28
woman during marriage in that of her husband. Or consider, as a third instance, but unum de multis, the powerful hold which the idea of aristocracy, as implying a superior quality of blood in so-called old families, still has on the popular mind of the West, America not excluded.
It has
The foregoing will, I trust, suffice to show that the term "slavery" is bound up with the peculiar development of the social life and the legal theories of the progressive Societies of the West. Indeed, such a peculiar meaning is attached to it that one ought to hesitate before applying the term rashly to the corresponding relation of a social organism like that of China, which had an entirely different history and has hitherto been socially unconnected with those highly developed Societies. But I believe also to have shown that in Greek, Roman, and modern society, the practice of slavery always required some ingenious justification before the tribunal of the moral sense; in other words, that ever since the social organisms of the West emerged from archaic patriarchalism, so long retained by the ancient Romans, and especially by the Sclavonians and a few other Indo-Germanic nations, slavery had no natural place in them. Its gradual dissolution was but a question of time.
Whilst thus the idea of absolute rights inherent in men and the recognition of the absolute equality of every human being has been slowly and gradually evolved in the West and thereby procured, in the course of ages, the virtual abolition of slavery, we find an entirely different development of the same ideas in China. That flower and fruit of modern Christian civilization, the practical realization of the consciousness of the common fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man, as the heirloom of every human creature, has been the very seedcorn and root from which the Chinese social organism has sprung up.
That Heaven and Earth are the common parent of all human creatures, that all men within the four seas (i.e., all people that on earth do dwell) are brethren, is the keynote of the religious, social, and political teaching of the most ancient Chinese Classics. In that ancient period of Chinese history, which is still looked upon as the classical norm and guide for the present and future, the Chow dynasty (founded 1122 B.C.), slavery was abolished in every form except that of the condemned criminal. Although slavery was re-established by the Han dynasty (3rd century B.C.), which developed the patria potestas to such an extent as to give parents the right to sell their children in case of extreme poverty, and although slavery, in a certain form and to a certain extent, has existed in China ever since, yet it is necessary to observe the radical differences which separate the system of slavery in vogue in China from that of the West. To understand, however, the exact position which the slave occupies in the social organism of China, we must first of all observe the point at which social life in China has arrived in its process of evolution from barbarism.
The stage which China, two thousand years ago, reached in the history of its social and political development and in which it has on the whole remained ever since, through its inveterate habit of looking to the past for an ideal of the present, is correctly designated by the term "patriarchalism," though the social organism in its ceaseless absorption of new ideas is gradually breaking through the bondage of patriarchalism in sundry points. The main idea of Chinese patriarchalism is that the male parent, as the patriarch of a definite family household, is the representative of the "family" which is the principal organized expression of the State. The supremacy of the male parent is enhanced by the necessity of continued sacrifices to the spirits of deceased ancestors. There lies, therefore, at the bottom of this system of patriarchalism the political necessity of a unitary household, as the substratum of the State, and the religious necessity of a positive central authority for sacred rites. The patriarch is thus invested with a power over every member of his family, consisting of one or more wives, children, grandchildren, and so forth, also of hired servants and possibly slaves, every one of whom has a fixed relation to the "family," guaranteed by the whole social state, and all are subject to the same patria potestas. In a State thus based on patriarchalism, the idea of personal liberty, of absolute rights possessed by every individual, as conceived by the civilization of the West, has no apparent room, although it is contained in it as the leaf is contained in the plant at every stage of its growth. Nor is there any room for that absolute slavery which for so many centuries disfigured Western civilization. Every member of the family or household, the wife, the concubine, the child, the servant, the slave, merges his or her individual existence in the "family," which is legally the only "person" existing in China. The Chinese mind cannot comprehend any basis for individual relations apart from the relations of the family. Yet each individual has a definite place as a person, not as a property, reserved to him in this imperium in imperio, the empire of the pater familias, which place is guaranteed to him and guarded by the State. None is indeed sui juris, for all under the patria potestas, but the latter has its fixed limits. The mother, although but a purchased Agnate, becomes the depositary of the patria potestas with the death of the father. The father of the family himself, although endowed with the jus vitae necisque, is for every exercise of his power affecting the life of any one subject to his patria potestas, answerable to the State. Moreover, he has as many duties as he has rights. He is solidarily responsible for any crime committed by any member, servant, or slave of his family, whereby crime becomes a corporate act and the extent of moral responsibility, thus laid upon the house-father, a serious burden. In a family thus constituted, none can be free, but at the same time, the bondage under which all are, in their several ways, is not a mark of tyranny, but of religious unity, a bond of equality and mutual regard.
