Agriculture, Trade, and Commerce

Agriculture and commerce are so intimately bound up with the
constitution and the external history of states, that the former
must frequently be noticed in the course of describing the latter.
We shall here endeavour to supplement the detached notices which
we have already given, by exhibiting a summary view of Italian and
particularly of Roman economics.

Agriculture

It has been already observed(1) that the transition from a pastoral
to an agricultural economy preceded the immigration of the Italians
into the peninsula. Agriculture continued to be the main support
of all the communities in Italy, of the Sabellians and Etruscans
no less than of the Latins. There were no purely pastoral tribes
in Italy during historical times, although of course the various
races everywhere combined pastoral husbandry, to a greater or less
extent according to the nature of the locality, with the cultivation
of the soil. The beautiful custom of commencing the formation of
new cities by tracing a furrow with the plough along the line of
the future ring-wall shows how deeply rooted was the feeling that
every commonwealth is dependent on agriculture. In the case of
Rome in particular--and it is only in its case that we can speak of
agrarian relations with any sort of certainty--the Servian reform
shows very clearly not only that the agricultural class originally
preponderated in the state, but also that an effort was made
permanently to maintain the collective body of freeholders as the
pith and marrow of the community. When in the course of time a
large portion of the landed property in Rome had passed into the
hands of non-burgesses and thus the rights and duties of burgesses
were no longer bound up with freehold property, the reformed
constitution obviated this incongruous state of things, and the
perils which it threatened, not merely temporarily but permanently,
by treating the members of the community without reference to their
political position once for all according to their freeholding,
and imposing the common burden of war-service on the freeholders--a
step which in the natural course of things could not but be followed
by the concession of public rights. The whole policy of Roman war
and conquest rested, like the constitution itself, on the basis of
the freehold system; as the freeholder alone was of value in the
state, the aim of war was to increase the number of its freehold