, I would merely point out a vital difference between the economics of the Eastern and the Western world at the time of the early development of Christianity.

In the Roman Empire, after the fall of the Republic, the social and religious restraints upon the accumulation of capital suddenly broke down. A scope for unlimited competition and for capitalism on a large scale became practical for the first time in the West. The opportunity was seized by greedy adventurers, and the noblest families in Rome succumbed to the temptation of getting rich quickly. This undermining of the whole economic structure of society began under Julius Caesar.

Augustus saw the danger and enlisted every support of literature and statesmanship in order to bring back the simpler living of the old Roman republican days. But the vicious circle of capitalism, once entered, is not easy to escape. Its effects in degrading the poor, in oppressing the slave, in establishing vast areas of luxurious wealth and abject poverty side by side as a normal social condition, so told upon the vital energies of the State, that without any external defeat the Empire fell to pieces by the accumulations of rottenness within. The barbarians were welcomed as deliverers by an enslaved people.

In the Eastern countries, generally, the reign of this capitalist system was probably never established in the same degree as under the Roman Empire in the West. We have now collected, for instance, a considerable amount of detailed knowledge about the Empire of Asoka in India. We can trace the bare outline of its economics, and we are astonished at the business capacity by which it centralised the administration. But though centralisation reigned supreme in almost every department, the village communal land tenure went on, unimpeded and unbroken, and there are no clear signs of the full capitalist system in operation. The picture we obtain is rather that of a modified State Socialism,— a picture differing entirely from that of the later Roman Empire.

The same story may be told of China. There, individual peasant proprietors remained undisturbed

in their possession of small holdings, while dynasties rose and fell. The whole structure of society prevented the growth of capitalism in land and made it difficult also in trade.

One of the central and distinctive marks of human history seems to be that the East has always been engrossed in religion. Religion, whether in Palestine, Persia, India, or China, has been intimately interwoven with the social and domestic life, making a dharma for each individual. Owing to this, the area of selfinterest has been strictly and duly limited. This social condition of the East, directly due to religious causes, had its counterpart in the Middle Ages of Europe. But in the Roman Empire and in the Modern Age, another form of society has prevailed, in which the individual has been far less bound by religious and social custom. Unlimited competition and unrestricted capitalism on a large scale have been made feasible in both these periods. Self-interest and self-seeking have tended to become almost completely unrestrained, and their gains have been protected by law. These are perhaps the only two ages of despotic capitalism in the recorded history of mankind.

The crying evils of the commercial and industrial life of the Roman Empire have already been noticed. The upstart millionaires, so well known to us from the pages of Martial and Juvenal, were monsters of shameless rapacity and insensate luxury, scarcely human at