Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/69

 triumvirs, and the approaching career of Julius Cæsar. To form a proper judgment of his designs, and their character, we must endeavor to gain some distinct idea of the condition of the inhabitants of Italy during his time, as divided into the classes of the nobles, the poorer citizens, and the slaves.

The vast capacity for reproduction, which the laws of society secure to capital in a greater degree than to personal exertion, displays itself no where so clearly as in slave-holding states, where the laboring class is but a portion of the capital of the opulent. As wealth consists chiefly in land and slaves, the rates of interest are, from universally operative causes, always comparatively high; the difficulty of advancing with borrowed capital proportionally great. The small land-holder finds himself unable to compete with those who are possessed of whole cohorts of bondmen; his slaves, his lands, rapidly pass, in consequence of his debts, into the hands of the more opulent. The large plantations are constantly swallowing up the smaller ones; and land and slaves soon come to be engrossed by a few. Before Cæsar passed the Rubicon, this condition existed in its extreme in the Roman State. The owned the soil and its cultivators. A free laborer was hardly known. The large proprietors of slaves not only tilled their immense plantations, but also indulged their avarice in training their slaves to every species of labor, and letting them out, as horses from a livery stable, for the performance of every conceivable species of work. Four or five hundred slaves were not an uncommon number in one family; fifteen or twenty thousand sometimes belonged to one master. The wealth of Crassus was immense, and consisted chiefly in lands and slaves; on the number of his slaves we hardly dare hazard a conjecture. Of joiners and masons he had over five hundred. Nor was this the whole evil. The nobles, having impoverished their lands, became usurers, and had their agents dispersed over all the provinces. The censor Cato closed his career by recommending usury, as more productive than agriculture by slave labor; and such was the prodigality of the Roman planters, that, to indulge their fondness for luxury, many of them also mortgaged their estates to the money-lenders. Thus the lands of Italy, at best in the hands of a few proprietors, became virtually vested in the hands of a still smaller number of usurers. No man's house, no man's person, was secure. Nullie est certa domus, nullum sine pignore corpus. Hence, corruption readily found its way into the senate; the votes of that body, not less than the votes of the poorer citizens, were a merchantable commodity. Venalis Curia patrum. The wisdom and the decrees of the senate were for sale to the highest bidder.

Thus there was in all Italy no yeomanry, no free labor, no free manufacturing class; and thus the wealth of the great landed proprietors was wholly unbalanced. The large plantations, cultivated by slave labor, had already ruined Italy. Verum confitentibus, latifundia Italiam perdiderunt.

The, who still elected tribunes and consuls, and were still sometimes convened in a sort of town-meeting, were poor and abject. But the right of suffrage insured them a maintenance. The petty offices in the Commonwealth were filled from their number, and such as retained some capacity for business found many a lucrative job, in return for their influence and their votes. The custom houses, the provinces, the internal police, offered inviting situations to moderate ambition. The rest clamored for bread from the public treasury, for tickets for the theatre at the national expense, for gladiatorial shows, where men were butchered at the cost of the office-seeking aristocracy, for the amusement of the majority. But there existed no free manufacturing establishments, no free farmers, no free laborers, no free mechanics. The state possessed some of the forms of democracy; but the life-giving principle of a democracy, prosperous free labor, was wanting.

The third class was the class of. It was three times as numerous as both the