om
carrying on whatever the Romans included under the head of
"speculation" (-quaestus-).(28) It is true that this enactment was
not called for by the senators; it was on the contrary a work of the
democratic opposition, which perhaps desired in the first instance
merely to prevent the evil of members of the governing class
personally entering into dealings with the government. It may be,
moreover, that the capitalists in this instance, as so often
afterwards, made common cause with the democratic party, and seized
the opportunity of diminishing competition by the exclusion of the
senators. The former object was, of course, only very imperfectly
attained, for the system of partnership opened up to the senators
ample facilities for continuing to speculate in secret; but this
decree of the people drew a legal line of demarcation between those
men of quality who did not speculate at all or at any rate not openly
and those who did, and it placed alongside of the aristocracy which
was primarily political an aristocracy which was purely moneyed--the
equestrian order, as it was afterwards called, whose rivalries with
the senatorial order fill the history of the following century.

Sterility of the Capitalist Question

A further consequence of the one-sided power of capital was the
disproportionate prominence of those branches of business which were
the most sterile and the least productive for the national economy as
a whole. Industry, which ought to have held the highest place, in
fact occupied the lowest. Commerce flourished; but it was universally
passive, importing, but not exporting. Not even on the northern
frontier do the Romans seem to have been able to give merchandise in
exchange for the slaves, who were brought in numbers from the Celtic
and probably even from the Germanic territories to Ariminum and the
other markets of northern Italy; at least as early as 523 the export
of silver money to the Celtic territory was prohibited by the Roman
government. In the intercourse with Greece, Syria, Egypt, Cyrene, and
Carthage, the balance of trade was necessarily unfavourable to Italy.
Rome began to become the capital of the Mediterranean states, and
Italy to become the suburbs of Rome; the Romans had no wish to be
anything more, and in their opulent indifference contented themselves
with a passive commerce, such as every city which is nothing more than
a capital necessarily carries on--they possessed, forsooth, mone