ew territory was
acquired in Italy excepting the far from attractive Ligurian valleys;
therefore no other land existed for distribution there except the
leased or occupied domain-land, the laying hands on which was, as may
easily be conceived, just as little agreeable to the aristocracy now as
it was three hundred years before. The distribution of the territory
acquired out of Italy appeared for political reasons inadmissible;
Italy was to remain the ruling country, and the wall of partition
between the Italian masters and their provincial servants was not
to be broken down. Unless the government were willing to set aside
considerations of higher policy or even the interests of their order,
no course was left to them but to remain spectators of the ruin of
the Italian farmer-class; and this result accordingly ensued.
The capitalists continued to buy out the small landholders, or indeed,
if they remained obstinate, to seize their fields without title of
purchase; in which case, as may be supposed, matters were not always
amicably settled. A peculiarly favourite method was to eject the wife
and children of the farmer from the homestead, while he was in the
field, and to bring him to compliance by means of the theory of
"accomplished fact." The landlords continued mainly to employ slaves
instead of free labourers, because the former could not like the
latter be called away to military service; and thus reduced the free
proletariate to the same level of misery with the slaves. They
continued to supersede Italian grain in the market of the capital,
and to lessen its value over the whole peninsula, by selling Sicilian
slave-corn at a mere nominal price. In Etruria the old native
aristocracy in league with the Roman capitalists had as early as 620
brought matters to such a pass, that there was no longer a free farmer
there. It could be said aloud in the market of the capital, that the
beasts had their lairs but nothing was left to the burgesses save
the air and sunshine, and that those who were styled the masters
of the world had no longer a clod that they could call their own.
The census lists of the Roman burgesses furnished the commentary on
these words. From the end of the Hannibalic war down to 595 the numbers
of the burgesses were steadily on the increase, the cause of which is
mainly to be sought in the continuous and considerable distributions
of domain-land:(22) after 595 again, when the census yielded 328,000