ation between the
upper class and the common people, and so materially lessened its
dangers. The free tenants-on-sufferance, sprung from families of
decayed farmers, dependents, and freedmen, formed the great bulk
of the proletariate,(13) and were not much more dependent on the
landlord than the petty leaseholder inevitably is with reference to
the great proprietor. The slaves tilling the fields for a master
were beyond doubt far less numerous than the free tenants. In all
cases where an immigrant nation has not at once reduced to slavery
a population -en masse-, slaves seem to have existed at first only
to a very limited amount, and consequently free labourers seem to
have played a very different part in the state from that in which
they subsequently appear. In Greece "day-labourers" (--theites--)
in various instances during the earlier period occupy the place
of the slaves of a later age, and in some communities, among the
Locrians for instance, there was no slavery down to historical times.
Even the slave, moreover, was ordinarily of Italian descent; the
Volscian, Sabine, or Etruscan war-captive must have stood in a
different relation towards his master from the Syrian and the Celt
of later times. Besides as a tenant he had in fact, though not
in law, land and cattle, wife and child, as the landlord had, and
after manumission was introduced(14) there was a possibility, not
remote, of working out his freedom. If such then was the footing
on which landholding on a large scale stood in the earliest times,
it was far from being an open sore in the commonwealth; on the
contrary, it was of most material service to it. Not only did it
provide subsistence, although scantier upon the whole, for as many
families in proportion as the intermediate and smaller properties;
but the landlords moreover, occupying a comparatively elevated and
free position, supplied the community with its natural leaders and
rulers, while the agricultural and unpropertied tenants-on-sufferance
furnished the genuine material for the Roman policy of colonization,
without which it never would have succeeded; for while the state
may furnish land to him who has none, it cannot impart to one who
knows nothing of agriculture the spirit and the energy to wield
the plough.

Pastoral Husbandry

Ground under pasture was not affected by the distribution of the
land. The state, and not the clanship, was regarded as the owner
of the common pastures.