of the masses. "The people," as spoken of by their historians and
philosophers, mean simply a middle class, the humblest member of which
owned at least one slave. The slaves themselves, the real "masses," had
no political or social existence more than the horses with which they
were sent to the river to drink. In any scheme of political economy
Aristotle's words, in the first book of the "Politics," were the
keynote: "The science of the master reduces itself to knowing how to
make use of the slave. He is the master, not because he is the owner of
the man, but because he knows how to make use of his property."

In fact, according to this chivalrous philosopher, the man was the head
of the family in three distinct capacities; for he says: "Now a freeman
governs his slave in the manner the male governs the female, and in
another manner the father governs his child; and these have the
different parts of the soul within them, but in a different manner. Thus
a slave can have no deliberative faculty; a woman but a weak one, a
child an imperfect one."

That liberty could be their right appears to have been not even
suspected. Yet out from these dumb masses of humanity, regarded less
than brutes, toiling naked under summer sun or in winter cold, chained
in mines, men and women alike, and when the whim came, massacred in
troops, sounded at intervals a voice demanding the liberty denied. It
was quickly stifled. The record is there for all to read; stifled again
and again, from Drimakos the Chian slave to Spartacus at Rome, yet each
protest from this unknown army of martyrs was one step onward toward the
emancipation to come. In each revolution, however small, two parties
confronted each other,--the people who wished to live by the labor of
others, the people who wished to live by their own labor,--the former
denying in word and deed the claim of the latter.