Civil equality, which had already received a fatal wound through the rise of the ruling order of lords, suffered an equally severe blow in consequence of the line of social demarcation becoming more and more distinctly drawn between the rich and the poor.  Nothing more effectually promoted this separation in a downward direction than the already-mentioned rule—­apparently a matter of indifference, but in reality involving the utmost arrogance and insolence on the part of the capitalists—­that it was disgraceful to take money for work; a wall of partition was thus raised not merely between the common day-labourer or artisan and the respectable landlord or manufacturer, but also between the soldier or subaltern and the military tribune, and between the clerk or messenger and the magistrate.  In an upward direction a similar barrier was raised by the Claudian law suggested by Gaius Flaminius (shortly before 536), which prohibited senators and senators’ sons from possessing sea-going vessels except for the transport of the produce of their estates, and probably also from participating in public contracts—­forbidding them generally from carrying on whatever the Romans included under the head of “speculation” (-quaestus-).(28) It is true that this enactment was not called for by the senators; it was on the contrary a work of the democratic opposition, which perhaps desired in the first instance merely to prevent the evil of members of the governing class personally entering into dealings with the government.  It may be, moreover, that the capitalists in this instance, as so often afterwards, made common cause with the democratic party, and seized the opportunity of diminishing competition by the exclusion of the senators.  The former object was, of course, only very imperfectly attained, for the system of partnership opened up to the senators ample facilities for continuing to speculate in secret; but this decree of the people drew a legal line of demarcation between those men of quality who did not speculate at all or at any rate not openly and those who did, and it placed alongside of the aristocracy which was primarily political an aristocracy which was purely moneyed—­the equestrian order, as it was afterwards called, whose rivalries with the senatorial order fill the history of the following century.

Sterility of the Capitalist Question

A further consequence of the one-sided power of capital was the disproportionate prominence of those branches of business which were the most sterile and the least productive for the national economy as a whole.  Industry, which ought to have held the highest place, in fact occupied the lowest.  Commerce flourished; but it was universally passive, importing, but not exporting.  Not even on the northern frontier do the Romans seem to have been able to give merchandise in exchange for the slaves, who were brought in numbers from the Celtic and probably even from the Germanic territories to Ariminum and the other markets of northern