Italy; at least as early as 523 the export of silver money to the Celtic territory was prohibited by the Roman government.  In the intercourse with Greece, Syria, Egypt, Cyrene, and Carthage, the balance of trade was necessarily unfavourable to Italy.  Rome began to become the capital of the Mediterranean states, and Italy to become the suburbs of Rome; the Romans had no wish to be anything more, and in their opulent indifference contented themselves with a passive commerce, such as every city which is nothing more than a capital necessarily carries on—­they possessed, forsooth, money enough to pay for everything which they needed or did not need.  On the other hand the most unproductive of all sorts of business, the traffic in money and the farming of the revenue, formed the true mainstay and stronghold of the Roman economy.  And, lastly, whatever elements that economy had contained for the production of a wealthy middle class, and of a lower one making enough for its subsistence, were extinguished by the unhappy system of employing slaves, or, at the best, contributed to the multiplication of the troublesome order of freedmen.

The Capitalists and Public Opinion

But above all the deep rooted immorality, which is inherent in an economy of pure capital, ate into the heart of society and of the commonwealth, and substituted an absolute selfishness for humanity and patriotism.  The better portion of the nation were very keenly sensible of the seeds of corruption which lurked in that system of speculation; and the instinctive hatred of the great multitude, as well as the displeasure of the well-disposed statesman, was especially directed against the trade of the professional money-lender, which for long had been subjected to penal laws and still continued under the letter of the law amenable to punishment.  In a comedy of this period the money-lender is told that the class to which he belongs is on a parallel with the -lenones- —­

-Eodem hercle vos pono et paro; parissumi estis ibus. 
Hi saltem in occultis locis prostant:  vos in foro ipso. 
Vos fenore, hi male suadendo et lustris lacerant homines. 
Rogitationes plurimas propter vos populus scivit,
Quas vos rogatas rumpitis:  aliquam reperitis rimam. 
Quasi aquam ferventem frigidam esse, ita vos putatis leges.-

Cato the leader of the reform party expresses himself still more emphatically than the comedian.  “Lending money at interest,” he says in the preface to his treatise on agriculture, “has various advantages; but it is not honourable.  Our forefathers accordingly ordained, and inscribed it among their laws, that the thief should be bound to pay twofold, but the man who takes interest fourfold, compensation; whence we may infer how much worse a citizen they deemed the usurer than the thief.”  There is no great difference, he elsewhere considers, between a money-lender and a murderer; and it must be allowed that his acts did not fall short of his words—­when