applies to slaves, but there is a difference: for the animal is only guided by instinct, whereas the slave, though he does not partake of reason, can apprehend reason. Where, then, one class of men presents a marked inferiority to another, there slavery is justified. And nature probably intended to make a visible distinction between freeman and slave, but she has not always succeeded, for some slaves have the souls or bodies of freemen, (and some freemen the souls or bodies of slaves.

H

On the other hand it has been argued that there is a slave by c. 6. law as well as by nature. But this doctrine is indignantly denied by many jurists, who contend that to make the captive taken in war the slave of the victor is an act of great injustice. The question runs up into the wider question: What is justice?what Some say that virtue when furnished with external goods is power, and that justice is only the rule of a superior; while others distinguish between justice and virtue, and assert justice to be benevolence. If these two propositions are simply opposed, the result is an absurdity. For the truth of a third proposition [which combines them], viz. that the benevolent rule of a superior in virtue is just, can hardly/ be contested. Others again appeal to custom, which they identify with justice; but this is a view which cannot be consistently maintained. For a war which is justified by custom may nevertheless be an unjust war, or the person enslaved may be unworthy to be made a slave. 'Hellenes never can be slaves;' they are noble everywhere, even when taken in war; but the barbarians are noble only in their own country. Does not this use of language clearly imply that there are two classes of men, the slave by nature, and the freeman by nature? And where there is a marked superiority in one class and a marked inferiority in another, there the relation of master and slave springs up; and this relation, when arising naturally and not resting merely on law and force, is a kindly and beneficent one. [In slavery then the rule of the superior is combined with benevolence; and therefore on both grounds it is justice.]

The question respecting the different kinds of rule on which we c. 7. touched before is now set at rest. The master has been shown to exercise an absolute rule over his slaves, unlike the constitutional

B

rule which the statesman exercises over his fellow-citizens. And master and slave receive their name, not from any science or art which is possessed by either of them [as Plato imagined], but because they are of a certain character. (There might indeed be a science of another sort, which would teach the master how to give his orders and the slave how to execute them; this science would include cookery and other menial arts. And there might also be a science or art of slave-hunting, which would be a kind of war. But enough of this subject.)

1.

In the opening of the Politics there are many indications of the strife of opinion and uncertainty of language which prevailed in the time of Aristotle. In the first page the writer strikes a note of hostility against Plato, which is repeated at intervals throughout the treatise. Yet the views of Aristotle and Plato respecting the kinds or degrees of governments are not essentially different; the opposition between them was exaggerated, if not invented, by their respective followers. From this almost verbal controversy, he passes on to consider the intentions of nature in the creation of society. But the word nature was ambiguous in ancient no less than in modern times, and was variously used to signify 1) the undeveloped or inchoate, 2) the final or perfect nature. The state and the family are both said to exist by nature; but the state in a higher sense than the family:... The distinction between men and animals is seen to be the gift of language by which the sphere of human nature is enlarged and rendered capable of good and evil. This distinction is here limited by Aristotle to that part of language which is concerned with our moral ideas. We should rather say that through language man attains to the expression of general and universal conceptions not only in morals, but in all things (cp. Met. 1..6. § 2). The true method of enquiry, according to Aristotle, is the analysis of the whole into its parts; but he does not see that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, and that the parts are changed by their relation to one another. As well might we suppose that we could analyse life into the chemical elements which are the conditions of life, or detect the mind in the

nerves which are its instruments, as imagine that the state was only a compound of families and villages.ters of prits (veece you exon 20

Yet there is likewise in Aristotle's Politics a consciousness that the whole is prior to the parts, and that the synthetical method must be combined with the analytical. Though imperfectly expressed, the perfect image of the state in which' every means is an end, and the end the sum of the means,' is already present to his mind. The two aspects of the truth are placed side by side, but they are not yet harmonised or brought into relation with one another. Aristotle is thought to have been the first who based knowledge on experience, but ever and anon the ideal or poetical image which was always latent in Greek philosophy, though clothed in an unpoetical dress, and reduced to a skeleton, returns upon him. It would have been a surprise to himself, and still more to his school, if he could have recognised how nearly he approached in reality to some of those conceptions on which he was making war. For example, when he speaks of a whole prior to the parts, what does this mean but the idea of the state prior to the existence of it in fact? The conception of the perfect man whose single virtue exceeds that of all other men put together, and who therefore has a natural right to rule, is even more extravagant than the rule of philosophers in the Republic of Plato.

