CHAPTER I

EMPIRE

99

AND it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus that all the world should be taxed." Our attention is arrested by the audacity of the thing. "That all the world should be taxed!" The brazenness of the decree extorts a kind of admiration, like that extended to brigands who exhibit nerve in uncommon degree. That kind of admiration and no other. Because people to-day are under no illusion as to the nature of this "tax." Rome was under no illusion either. Whatever her faults, hypocrisy was not one of them. And this which our record pleasantly terms a "tax, was recognized by Rome herself as booty, plain and flat. No pretence that she was levying it on the peoples with their consent, or was to expend it for their benefit. It was the spoils of conquest, and was extracted at the point of the sword. It was a hold-up game - frankly admitted to be such by the "taxer," and howlingly described as such by the "taxed." Our wonder is not that the people howled. Our wonder is that they did not howl louder. That a small group on the banks of the Tiber could hold up "the whole world," argues a distinct decay of spirit in the people thus. held up. A lone wolf - the simile is Rome's; she traced her origin

to a she-wolf- a lone wolf prevails against a flock of a hundred sheep, not so much because of his wolfiness as because of their sheepiness.

But there was a stalwart little people in Rome's province of Syria who had not as yet so lost spirit as to concede the right of wolves to be wolves and of sheep to be sheep. This people was enrolled in the list of the conquered. But it had only been a conquest of territory. The soul was unsurrendered. And just about now to be exact, precisely during a journey on the part of his parents to pay this "tax" - there was being born in this unconquered race a leader who was to call back to self-respect the peoples thus subjugated, raising up in them once more a free spirit. In fact, knowing pre-natal influence as we now do, we can affirm that this particular "tax," dragging him as it did by the umbilical cord across the landscape of Syria, must have had something to do with moulding him into the economic out-and-outer which we behold him later. This "tax" was the first instance in history of brigandage on a world scale. It is more than an accident, therefore, that its incidence coincided with the gestation period of a child who as man was to vision a world-wide union of the toiling masses against the legalized brigandage which had its headquarters on the Tiber. For he felt the shock of this new and fateful force that had come into the world, while he was yet unborn, and at a time when, among most nations, even those but partially civilized, mother and child have immemorially been accorded a cessation of brutality.

The reader has caught the drift. We here address ourselves to view Jesus, the Carpenter of Nazareth, from the viewpoint of economics. Concededly a different viewpoint from that usually held. But we shall be rigorously historical. The present is not a work of the imagination. It affirms to be a piece of cool, scientific history. If the portrait of The Carpenter here unearthed differs from the one commonly viewed, may it not be because accretions of time have defaced the picture, blurring its aforetime sharpness? - incrustations which are now peeling off, by grace of the critical scholarship of our day, revealing some vivid tints in the portrait. The attempt in these pages is that of a restoration. It slavishly follows the ancient records, and is ambitious of nothing more than to retrace the picture as it was at the first. No originality is claimed. I have been an incontinent borrower. The book is plagiaristic throughout.

Entirely modern is the study of economic backgrounds. It was a study which ancient chroniclers did not at all take to. Their interest lay in kings and conquerors. Themselves members of the privileged class, they accounted the common people a degrading theme. History in the pre-democratic eras was a Book of Kings, and only incidentally a Book of Peoples. The people! Their short and simple annals were deemed unworthy the pen of a chronicler-lives of a dull monotone, an unrelieved gray of drudgery and the daily round. Whereas the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, gave to the colourists the opportunity they craved for splendid patches of purple. There was also another more cogent- reason why

the historians of that day did not chronicle the life conditions of the proletariat. The overlords, patrons of the historical art, did not wish those conditions chronicled -social history might prove explosive. The seigniorial class lived on the heaving crust of a volcano. Any book calculated to break open that crust, if only for a peep-sight into the human depths below, would have met hard sledding with the publishing houses of the period. If any such manuscripts did get published, the copies were hunted out ruthlessly by imperial decree. For, except in the first three books of the New Testament, we have extant no contemporary ancient chronicles written by and for the people themselves. In the pages that treated of the slave Spartacus and the humiliations he inflicted on Rome's master class, both Sallust and Livy are to this day missing.

In this way ancient civilization was given a glittering front. But the type of historian that is being developed by democracy, is achieving a change of base. He is going to peer behind that imposing façade to the social life of the times — the myriad slaves toiling in the silver mines of the Athenians, in the vast brick fields of Rome, in the copper mines of Sinai, in galleys on the Mediterranean, in the gold mines of Egypt, in the quarries of Numidia and Greece; he is going to listen to the clank of the chains in the vineyards of Italy. Nor are we altogether without materials, outside the three books mentioned, for such a study. Slip-ups will occur in the most rigorously supervised bureau of history. The hundred-eyed censor can but imperfectly visée such material for instance as personal correspondence. So

that we can beguile from these accidents and fugitive pieces a fairly coherent account of life in the dumb ages those submerged classes which, denied even the privilege of articulating their sorrows, were yet the foundation of the millionairic splendour and pageantry which monopolize the pages of ancient writ. To view that dim mass of unrequited toil cannot but be a rewarding task. For Christianity took its rise in an economic upheaval. We shall see that even its highest and most spiritual reaches had a rootage in the industrial condition of the masses.

The Roman Empire was a world-wide confederation of aristocracies for the perpetuation of human servitude. Customarily that empire has been pictured in terms of military art, of jurisprudence, or of government. But these phases of it were secondary. Economic exploitation was the end in view, the organizing purpose throughout. For the Romans were enormously "practical." Aught smacking of idealism was laughed by them out of court. Once upon a time they had had a religion. But this was back in Rome's early days; and she was not a despoiler of peoples then. Before the empire her era of aggression started in, her idealism had left off, she had entered upon her decadence. In fact her only ideal now was to frame a system of human relationships so minutely administered by law that idealism would be unnecessary. Her famed codes of jurisprudence and systems of administration had for their purpose to bring life down out of the cloud-lands of sentiment onto a level where law would be everywhere operative. Pa