archs; but many of these decrees were necessarily forced by motives of self-protection, on the part of a small but powerful and insolent ruling class. Under extraordinary conditions, a slave might break his chains, or a serf might rise up free; but aside from the mercies of the Church and the philanthropic ideals of a few noble spirits outside the Church, we cannot add that the historical evolution toward freedom here outlined was based to any great extent on what we today would call moral grounds. "First," says Vinogradoff, "we find the laborer as chattel at will; many centuries later, we see him working on the land under half-slave conditions, fixed both by custom and by law; and ultimately after frightful social revolutions he becomes a free agent, bound by contract. These grand historical evolutions presuppose centurylong upheavals in society - rioting, turbulence, famine, pestilence, bloodshed world without end. As before us pass in review centuries of turmoil, it is obvious that in the infinitely slow steps toward Democracy, the human mind has suffered even more than the racked and tortured human body. Through Bible stories and from other sources we hear much of mighty god-men among Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Medes and Persians, but in each case the overlord in his own person enacts the combined role of soldier, high-priest, king, and legislator. Whenever he delegates power to a lesser official, that man in turn rules as a despot accountable to the king only. The general purpose of the god-men was to collect tribute. They always had both hands out and their lips spoke the single monotonous word, Give. "There seemed to be very little disposition to interfere with the modes of life by the Ancient people, or of local governments, so long as tribute was paid (Allen, Evolution of Governments and Laws, p. 188). Egyptian conquests in Asia merely meant tribute from Asia to the Pharaohs, and when Egypt became subject to the Assyrians and afterwards to the Persians, Egypt paid tribute to the King. That all-powerful monarchs were regarded as gods that even after death would still rule their subjects through mysterious powers, is amply testified by very many sources throughout the Ancient World, for example, rock-cut Egyptian inscriptions. The messages are generally magical in purport, for the religion of ancient Egypt was saturated with belief in magic. "The great ancestor of Egyptian literature, the famous Book of the Dead, copies of which are found in the oldest tombs of the XI Dynasty, 2160 B. C. (Andrews, Brief Inst. of Gen. Hist.), dwells in detail on incantations having to do with the soul of the Dead, and recites the long and painful adventures which spirits were supposed to pass through, in making their way to the abode of Osiris." Man-gods dominated for centuries as soldier, priest, king and legislator combined, with despotic powers of life and death over the mass of servile society. Slaves and gods-slaves on one side, gods on the other. And both must be swept away. But when?-and how? CHAPTER III FIRST TRACES OF DEVELOPMENT In the Mother Land we find lash-driven "And it came to pass that as they journeyed from the East, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and dwelt there." Thus, in the usual terse summary (accept it or reject it, but do not argue it!) Hebrew scripture assigns beginnings of history for our race to the farfamed, remote and fruitful land of Shinar, in the TigrisEuphrates valley, beyond the headwaters of Persian gulf. Between two big rivers in the long, narrow valleys we find the birthplace of tribal names and dynasties. Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Babylon, are side by side. within a few hundred miles north and south; all part of the identical Mother Land at one time of the posterity of Nimrod and Noah. Yet geological science makes plain that mankind was on the Earth unnumbered centuries before the Hebrew record of Shinar. "Beginnings" of any human institution take us into mere conjecture. All prehistoric tribes trace their descent from heaven. This, of course, is mere obvious human self-conceit, but when the Mother Land emerges from the obscurity of an unknown past, we already find tribal peoples possessed of a relatively high degree of culture: flocks and herds, conceptions of the word "moral," ideals of domestic crafts, such as weaving and forging weapons of bronze, rudiments of agriculture-and the land is ruled by a military despot who, in addition, is usually the high-priest, therefore head of the national religious cult. We go into this, in passing, because the legend of Shinar pretends to dismiss, abruptly, something that at best is told to satisfy a vain human longing rather than to convince the inquiring mind. In the Ancient World, as organized, we find ourselves confronted by a social system that, whatever its primordial origin, is based on unlimited human slavery. Slave-hosts of Shinar were recruited from innumerable war-captives reduced to bondage under the necessary and obvious social system of the time. But the slave might be a superior man, degraded by the misfortunes of war. Then, too, customary practice demanded that the unfortunate debtor give himself as security for his loan, working out the debt under the lash of a master who saw to it that, as long as there was a breath of life in the slave's body, the old grudge would never be fully wiped out. * In the Mother Land the Common Man is branded like the ox, with the brand of his owner; is brother to the ox in the field. He lives in a tent or in the open; camel-driver or sheep-herder; nomad, wandering in gypsy bands; his dog, sheep, goat, eat and sleep beside him, are his constant companions. When the tribe tires of one spot, the camp is struck. Or, if the Common Man is in the king's city, the chances are that the Common Man is drudging to repair walls, or digging ditches, or is conscripted into the army. Whippers-in go through the camp before the battle and lash the soldiers to march out to slaughter. At least, whatever he was or was not, his pathetic history has never been written in detail; for heretofore writers of History have been so over-engaged with ambitions of kings, feuds of priests, politicians and philosophers, that the cause of the Common Man has never been regarded as of importance. Therefore, at this late century, to attempt to find out about him it is necessary to try to decipher picture-writing on old stones, find meanings in ancient mounds, reconstruct canals out of use 4,000 years, observe smoke-marks in caverns where the forgotten humans huddled against the winter's storms; and all these sources failing, we patch up broken pottery found in age-old Chaldean brick vaults of the dead. For in the Mother Land, as in Egypt and elsewhere at this remote period, the Ancients are best studied through relics found in depositories of the dead. Whatever else our great-ancestors wrought, their tombs and temples are their living monuments today: memorials of stone, brick, clay. In Chaldea, coffins for the Common Man were formed of two large jars placed mouth to mouth and cemented with bitumen. Over these clay coffin-jars they heaped earth and put in drain pipes, and then added more earth, to hide the spot from prying eyes. The peculiar fascination of the excavations has thus been commented on by a former worker for Field Museum, Chicago, after an exploring expedition in Palestine: "It used to be my special work when the graves were opened to gather up the dust into which the body had turned and sift it through my fingers to rescue the jewelry buried with the dead. There were bronze earrings, finger rings, armlets, anklets, and beads of various stones and shapes. The most striking adornment worn by the women was a long thin piece of gold, bound upon the forehead. It is almost certain that Sarah adorned herself with such an ornament." Thus we have to dig under the soil like moles, visiting the Land of Eternal Silence; and the side-walls of the higher-class Chaldean tombs are closed in, above, with an arch. The body was laid to rest on its left side on a matting of reeds, a brick under the head, and at the left a copper bowl, the fingers of the right hand placed on the bowl, as though ready to eat. Ornaments were scattered about, food and drink arranged conveniently near the corpse. It is plain from this that the people of that far-off time, 4000 B. C., believed that the Dead are still living, have merely fallen asleep; and at the right time, on waking up, will be hungry, eat and drink, and dress as in life, even down to putting on rings and bracelets; take up the bow and arrow, the spear or the war club, and call for the favorite dog or war horse whose bones are buried near at hand; and ride out into the world of light, to act |