Claudius was the first defender of this shameful practice." "Discharge your old workman," says the economist of the proprietary school; "turn off that sick domestic, that toothless and worn-out servant.

Put away the unserviceable beauty; to the hospital with the useless mouths!" "The condition of these wretched beings improved but little under the emperors; and the best that can be said of the goodness of Antoninus is that he prohibited intolerable cruelty, as an ABUSE OF PROPERTY.
_Expedit enim reipublicae ne quis re re sua male utatur_, says Gaius.
"As soon as the Church met in council, it launched an anathema against the masters who had exercised over their slaves this terrible right of life and death.

Were not the slaves, thanks to the right of sanctuary and to their poverty, the dearest proteges of religion?
Constantine, who embodied in the laws the grand ideas of Christianity, valued the life of a slave as highly as that of a freeman, and declared the master, who had intentionally brought death upon his slave, guilty of murder.

Between this law and that of Antoninus there is a complete revolution in moral ideas: the slave was a thing; religion has made him a man." Note the last words: "Between the law of the Gospel and that of Antoninus there is a complete revolution in moral ideas: the slave was a thing; religion has made him a man." The moral revolution which transformed the slave into a citizen was effected, then, by Christianity before the Barbarians set foot upon the soil of the empire.

We have only to trace the progress of this MORAL revolution in the PERSONNEL of society.