h exposed
to perils and mischances. On the other hand farmers furnish the
bravest men and the ablest soldiers; no calling is so honourable,
safe, and free from odium as theirs, and those who occupy themselves
with it are least liable to evil thoughts." He was wont to say of
himself, that his property was derived solely from two sources
--agriculture and frugality; and, though this was neither very logical
in thought nor strictly conformable to the truth,(29) yet Cato was not
unjustly regarded by his contemporaries and by posterity as the model
of a Roman landlord. Unhappily it is a truth as remarkable as it is
painful, that this husbandry, commended so much and certainly with so
entire good faith as a remedy, was itself pervaded by the poison of
the capitalist system. In the case of pastoral husbandry this was
obvious; for that reason it was most in favour with the public and
least in favour with the party desirous of moral reform. But how
stood the case with agriculture itself? The warfare, which from the
third onward to the fifth century capital had waged against labour,
by withdrawing under the form of interest on debt the revenues of the
soil from the working farmers and bringing them into the hands of the
idly consuming fundholder, had been settled chiefly by the extension
of the Roman economy and the throwing of the capital which existed in
Latium into the field of mercantile activity opened up throughout the
range of the Mediterranean. Now even the extended field of business
was no longer able to contain the increased mass of capital; and an
insane legislation laboured simultaneously to compel the investment
of senatorial capital by artificial means in Italian estates, and
systematically to reduce the value of the arable land of Italy by
interference with the prices of grain. Thus there began a second
campaign of capital against free labour or--what was substantially the
same thing in antiquity--against the small farmer system; and, if the
first had been bad, it yet seemed mild and humane as compared with the
second. The capitalists no longer lent to the farmer at interest
--a course, which in itself was not now practicable because the petty
landholder no longer aimed at any considerable surplus, and was
moreover not sufficiently simple and radical--but they bought up the
farms and converted them, at the best, into estates managed by
stewards and worked by slaves. This likewise was called agriculture;
it