d been long fermenting, without
hindrance and with fearful rapidity and violence to maturity. From
a very early period the Roman economy was based on the two factors
--always in quest of each other, and always at variance--the husbandry
of the small farmer and the money of the capitalist. The latter in the
closest alliance with landholding on a great scale had already for
centuries waged against the farmer-class a war, which seemed as though
it could not but terminate in the destruction first of the farmers
and thereafter of the whole commonwealth, but was broken off without
being properly decided in consequence of the successful wars and the
comprehensive and ample distribution of domains for which these wars
gave facilities. It has already been shown(5) that in the same age,
which renewed the distinction between patricians and plebeians under
altered names, the disproportionate accumulation of capital was
preparing a second assault on the farming system. It is true that
the method was different. Formerly the small farmer had been ruined
by advances of money, which practically reduced him to be the steward
of his creditor; now he was crushed by the competition of transmarine,
and especially of slave-grown, corn. The capitalists kept pace with
the times; capital, while waging war against labour or in other words
against the liberty of the person, of course, as it had always done,
under the strictest form of law, waged it no longer in the unseemly
fashion which converted the free man on account of debt into a slave,
but, throughout, with slaves legitimately bought and paid; the former
usurer of the capital appeared in a shape conformable to the times
as the owner of industrial plantations. But the ultimate result was
in both cases the same--the depreciation of the Italian farms; the
supplanting of the petty husbandry, first in a part of the provinces
and then in Italy, by the farming of large estates; the prevailing
tendency to devote the latter in Italy to the rearing of cattle and
the culture of the olive and vine; finally, the replacing of the
free labourers in the provinces as in Italy by slaves. Just as the
nobility was more dangerous than the patriciate, because the former
could not, like the latter, be set aside by a change of the
constitution; so this new power of capital was more dangerous than
that of the fourth and fifth centuries, because nothing was to be
done against it by changes in the law of the l