aly colonies of
veterans to whom they assigned lands; they made gifts thereof to indigent
Roman citizens; they attracted by the title of senator rich citizens from
the provinces, and when they had once installed them as landholders in
Italy, they did not permit them to depart without authorization. Trajan
decreed that every candidate for the Roman magistracies should be bound
to have a third of his fortune invested in Italian land, "in order," says
Pliny the Younger, "that those who sought the public dignities should
regard Rome and Italy not as an inn to put up at in travelling, but as
their home." And Pliny the Elder, going as a philosophical observer to
the very root of the evil, says, in his pompous manner, "In former times
our generals tilled their fields with their own hands; the earth, we may
suppose, opened graciously beneath a plough crowned with laurels and held
by triumphal hands, maybe because those great men gave to tillage the
same care that they gave to war, and that they sowed seed with the same
attention with which they pitched a camp; or maybe, also, because
everything fructifies best in honorable hands, because everything is done
with the most scrupulous exactitude. . . . Nowadays these same fields
are given over to slaves in chains, to malefactors who are condemned to
penal servitude, and on whose brow there is a brand. Earth is not deaf
to our prayers; we give her the name of mother; culture is what we call
the pains we bestow on her . . . but can we be surprised if she render
not to slaves the recompense she paid to generals?"

What must have been the decay of population and of agriculture in the
provinces, when even in Italy there was need of such strong protective
efforts, which were nevertheless so slightly successful?

Pliny had seen what was the fatal canker of the Roman empire in the
country as well as in the towns: slavery or semi-slavery.

Landed property was overwhelmed with taxes, was subject to conditions
which branded it with a sort of servitude, and was cultivated by a
servile population, in whose hands it became almost barren. The large
holders were thus disgusted, and the small ruined or reduced to a
condition more and more degraded. Add to this state of things in the
civil department a complete absence of freedom and vitality in the
political; no elections, no discussion, no public responsibility;
characters weakened by indolence and silence, or destroyed by despotic
p