spend their most vigorous years abroad.

A compensation of very dubious value was afforded by the free
parasitic Helleno-Oriental population, which sojourned in the
capital as diplomatic agents for kings or communities, as physicians,
schoolmasters, priests, servants, parasites, and in the myriad
employments of sharpers and swindlers, or, as traders and
mariners, frequented especially Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium.
Still more hazardous was the disproportionate increase of the
multitude of slaves in the peninsula. The Italian burgesses by
the census of 684 numbered 910,000 men capable of bearing arms, to
which number, in order to obtain the amount of the free population
in the peninsula, those accidentally passed over in the census,
the Latins in the district between the Alps and the Po, and the
foreigners domiciled in Italy, have to be added, while the Roman
burgesses domiciled abroad are to be deducted. It will therefore
be scarcely possible to estimate the free population of the
peninsula at more than from 6 to 7 millions. If its whole
population at this time was equal to that of the present day, we
should have to assume accordingly a mass of slaves amounting to 13
or 14 millions. It needs however no such fallacious calculations
to render the dangerous tension of this state of things apparent;
this is loudly enough attested by the partial servile insurrections,
and by the appeal which from the beginning of the revolutions was
at the close of every outbreak addressed to the slaves to take
up arms against their masters and to fight out their liberty.
If we conceive of England with its lords, its squires, and
above all its City, but with its freeholders and lessees converted
into proletarians, and its labourers and sailors converted into slaves,
we shall gain an approximate image of the population of the Italian
peninsula in those days.

The economic relations of this epoch are clearly mirrored to
us even now in the Roman monetary system. Its treatment shows
throughout the sagacious merchant. For long gold and silver stood
side by side as general means of payment on such a footing that,
while for the purpose of general cash-balances a fixed ratio of
value was legally laid down between the two metals,(39) the giving
one metal for the other was not, as a rule, optional, but payment
was to be in gold or silver according to the tenor of the bond.
In this way the great evils were avoided, that are otherwise
inevita