It must be clearly understood, however, that the "family," which thus forms the unit of the Chinese system of patriarchalism, is not what we understand to be a family, but strictly speaking, one of those legal fictions with which the Chinese social system, like every other archaic organism, abounds. The Chinese family really means the circle of those who are under one and the same patria potestas, whether
by gift or purchase. Such
The son differs
they came under this power by procreation, by agnation, by adoption, or a "family" may be a combination of many households, of brothers and their descendants in two or more generations, not necessarily dining at the same table, not necessarily tilling the same fields, but held together by common subjection to the same patria potestas and the common use of the same ancestral hall with the common worship of the same oldest ancestral tablet. This explains the common occurrence in our Law Courts of half a dozen men, acknowledging each to be the son of a different father, yet persisting in calling themselves brothers. The purchased slave, the hired domestic, the wife, are as truly related to the head of such a family as the latter's own son, differing from the family slave only by the nearer chance he has of wielding some day himself the patria potestas. It seems strange to us, brought up, as we are, in the ideas of cognate relationship, but it is nevertheless a fact that simple purchase and adoption—which latter is invariably a money bargain—should constitute kinship, so much so, that law and custom make no distinction whatever between adoptive and real connection, and that the purchased slave enters into the circle of relationship in the family. Few foreigners have comprehended the extent of social equality which this conception of the family practically engenders. The amount of influence which woman, bought and sold as she is, really has in China, and there within her proper sphere, within the family, is little understood. The depth of domestic affection, of filial piety, of paternal care, which is ingrained in every member of this colossal aggregation of families called China, has never been fathomed yet, and is almost unintelligible to the members of modern European Societies, which in their haste to constitute a social order, in which every personal relation shall be based on the free and intelligent agreement of individuals, almost forget that they are building up the rights of the individual on the ruins of the family and developing social equality and individual liberty at the expense of domestic affections and filial piety. Who would glibly decide that this modern intellectual individualism of the West, with all the development it has wrought in science and mechanics, is an undoubted advance upon the filial piety and intuitive faith of Chinese patriarchalism?
Having thus a definite place within the pale of the family, and thereby secured against being reduced to the condition of mere chattelhood, though subject to a patria potestas which is shared in by every other member of the family, the Chinese family-slave has not a position peculiarly galling. His master is of the same blood with him. Slavery in China is not an incident of race as in the West but an accident of misfortune. The master knows that any turn of fortune may reduce him to the position of a slave. The slave knows that his master, though he be the highest official in the Empire, is under the same patria potestas in relation to the Emperor, in which he, the slave, stands in relation to his master. There is really little in the position of a Chinese family-slave which allows a close comparison with the condition of a slave under the Roman Law, or of a negro in the hands of his West-Indian or American master. Considering that the legal definition of the term slavery (see Wharton, Law Lexicon, London, 1872) is "that civil relation in which one man has absolute power over the life, fortune, and liberty of another," the question arises, can such a position as that occupied by the Chinese slave be seriously called slavery, in the legal acceptation of the term, or is it not rather the position of a bond-servant than a slave that he occupies?
To answer this question, it is necessary to define exactly who are slaves in China, how such the existing system of domestic slavery arises or perpetuates itself, and then place side by side with servitude as it practically obtains in China.
