156 Profitableness of slavery? 



no doubt highly coloured, but the group settled in Etruria were 

 probably some of the worst specimens. In such hands agriculture 

 could not flourish, and the true interests of Rome could hardly have 

 suffered a more deadly blow than the transfer of Italian lands from 

 those who could farm them to those who could not. It was not merely 

 that lands were * let down.' Italy was made less able to maintain a (fl 

 native population, fitted and willing to serve the state in peace and 

 war. The effects of this diminution of the free rustic population were 

 most seriously felt under the Empire. Writers of the Augustan age 

 deplore 1 the disappearance of the old races in a large part of Italy, 

 displaced by alien slaves ; and their cry is repeated by later genera- 

 tions. The imperial country that had conquered the Mediterranean 

 world became dependent on subjects and foreigners for her own 

 defence. 



The evil plight of agriculture in Cicero's day was merely a con- 

 tinuation and development of the process observable in the second 

 century. Experience had probably moderated some of the crude and 

 blundering methods of the landgrabbers whose doings provoked the 

 agrarian movement of the Gracchi. But in essence the system was 

 the same. And it was a failure, a confessed evil. Why ? It is easy 

 to reply that slave-labour is wasteful ; and this is I believe an economic 

 truism. But it is well to look a little further. Let me begin by I 

 quoting from an excellent book 2 written at a time when this subject 

 was one of immediate practical interest. ' The profitableness which has 

 been attributed to slavery is profitableness estimated exclusively from 

 the point of view of the proprietor of slaves.... The profits of 

 capitalists may be increased by the same process by which the gross 

 revenue of a country is diminished, and therefore the community as 

 a whole may be impoverished through the very same means by which 

 a portion of its number is enriched. The economic success of slavery 

 therefore is perfectly consistent with the supposition that it is pre- 

 judicial to the material well-being of the country where it is estab- 

 lished.' These propositions I do not dispute : I had come to the 

 same conclusion long before I read this passage. <(j further admit . 

 that in the case of Rome and Italy the community as a whole was 

 impoverished by the slave-system : it was the constant influx of 

 tributes from the provinces that kept up the appearance of wealth at 

 the centre of empire.^ But whether, in the case of agriculture, the 

 capitalist landlords were really enriched by the profits of plantation 

 slavery, is surely a question open to doubt. 



Those of them whose capital sunk in great estates and gangs of 



1 Livy vi 12 5, cf vn 25 8. 



2 Cairnes The Slave Power ch ill. [1862, second edn. 1863.] 



