the value of the arable land of Italy by interference with the prices of grain.  Thus there began a second campaign of capital against free labour or—­what was substantially the same thing in antiquity—­against the small farmer system; and, if the first had been bad, it yet seemed mild and humane as compared with the second.  The capitalists no longer lent to the farmer at interest —­a course, which in itself was not now practicable because the petty landholder no longer aimed at any considerable surplus, and was moreover not sufficiently simple and radical—­but they bought up the farms and converted them, at the best, into estates managed by stewards and worked by slaves.  This likewise was called agriculture; it was essentially the application of the capitalist system to the production of the fruits of the soil.  The description of the husbandmen, which Cato gives, is excellent and quite just; but how does it correspond to the system itself, which he portrays and recommends?  If a Roman senator, as must not unfrequently have been the case, possessed four such estates as that described by Cato, the same space, which in the olden time when small holdings prevailed had supported from 100 to 150 farmers’ families, was now occupied by one family of free persons and about 50, for the most part unmarried, slaves.  If this was the remedy by which the decaying national economy was to be restored to vigour, it bore, unhappily, an aspect of extreme resemblance to the disease.

Development of Italy

The general result of this system is only too clearly obvious in the changed proportions of the population.  It is true that the condition of the various districts of Italy was very unequal, and some were even prosperous.  The farms, instituted in great numbers in the region between the Apennines and the Po at the time of its colonization, did not so speedily disappear.  Polybius, who visited that quarter not long after the close of the present period, commends its numerous, handsome, and vigorous population:  with a just legislation as to corn it would doubtless have been possible to make the basin of the Po, and not Sicily the granary of the capital.  In like manner Picenum and the so-called -ager Gallicus- acquired a numerous body of farmers through the distributions of domain-land consequent on the Flaminian law of 522—­a body, however, which was sadly reduced in the Hannibalic war.  In Etruria, and perhaps also in Umbria, the internal condition of the subject communities was unfavourable to the flourishing of a class of free farmers, Matters were better in Latium—­which could not be entirely deprived of the advantages of the market of the capital, and which had on the whole been spared by the Hannibalic war—­as well as in the secluded mountain-valleys of the Marsians and Sabellians.  On the other hand the Hannibalic war had fearfully devastated southern Italy and had ruined, in addition to a number of smaller townships, its two largest cities, Capua and Tarentum, both once