The only classes of persons in China answering to some extent the aforementioned legal definition of the term slavery are convicts, eunuchs, and persons who sold themselves into or were born in hereditary family-slavery. Chinese convicts, as also occasionally prisoners of war, are sometimes attached, in the position of slaves, to military stations on the frontier, or presented to military officers on the frontier as domestic slaves. They are treated as outlaws, but may not be killed with impunity. Most of them eventually become permanent settlers and have their liberty restored to them, or they may be pardoned and return as free men to their families. Female convicts also are occasionally sold into domestic slavery in official families. But if such a female slave is given in marriage, she becomes free, and if she bears a son to a free man, whether as wife or concubine, that son may succeed to his father's property. As to eunuchs, who are principally employed in the Imperial Palace, or in the Palaces of the Princes, who are by law bound to keep and supply eunuchs, they are either provided by parents who have their children made eunuchs to secure to them the easy life in the Harem, or they are persons who for some reason or other submitted to the same operation, or they are the sons of rebels who were made eunuchs by order of the Government. These eunuchs, though the victims of a barbarous custom, are not outside the pale of the family, and occupy a fixed position in it guaranteed by the law. As to private or ordinary domestic slaves, not being convicts, it must be understood, in the first instance, that no free parent can sell his children into hereditary slavery. The law, whilst recognizing and legalizing hereditary slavery, severely punishes any tendency to mix the once existing social ranks. Hereditary slaves, therefore, if not convicts, are either born in hereditary slavery or they are persons who deliberately sold themselves into such slavery, by stress of poverty or with a view to gain the protection of a wealthy family. Such a sale must be the free and voluntary act of the individual, must have the sanction of him who wields the patria potestas over the individual, and the deed must be approved, stamped, and registered in a public Court. The owner of such a slave is bound by custom to provide him with a wife, and the descendants of such a marriage are then hereditary slaves.
As
28
woman during marriage in that of her husband. Or consider, as a third instance, but unum de multis, the powerful hold which the idea of aristocracy, as implying a superior quality of blood in so-called old families, still has on the popular mind of the West, America not excluded.
It has
The foregoing will, I trust, suffice to show that the term "slavery" is bound up with the culiar development of the social life and the legal theories of the progressive Societies of the West. indeed such a peculiar meaning attached to it that one ought to hesitate before applying the term rashly to the corresponding relation of a social organism like that of China which had an entirely different history and has hitherto been socially unconnected with those highly developed Societi But I believe also to have shown that in Greek, Roman and modern society the practice of slavery always required some ingenious justification before the tribunal of the moral sense; in other words, that ever since the social organisms of the West emerged from archaic patriarchalism, so long retained by the ancient Romans, and especially by the Sclavonians and a few other Indo-Germanic nations, slavery had no natural place in them. Its gradual dissolution was but a question of time.
Whilst thus the idea of absolute rights inherent in men and the recognition of the absolute equality of every human being has been slowly and gradually evolved in the West and thereby procured, in the course of ages, the virtual abolition of slavery, we find an entirely different development of the same ideas in China. That flower and fruit of modern Christian civilization, the practical realisation of the consciousness of the common fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man, as the heirloom of every human creature, has been the very seedcorn and root from which the Chinese social organism has sprung up.
That Heaven and Earth are the common parent of all human creatures, that all men within the four seas (1. e. all people that on earth do dwell) are brethren, is the keynote of the religious, social and political teaching of the most ancient Chinese Classics. In that ancient period of Chinese history, which is still looked upon as the classical norm and guide for the present and future, the Chow dynasty (founded 1,122 B. C. ), slavery was abolished in every form except that of the condemned criminal. Although slavery was re-established by the Han dynasty ( 3rd century B. C.), which developed the patria potestas to such an extent as to give parents the right to sell their children in case of extreme poverty, and although slavery, in a certain form and to a certain extent, has existed in China ever since, yet it is necessary to observe the radical differences which separate the system of slavery in vogue in China, from that of the West. To understand, however, the exact position which the slave occupies in the social organism of China, we must first of all observe the point at which social life in China has arrived in its process of evolution from barbarism.
