(except so far as limited by express compact) between a
commonwealth and its subjects, or other independent commonwealths;
the banishment of that primitive law even from so narrow a field,
commenced the regeneration of human nature, by giving birth to
sentiments of which experience soon demonstrated the immense value
even for material interests, and which thence forward only required
to be enlarged, not created. Though slaves were no part of the
commonwealth, it was in the free states that slaves were first felt
to have rights as human beings. The Stoics were, I believe, the
first (except so far as the Jewish law constitutes an exception)
who taught as a part of morality that men were bound by moral
obligations to their slaves. No one, after Christianity became
ascendant, could ever again have been a stranger to this belief, in
theory; nor, after the rise of the Catholic Church, was it ever
without persons to stand up for it. Yet to enforce it was the most
arduous task which Christianity ever had to perform. For more thana
thousand years the Church kept up the contest, with hardly any
perceptible success. It was not for want of power over men's minds.
Its power was prodigious. It could make kings and nobles resign
their most valued possessions to enrich the Church. It could make
thousands in the prime of life and the height of worldly
advantages, shut themselves up in convents to work out their
salvation by poverty, fasting, and prayer. It could send hundreds
of thousands across land and sea, Europe and Asia, to give their
lives for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. It could make
kings relinquish wives who were the object of their passionate
attachment, because the Church declared that they were within the
seventh (by our calculation the fourteenth) degree of relationship.
All this it did; but it could not make men fight less with one
another, nor tyrannise less cruelly over the serfs, and when they
were able, over burgesses. It could not make them renounce either
of the applications of force; force militant, or force triumphant.
This they could never be induced to do until they were themselves
in their turn compelled by superior force. Only by the growing
power of kings was an end put to fighting except between kings, or
competitors for kingship; only by the growth of a wealthy and
warlike bourgeoisie in the fortified towns, and of a plebeian
infantry which proved more powerful in the field than the
undisciplined chivalry, was the insolent tyranny of the nobles over
the bourgeoisie and peasantry brought within some bounds. It was
persisted in not only until, but long after, the oppressed had
obtained a power enabling them often to take conspicuous vengeance;
and on the Continent much of it continued to the time of the French
Revolution, though in England the earlier and better organisation
of the democratic classes put an end to it sooner, by establishing
equal laws and free national institutions. 

If people are mostly so little aware how completely, during the
greater part of the duration of our species, the law of force was
the avowed rule of general conduct, any other being only a special
and exceptional consequence of peculiar ties---and from how very
recent a date it is that the affairs of society in general have
been even pretended to be regulated according to any moral law; as
little do people remember or consider, how institutions and customs
which never had any ground but the law of force, last on into ages
and states of general opinion which never would have permitted
their first establishment. Less than forty years ago, Englishmen
might still by law hold human beings in bondage as saleable
property: within the present century they might kidnap them and
carry them off, and work them literally to death. This absolutely
extreme case of the law of force, condemned by those who can
tolerate almost every other form of arbitrary power, and which, of
all others presents features the most revolting to the feelings of
all who look at it from an impartial position, was the law of
civilised and Christian England within the memory of persons now
living: and in one half of Anglo-Saxon America three or four years
ago, not only did slavery exist, but the slave-trade, and the
breeding of slaves expressly for it, was a general practice between
slave states. Yet not only was there a greater strength of
sentiment against it, but, in England at least, a less amount
either of feeling or of interest in favour of it, than of any other
of the customary abuses of force: for its motive was the love of
gain, unmixed and undisguised; and those who profited by it were a
very small numerical fraction of the country, while the natural
feeling of all who were not personally interested in it, was
unmitigated abhorrence. So extreme an instance makes it almost
superfluous to refer to any other: but consider the long duration of
absolute monarchy. In England at present it is the almost universal
conviction that military despotism is a case of the law of force,
having no other origin or justification. Yet in all the great
nations of Europe except England it either still exists, or has
only just ceased to exist, and has even now a strong party
favourable to it in all ranks of the people, especially among
persons of station and consequence. Such is the power of an
established system, even when far from universal; when not only in
almost every period of history there have been great and well-known
examples of the contrary system, but these have almost invariably
been afforded by the most illustrious and most prosperous
communities. In this case, too, the possessor of the undue power,
the person directly interested in it, is only one person, while
those who are subject to it and suffer from it are literally all
the rest. The yoke is naturally and necessarily humiliating to all
persons, except the one who is on the throne, together with, at
most, the one who expects to succeed to it. How different are these
cases from that of the power of men over women!I am not now
prejudging the question-of its justifiableness. I am showing how
vastly more permanent it could not but be, even if not justifiable,
than these other dominations which have nevertheless lasted down to
our own time. Whatever gratification of pride there is in the
possession of power, and whatever personal interest in its