y
enough to pay for everything which they needed or did not need. On
the other hand the most unproductive of all sorts of business, the
traffic in money and the farming of the revenue, formed the true
mainstay and stronghold of the Roman economy. And, lastly, whatever
elements that economy had contained for the production of a wealthy
middle class, and of a lower one making enough for its subsistence,
were extinguished by the unhappy system of employing slaves, or,
at the best, contributed to the multiplication of the troublesome
order of freedmen.

The Capitalists and Public Opinion

But above all the deep rooted immorality, which is inherent in an
economy of pure capital, ate into the heart of society and of the
commonwealth, and substituted an absolute selfishness for humanity
and patriotism. The better portion of the nation were very keenly
sensible of the seeds of corruption which lurked in that system of
speculation; and the instinctive hatred of the great multitude, as
well as the displeasure of the well-disposed statesman, was especially
directed against the trade of the professional money-lender, which for
long had been subjected to penal laws and still 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 bank