438 LAND REFORM 



wealth and a class with miserable poverty were created, with 

 a great gulf between them ; and social disorders and national 

 instability became permanent. As time went on the dis- 

 possessed and impoverished classes demanded the "cheap 

 loaf," free meals, free corn, free amusements, etc., demands 

 which had to be reckoned with by the ruling classes as a part 

 of the national economy. In spite of the appearance from 

 time to time of rulers with brilliant powers, of foreboding 

 writers, and sage philosophers, Roman society dropped into 

 the almost incredible conditions of luxury, wealth, idleness, 

 and vice described in the pages of Gibbon.^ 



A brilliant writer, referring to the time when the broad 

 acres were still the staple of wealth in Italy, states : " It was 

 not, however, the wealth of the moderate homestead which 

 was to be won from a careful tillage of the field," but it was 

 the wealth of the owners of vast slave-cultivated estates, a 

 cultivation associated with a " belief in the superior value of 

 pasturage to tillage which was to turn many a populous and 

 fertile plain into a wilderness of danger and desolation." 

 " The Latifundium " (a large estate), he says, " acquired, as it 

 was believed, in many cases by force, fraud, and shameless 

 violation of the law — was becoming the standard of cultiva- 

 tion throughout Italy." ^ The large estates in England corre- 

 sponded with the latifundia in Italy. They were acquired 

 by the same methods, and the accumulation of land into few 

 hands had the same effect here as it had in Italy. They were, 

 like the latifundia, cultivated by men whom the system had 

 reduced to slavery in all but the name. The financial results 

 of a system might be good for the few, but the social effects 

 of that system might at the same time spread ruin among 

 the people generally. It was the large estates in England 

 and the way in which they were acquired, that, like the lati- 

 fundia in Italy, "turned many a populous and fertile plain 

 into a wilderness of danger and desolation." 



If the circumstances connected with the Roman land 

 system were put side by side, in parallel columns, with those 



^ For a further description of these conditions see " Roman Society from Nero 

 to Marcus Aurelius," by Samuel Dill, m.a. (Macmillan, 1904). 



' " A History of Rome," Dr. Greenidge, 1904, Vol. I, p. 36 onwards. 



