A brooch wrongly placed, a tress of hair ill-arranged, and the enraged matron orders her slave to be lashed and crucified.

If her milder husband interferes, she not only justifies the cruelty, but asks in amazement: "What! is a slave so much of a human being ?" No wonder that there was a proverb, "As many slaves, so many foes." No wonder that many masters lived in perpetual fear, and that "the tyrant's devilish plea, necessity," might be urged in favor of that odious law which enacted that, if a master was murdered by an unknown hand, the whole body of his slaves should suffer death,--a law which more than once was carried into effect under the reigns of the Emperors.
Slavery, as we see in the case of Sparta and many other nations, always involves its own retribution.

The class of free peasant proprietors gradually disappears.

Long before this time Tib.

Gracchus, in coming home from Sardinia, had observed that there was scarcely a single freeman to be seen in the fields.