till continued under the
letter of the law amenable to punishment. In a comedy of this period
the money-lender is told that the class to which he belongs is on a
parallel with the -lenones- --

-Eodem hercle vos pono et paro; parissumi estis ibus.
Hi saltem in occultis locis prostant: vos in foro ipso.
Vos fenore, hi male suadendo et lustris lacerant homines.
Rogitationes plurimas propter vos populus scivit,
Quas vos rogatas rumpitis: aliquam reperitis rimam.
Quasi aquam ferventem frigidam esse, ita vos putatis leges.-

Cato the leader of the reform party expresses himself still more
emphatically than the comedian. "Lending money at interest," he says
in the preface to his treatise on agriculture, "has various
advantages; but it is not honourable. Our forefathers accordingly
ordained, and inscribed it among their laws, that the thief should be
bound to pay twofold, but the man who takes interest fourfold,
compensation; whence we may infer how much worse a citizen they deemed
the usurer than the thief." There is no great difference, he elsewhere
considers, between a money-lender and a murderer; and it must be
allowed that his acts did not fall short of his words--when governor
of Sardinia, by his rigorous administration of the law he drove the
Roman bankers to their wits' end. The great majority of the ruling
senatorial order regarded the system of the speculators with dislike,
and not only conducted themselves in the provinces on the whole with
more integrity and honour than these moneyed men, but often acted as
a restraint on them. The frequent changes of the Roman chief
magistrates, however, and the inevitable inequality in their mode
of handling the laws, necessarily abated the effort to check such
proceedings.

Reaction of the Capitalist System on Agriculture

The Romans perceived moreover--as it was not difficult to perceive
--that it was of far more consequence to give a different direction
to the whole national economy than to exercise a police control over
speculation; it was such views mainly that men like Cato enforced
by precept and example on the Roman agriculturist. "When our
forefathers," continues Cato in the preface just quoted, "pronounced
the eulogy of a worthy man, they praised him as a worthy farmer and a
worthy landlord; one who was thus commended was thought to have
received the highest praise. The merchant I deem energetic and
diligent in the pursuit of gain; but his calling is too muc