reality of slavery may exist, and its evils remain, although its name has
been expunged from the statute book. It is always to be recollected that
slavery existed to just as great an extent in the most flourishing as in
the decaying periods of the Roman dominion--in the days of Scipio and
Caesar, as in those of Constantine or Honorius. Cato was a great dealer in
slaves. He was especially careful to sell his slaves when they _became
old_, lest, when worn out, they should become chargeable. The republic was
brought to the brink of ruin an hundred years before the birth of Christ
by the Servile War; yet, with that devouring cancer in its intestines, it
afterwards conquered the world. It was not slavery, but the combination of
slavery with free-trade and vast patrician and commercial wealth, which
really brought ruin on the ancient world. "Verumque confitentibus," says
Pliny, "_latifundia_ perdidere Italiam: jam vero et provincias." It was
the accumulation of patrician revenue and commercial wealth in the
capital, when the provinces were cultivated only by slaves, and the
gradual extinction of Italian agriculture by the introduction of Egyptian
and Lybian grain, where it could be raised cheaper than in the Italian
fields, because money was less plentiful in the impoverished extremities
than in the gorged centre of the Empire, which was the real cause of its
ruin. The free race of Italian cultivators, the strength of the legions,
disappeared before the fleets which wafted cheap grain from the banks of
the Nile and the shores of Africa to the Tiber. Thence the impoverishing
of the small freeholders--the buying up of all small freeholds by the
great families--the extinction of grain culture in Italy--the managing of
the huge estates into which the country was parcelled, in pasture
cultivation, by means of slaves--the disappearance of Italian
free-husbandmen--and the ruin of the Empire. So rich was the capital when
it fell, that Ammianus Marcellinus has recorded, that when Alaric appeared
before Rome, it contained within its walls seventeen hundred and fifty
great families, many of whom had estates, almost entirely in pasturage,
which yielded them what was equivalent, in English money, to one hundred
and sixty thousand pounds sterling of yearly rent.

To the same cause is to be ascribed the continued desolation of the
Campagna of Rome in modern times. Slavery has disappeared; but the curse
of an unlimited and extraordinary suppl