The stage which China, two thousand years ago, reached in the history of its social and political development and in which it has on the whole remained ever since, through its inveterate habit of looking to the past for an ideal of the present, is correctly desiguated by the term "patriarchalism." though the social organism in its ceaseless absorption of new ideas is gradually breaking through the bond- age of patriarchalism in sundry points. The main idea of Chinese patriarchalism is that the male parent, as the patriarch of a definite family household, is the representative of the "family" which is the prin- cipal organized expression of the State. The supremacy of the male parent is enhanced by the necessity of continued sacrifices to the spirits of deceased ancestors. There lies therefore at the bottom of this system of patriarchalism the political necessity of a unitary household, as the substratum of the State, and the religious necessity of a positive central authority for sacred rites. The patriarch is thus in- vested with a power over every member of his family consisting of one or more wives, children, grand- children, and so forth, also of hired servants and possibly slaves, every one of whom has a fixed relation to the "family," guaranteed by the whole social state, and all are subject to the same patria potestas. In a State thus based on patriarchalism the idea of personal liberty, of absolute rights possessed by every individual, as conceived by the civilization of the West, has no apparent room, although it is contained in it as the leaf is contained in the plant at every stage of its growth. Nor is there any room for that absolute slavery which for so many centuries disfigured Western civilization. Every member of the family or household, the wife, the concubine, the child, the servant, the slave, merges his or her individual existence in the "family," which is legally the only "person" existing in China. The Chinese mind cannot comprehend any basis for individual relations apart from the relations of the family. Yet each individual has a definite place as a person, not as a property, reserved to him in this imperium in imperio, the empire of the pater familias, which place is guaranteed to him and guarded by the State. None is indeed sui juris, for all under the patrit potestas, but the latter has its fixed limits. The mother, although but a purchased Agnate, becomes the depositary of the patria potestas with the death of the father. The father of the family himself, although endowed with the jus rite necisque, is for every exercise of his power affecting the life of any one, subject to his patria potestas, answerable to the State. Moreover he has as many duties as he has rights. He is solidarily responsible for any crime committed by any member, servant, or slave of his family, whereby crime becomes a corporate act and the extent of moral responsibility, thus laid upon the house-father, a serious burden. In a family thus constituted none can be free, but at the same time the bondage under which all are, in their several ways, is not a mark of tyranny, but of religious unity, a bond of equality and mutual regard.
It must be clearly understood, however, that the "family," which thus forms the unit of the Chinese system of patriarchalism, is not what we understand to be a family, but strictly speaking, one of those legal fictions with which the Chinese social system, like every other archaic organism, abounds. The Chinese family really means the circle of those who are under one and the same patria potestas, whether
necessar
by gift or purchase. Such
The son differs
they came under this power by procreation, by agnation, by adoption, or a "family" may be a combination of many households, of brothers and their descendants in two or more generations, not necessarily dining at the same table, not necessarily tilling the same fields, but held together by common subjection to the same patria potestas and the common use of the same ancestral hall with the common worship of the same oldest ancestral tablet. This explains the common occurrence in our Law Courts of half a dozen men, acknowledging cach to be the son of a different father, yet persisting in calling themselves brothers. The purchased slave, the hired domestic, th wife, are as truly related to the head of such a family as the latter's own son. from the family slave only by the nearer chance he has of wielding some day himself the patria potestus. It seems strange to us, brought up, as we are, in the ideas of cognate relationship, but it is nevertheless a fact that simple purchase and adoption-which latter is invariably a money bargain- should constitute kinship, so much so, that law and custom make no distinction whatever between adoptive and real connection, and that the purchased slave enters into the circle of relationship in the family. Few foreigners have comprehended the extent of social equality which this conception of the family practically engenders. The amount of influence which woman, bought and sold as she is, really has in China, and there within her proper sphere, within the family, is little understood. The depth of domestic affection, of filial piety, of paternal care, which is ingrained in every member of this collossal aggregation of families called China, has never been fathomed yet, and is almost unin- telligible to the members of modern European Societies which in their haste to constitute a social order, in which every personal relation shall be based on the free and intelligent agreement of indi- viduals, almost forget that they are building up the rights of the individual on the ruins of the family and developing social equality and individual liberty at the expense of domestic affections and filial piety. Who would glibly decide that this modern intellectual individualism of the West, with all the development it has wrought in science and mechanics, is an undoubted advance upon the filial piety and intuitive faith of Chinese patriarchalism?
