The Birth of the English Land System. 1 3 



might charge to recoup themselves was fixed by the censors, 

 who constituted the chief fiscal authority of the State. 



Thus, then, land being plentiful, any man belonging to the 

 governing class who liked to undertake the task of reclamation 

 was readily allowed to do so. The Ager Publicus at first was 

 entirely monopolised by the Patricians. It was a stage of 

 society when trade did not exist, and when, therefore, rich and 

 poor were synonymous terms with landed and landless. Gradu- 

 ally the richer " possessores " succeeded in elbowing out their 

 poorer neighbours. Everything tended towards a monopoly of 

 the Ager Publicus by the capitalist. Large areas of waste, caused 

 either by the devastation of conquest or the natural defects of 

 soil, were continually being added to the State. They could 

 not be pastured or rendered fertile except by expensive oper- 

 ations. They therefore fell into the hands of a limited class 

 who could afford to sink capital either in restoring their pris- 

 tine good qualities or in stocking them with flocks and herds. 

 None but the moneyed Roman could afford to meet the State 

 charges of one-fifth and one-tenth respectively on the lands 

 they had rendered fit for corn and fruit ; and the huge flocks 

 and herds of a wealthy patrician would have bared the unstinted 

 herbage of the waste for the poor man's cow. Up to a certain 

 point this process of reclaiming and thus rendering profitable 

 the waste lands of the State had been beneficial to the bulk of 

 the nation. Then the poise between supply and demand was 

 disturbed from an opposite direction. 



The struggles between the Patricians and Plebeians, which 

 occupy the earlier pages of Roman history, had centred round 

 the rights to enjoy the Ager Publicus.^ When the slave-culti- 

 vated properties of the large landowners threatened to swallow 

 up the territory available for cultivation, when the yeoman 

 farmers of the days of Cincinnatus had wellnigh disappeared, 

 when the Roman citizen army had steadily diminished from 

 328,000 to 319,000 in less than thirty years, and its ranks had 

 been refilled with slaves, who were not liable to be called from 

 their work to serve their country, the position of the possessores 



^ Mommsen, ^ist. of Rome. vol. iii. cli. ii. and iii. Plutarch, Lives of 

 Gracchi. 



