These were the results of the police system for securing order, as it was handled by the Roman senate and its officials in Italy and the provinces.  While the task of getting quit of the proletariate demands and only too often transcends the whole power and wisdom of a government, its repression by measures of police on the other hand is for any larger commonwealth comparatively easy.  It would be well with states, if the unpropertied masses threatened them with no other danger than that with which they are menaced by bears and wolves; only the timid and those who trade upon the silly fears of the multitude prophesy the destruction of civil order through servile revolts or insurrections of the proletariate.  But even to this easier task of restraining the oppressed masses the Roman government was by no means equal, notwithstanding the profound peace and the inexhaustible resources of the state.  This was a sign of its weakness; but not of its weakness alone.  By law the Roman governor was bound to keep the public roads clear and to have the robbers who were caught, if they were slaves, crucified; and naturally, for slavery is not possible without a reign of terror.  At this period in Sicily a razzia was occasionally doubtless set on foot by the governor, when the roads became too insecure; but, in order not to disoblige the Italian planters, the captured robbers were ordinarily given up by the authorities to their masters to be punished at their discretion; and those masters were frugal people who, if their slave-herdsmen asked clothes, replied with stripes and with the inquiry whether travellers journeyed through the land naked.  The consequence of such connivance accordingly was, that Oh the subjugation of the slave-revolt the consul Publius Rupilius ordered all that came into his hands alive—­it is said upwards of 20,000 men—­to be crucified.  It was in truth no longer possible to spare capital.

The Italian Farmers

The care of the government for the elevation of free labour, and by consequence for the restriction of the slave-proletariate, promised fruits far more difficult to be gained but also far richer.  Unfortunately, in this respect there was nothing done at all.  In the first social crisis the landlord had been enjoined by law to employ a number of free labourers proportioned to the number of his slave labourers.(17) Now at the suggestion of the government a Punic treatise on agriculture,(18) doubtless giving instructions in the system of plantation after the Carthaginian mode, was translated into Latin for the use and benefit of Italian speculators—­the first and only instance of a literary undertaking suggested by the Roman senate!  The same tendency showed itself in a more important matter, or to speak more correctly in the vital question for Rome—­the system of colonization.  It needed no special wisdom, but merely a recollection of the course of the first social crisis in Rome, to perceive that the only real