Having thus a definite place within the pale of the family, and thereby secured against being reduced to the condition of mere chattelhood, though subject to a patria potestas which is shared in by every other member of the family, the Chinese family-slave has not a position peculiarly galling. His master is of the same blood with him. Slavery in China is not an incident of race as in the West but an accident of misfortune. The master knows that any turn of fortune may reduce him to the position of a slave. The slave knows that his master, though he be the highest official in the Empire, is under the same patria potestas in relation to the Emperor, in which he, the slave, stands in relation to his master. There is really little in the position of a Chinese family-slave which allows a close comparison with the condition of a slave under the Roman Law, or of a negroe in the hands of his West-Indian or American master. Considering that the legal definition of the term slavery (see Wharton, Law Lexicon, London, 1872,) is that civil relation in which one man has absolute power over the life, fortune and liberty of another," the question arises, can such a position as that occupied by the Chinese slave be seriously called slavery, in the legal acceptation of the term, or is it not rather the position of a bond-servant than a slave that he occupies?
To answer this question, it is necessary to define exactly who are slaves in China, how such the existing system of domestic slavery arises or perpetuates itself, and then place side by side with servitude as it practically obtains in China.
The only classes of persons in China answering to some extent the aforementioned legal defini- tion of the term slavery are convicts, eunuchs, and persons who sold themselves into or were born in hereditary family-slavery. Chinese convicts, as also occasionally prisoners of war, are sometimes attached, in the position of slaves, to military stations on the frontier, or presented to military officers on the frontier as domestic slaves. They are treated as outlaws, but may not be killed with impunity. Most of them eventually become permanent settlers and have their liberty restored to them, or they may be pardoned and return as free men to their families. Female convicts also are occasionally sold into domestic slavery in official families. But if such a female slave is given in marriage, she becomes free, and if she bears a son to a free man, whether as wife or concubine, that son may succeed to his father's property. As to eunuchs, who are principally employed in the Imperial Palace, or in the Palaces of the Princes, who are by law bound to keep and supply eunuchs, they are either provided by parents who have their children made eunuchs to secure to them the easy life in the Harem, or they are persons who for some reason or other submitted to the same operation, or they are the sons of rebels who were made eunuchs by order of the Government. These eunuchs, though the victims of a barbarous custom, are not outside the pale of the family, and occupy a fixed position in it guaranteed by the law. to private or ordinary domestic slaves, not being convicts, it must be understood, in the first instance, that no free parent can sell his children into hereditary slavery. The law, whilst recognizing and legalizing hereditary slavery, severely punishes any tendency to mix the once existing social ranks. Hereditary slaves, therefore, if not convicts, are either born in hereditary slavery or they are persons who deliberately sold themselves into such slavery, by stress of poverty or with a view to gain the protection of a wealthy family. Such a sale must be the free and voluntary act of the individual, must have the sanction of him who wields the patria potestas over the individual, and the deed must be approved, stamped and registered in a public Court. The owner of such a slave is bound by custom to provide him with a wife and the descendants of such a marriage are then hereditary slaves.
As
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