these arrangements furnished a moral basis for the
relation between the upper class and the common people,
and so materially lessened its dangers. The
free tenants-on-sufferance, sprung from families of
decayed farmers, dependents, and freedmen, formed the
great bulk of the proletariate,(13) and were not much
more dependent on the landlord than the petty leaseholder
inevitably is with reference to the great proprietor.
The slaves tilling the fields for a master were beyond
doubt far less numerous than the free tenants.
In all cases where an immigrant nation has not at
once reduced to slavery a population -en masse-, slaves
seem to have existed at first only to a very limited
amount, and consequently free labourers seem to have
played a very different part in the state from that
in which they subsequently appear. In Greece
“day-labourers” (—theites—)
in various instances during the earlier period occupy
the place of the slaves of a later age, and in some
communities, among the Locrians for instance, there
was no slavery down to historical times. Even
the slave, moreover, was ordinarily of Italian descent;
the Volscian, Sabine, or Etruscan war-captive must
have stood in a different relation towards his master
from the Syrian and the Celt of later times.
Besides as a tenant he had in fact, though not in
law, land and cattle, wife and child, as the landlord
had, and after manumission was introduced(14) there
was a possibility, not remote, of working out his
freedom. If such then was the footing on which
landholding on a large scale stood in the earliest
times, it was far from being an open sore in the commonwealth;
on the contrary, it was of most material service to
it. Not only did it provide subsistence, although
scantier upon the whole, for as many families in proportion
as the intermediate and smaller properties; but the
landlords moreover, occupying a comparatively elevated
and free position, supplied the community with its
natural leaders and rulers, while the agricultural
and unpropertied tenants-on-sufferance furnished the
genuine material for the Roman policy of colonization,
without which it never would have succeeded; for while
the state may furnish land to him who has none, it
cannot impart to one who knows nothing of agriculture
the spirit and the energy to wield the plough.
Pastoral Husbandry
Ground under pasture was not affected by the distribution of the land. The state, and not the clanship, was regarded as the owner of the common pastures. It made use of them in part for its own flocks and herds, which were intended for sacrifice and other purposes and were always kept up by means of the cattle-fines; and it gave to the possessors of cattle the privilege of driving them out upon the common pasture for a moderate payment (-scriptura-). The right of pasturage on the public domains may have originally borne some relation -de facto- to the possession of