their dormitories, with those who were porters chained to the doorways. It was a society of slavery—fighting slaves, working slaves, cultivating slaves, official slaves, and Gibbon adds that the Emperor himself was a slave, "the first slave to the ceremonies he imposed." Great and penetrating as were many of the minds of antiquity, none of them show much conception of any condition of society in which the economic impulse could replace physical compulsion.54 Had they been told that the time would come when the world would work very much harder under the impulse of an abstract thing known as economic interest, they would have regarded such a statement as that of a mere sentimental theorist. Indeed, one need not go so far: if one had told an American slaveholder of sixty years ago that the time would come when the South would produce more cotton under the free pressure of economic forces than under slavery, he would have made a like reply. He would probably have declared that "a good cowhide whip beats all economic pressure"—pretty much the sort of thing that one may hear from the mouth of the average militarist to-day. Very "practical" and virile, of course, but it has the disadvantage of not being true.
The presumed necessity for physical compulsion did not stop at slavery. As we have already seen, it was accepted as an axiom in statecraft that men's religious beliefs had to be forcibly restrained, and not merely their religious belief, but their very clothing; and we have hundreds of years of complicated sumptuary laws, hundreds of years, also, of forcible control or, rather, the attempted forcible control of prices and trade,