The accustomed' method of dividing the whole into its parts is logical rather than historical: that is to say, they are the parts into which it can be dissected, not the elements out of which it has 4 grown. It is like the carving of some noble victim, according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not breaking any part, as a bad carver might.' (Phaedrus, 265 E.) But it is not the historical method which resolves institutions and facts into their antecedent elements. Aristotle does not investigate the origins of states, but only divides a genus into species or a larger whole or form into the lesser parts or unities of which it is made up, or shows how an existing state may be preserved or destroyed. We must not expect him to give an analysis of primitive society, such as would be found in a modern writer on anthropology. His observation and experience were almost confined to Hellas. The earliest forms of property and society were unknown to him.

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7

He does not appear to have heard of marriage by capture,' and does not distinguish endogamy' and 'exogamy.' The horror naturalis, which forbids marriage within near degrees of relationship, was to him an established fact. He seems to have supposed that there existed from the first some rude form of the family, like that of the Homeric Cyclops, in which the individual savage gave the law to his own household. But he does not examine how this lowest form of human society passed into the village and the village into the state. Nor does he seriously attempt to gather the ancient customs of Hellas from the usages of the contemporary barbarians, although he occasionally lights upon this path of enquiry, which had been already indicated both by Thucydides с and Plato. Nor does it occur to him that the ties of family or

caste may be so strong, that the growth of the state is stunted by them; nor, on the other hand, that the life of cities may be so intense as to make any larger political unity impossible.

He tries to distinguish between instruments of production and action, and almost in successive sentences he implies that the slave is and is not both. There is a similar confusion in the opposition which he attempts to make between the artisan and the slave. Nor is the distinction between the slave who can only apprehend reason and the freeman who partakes of reason anything more than a verbal quibble. Both partake of reason in different degrees. He argues, again, that the slave being a possession and belonging to another is necessarily the minister of action. But the notion that a possession is a minister of action rather than of production is a fancy of his own; and he appears to forget at the moment that the artisan, who, if any one, may be termed a minister of production, was often a slave. Here, as in c. 13, he is contrasting the slave and the artisan on the ground that the true slave, not the artisan, derives an inspiration from his master. Such confusions we must admit to have existed in the mind of Aristotle, if we would attain any degree of clearness in the interpretation of his writings.

Respecting slavery, Aristotle arrives at a definite conclusion which, though unsatisfactory to us, satisfies himself. But he has not clearly separated his own view from that of his opponents. His conclusion is that slavery is right when intended by nature;

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and the manifest inferiority of certain races is regarded by him
as the proof that nature intended them to be slaves. But the
captive taken in war, unless he were of inferior race, was only
accidentally a slave. The slavery of Barbarian to Greek was
natural; the slavery of Greek to Greek was arbitrary and cruel.
He implies, though his meaning is obscurely expressed, that the
two opposite views, ‘justice is benevolence,' 'justice is the rule of a(k)

superior,' must be combined.

We are interested to remark that in the age of Aristotle there were some Greeks who would have maintained that slave-hunting was a lawful employment, and that there were also anti-slavery philosophers or sophists in the days before the Stoics, who asserted freedom to be the birthright of all mankind. Either of these extreme views was repudiated by him; his sense of justice revolted from the former, and he probably regarded the latter as too much at variance with the actual condition of the world. How could the 400,000 Athenian slaves ever be emancipated?

12.

How could the Greek enjoy cultivated leisure, which the was a necessity to him, when deprived of them? How could the barbarians of Illyria and Scythia be transformed into civil⚫ized beings? (If at all,' he would perhaps have replied,

'by subjection to the superior reason of an Hellenic master.') The question which has been asked in modern times, whether society could exist without domestic service?-may illustrate the manner in which a moderate thinker of the school of Aristotle would have regarded the existence of slavery in ancient Hellas. The difficulties which existed in the management of slaves at Lacedaemon were sufficient to show that they were a dangerous element in the state, a troublesome sort of cattle,' as Plato calls them. It is however remarkable that neither at Athens nor at Corinth, notwithstanding their enormous numbers and their constant employment in naval and other warfare, do we find any attempt at organised revolt among them, nor does any mention occur of their ill-treatment by the state. It may be further noted that Aristotle, in the Seventh Book, proposes the emancipation of individual slaves as the reward of good conduct-the door of hope was never to be closed-this is a first principle to be always

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