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 inevitably associated with the setting up of two precious metals; the severe gold crises—­as about 600, for instance, when in consequence of the discovery of the Tauriscan gold-seams(40) gold as compared with silver fell at once in Italy about 33 1/3 per cent—­exercised at least no direct influence on the silver money and retail transactions.  The nature of the case implied that, the more transmarine traffic extended, gold the more decidedly rose from the second place to the first; and that it did so, is confirmed by the statements as to the balances in the treasury and as to its transactions; but the government was not thereby induced to introduce gold into the coinage.  The coining of gold attempted in the exigency of the Hannibalic war(41) had been long allowed to fall into abeyance; the few gold pieces which Sulla struck as regent were scarcely more than pieces coined for the occasion of his triumphal presents.  Silver still as before circulated exclusively as actual money; gold, whether it, as was usual, circulated in bars or bore the stamp of a foreign or possibly