deficit.  No country where this species of game could be hunted remained exempt from visitation; even in Italy it was a thing by no means unheard of, that the poor freeman was placed by his employer among the slaves.  But the Negroland of that period was western Asia,(7) where the Cretan and Cilician corsairs, the real professional slave-hunters and slave-dealers, robbed the coasts of Syria and the Greek islands; and where, emulating their feats, the Roman revenue-farmers instituted human hunts in the client states and incorporated those whom they captured among their slaves.  This was done to such an extent, that about 650 the king of Bithynia declared himself unable to furnish the required contingent, because all the people capable of labour had been dragged off from his kingdom by the revenue-farmers.  At the great slave-market in Delos, where the slave-dealers of Asia Minor disposed of their wares to Italian speculators, on one day as many as 10,000 slaves are said to have been disembarked in the morning and to have been all sold before evening—­a proof at once how enormous was the number of slaves delivered, and how, notwithstanding, the demand still exceeded the supply.  It was no wonder.  Already in describing the Roman economy of the sixth century we have explained that it was based, like all the large undertakings of antiquity generally, on the employment of slaves.(8) In whatever direction speculation applied itself, its instrument was without exception man reduced in law to a beast of burden.  Trades were in great part carried on by slaves, so that the proceeds fell to the master.  The levying of the public revenues in the lower grades was regularly conducted by the slaves of the associations that leased them.  Servile hands performed the operations of mining, making pitch, and others of a similar kind; it became early the custom to send herds of slaves to the Spanish mines, whose superintendents readily received them and paid a high rent for them.  The vine and olive harvest in Italy was not conducted by the people on the estate, but was contracted for by a slave-owner.  The tending of cattle was universally performed by slaves.  We have already mentioned the armed, and frequently mounted, slave-herdsmen in the great pastoral ranges of Italy;(9) and the same sort of pastoral husbandry soon became in the provinces also a favourite object of Roman speculation—­Dalmatia, for instance, was hardly acquired (599) when the Roman capitalists began to prosecute the rearing of cattle there on a great scale after the Italian fashion.  But far worse in every respect was the plantation-system proper—­the cultivation of the fields by a band of slaves not unfrequently branded with iron, who with shackles on their legs performed the labours of the field under overseers during the day, and were locked up together by night in the common, frequently subterranean, labourers’ prison.  This plantation-system had migrated from the east to Carthage,(10) and seems