Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/657

Rh artificially low prices, among the poor and idle masses of the imperial city; which practice, originally adopted under the republic, with a view of obviating popular discontent, and continued, with additions of oil and meat under the empire, finally became a cause of great anxiety to the emperors lest anything should interfere with the movement of grain, which was mainly by sea from Africa and Sicily. To insure regularity and efficient service, the state at first farmed out the right to transport the crops to certain wealthy individuals; and this inducement to enterprise proving insufficient, the Emperor Claudius gave a bounty for each successful trip of the grain fleet. The construction of ships was also encouraged by subsidies, and in this way there grew up a class of wealthy shipowners, whose profits and incentive to business were obtained from the state, and who by organization into an association (analogous to the modern trust) under the name of "Naviculari," with branches in every city or town in the provinces, and with wealthy and influential senators among its stockholders or patrons, attained to great prominence and influence in the third and fourth centuries.

Taxation, in at least one notable instance, was also employed by the Romans as an instrumentality for the correction of a social evil—namely, a disinclination on the part of wealthy citizens, in the latter days of the republic and throughout the whole period of the empire, to contract marriages, with a view of avoiding the cares and burdens of a family. To counteract this tendency, a tax ("æs uxorium") was imposed on bachelors, with a limitation ("lex Julia et Papia Poppæa") on the transmission of property by will or gift by the unmarried and the childless.

The statesmen and administrators of Rome seem never to have given a thought to the desirability of encouraging industry, trade, or commerce among their own people, much less among the people they had subjugated. There was, throughout all their literature and laws, the contempt which brigands and barbarians entertain for honest industry, at least when that industry is not