to slaves. Originally, they employed
themselves upon the lands which had been obtained by conquest; but these
lands were gradually absorbed or usurped by the large proprietors. The
small farmers, oppressed with debt and usury, parted with their lands to
their wealthy creditors. Even in the time of Cicero, it was computed
that there were only about two thousand citizens possessed of
independent property. These two thousand persons owned the world; the
rest were dependent and powerless, and would have perished but for
largesses. Monthly distributions of corn were converted into daily
allowance for bread. The people were amused with games and festivals,
fed like slaves, and of course lost at last even the semblance of
manliness and independence. They loitered in the public streets, and
dissipated in gaming their miserable pittance; they spent the hours of
the night in the lowest resorts of crime and misery; they expired in
wretched apartments without attracting the attention of government;
pestilence, famine, and squalid misery thinned their ranks, and they
would have been annihilated but for constant accession to their numbers
from the provinces.

In the busy streets of Rome might be seen adventurers from all parts of
the world, disgraced by all the various vices of their respective
countries. They had no education, and but small religious advantages;
they were held in terror by both priests and nobles,--the priest
terrifying them with Egyptian sorceries, the nobles crushing them by
iron weight; like lazzaroni, they lived in the streets, or were crowded
into filthy tenements; a gladiatorial show delighted them, but the
circus was their peculiar joy,--here they sought to drown the
consciousness of their squalid degradation; they were sold into slavery
for trifling debts; they had no homes. The poor man had no ambition or
hope; his wife was a slave; his children were precocious demons, whose
prattle was the cry for bread, whose laughter was the howl of
pandemonium, whose sports were the tricks of premature iniquity, whose
beauty was the squalor of disease and filth; he fled from a wife in whom
he had no trust, from children in whom he had no hope, from brothers for
whom he felt no sympathy, from parents for whom he felt no reverence;
the circus was his home, the fights of wild beasts were his consolation;
the future was a blank, death was the release from suffering. There were
no hospitals for the sick and the old, except o