CHAP. vn. NEW WORKING OF MINES. 



which might prove detrimental to the working 

 of those in the continental dominions of the 

 empire. Notwithstanding the severe regulations 

 under which these persons held their lands, they 

 were not strictly speaking slaves. They were 

 allowed to dispose of their property if they could 

 rind purchasers ; but as the new possessors were 

 to be bound to the same services, and were to be 

 placed under the same restrictions, as the former 

 holders, it does not seem probable that it could 

 have been easy to meet with such purchasers. 

 Besides these, who were a kind of feudal tenants, 

 slaves were employed in the imperial mines. 

 They were not indeed foreigners, who had been 

 stolen by piracy and sold, but criminals, who 

 had been condemned by the laws to slavery. 



From the earliest period of Roman history, 

 under the consuls and the dictators, labour 

 in the mines had been adopted and practised 

 as a punishment in many cases ; but under 

 the emperors it was so much extended, that it 

 became as universally the penalty inflicted on 

 offenders against the laws as under the ancient 

 kings of Egypt. This mode of providing for 

 the working of the mines seems to have been 

 scarcely adequate to the providing of labourers 

 for such of them as were already in operation, 

 and utterly insufficient for opening the new 

 mines which had been acquired by conquest on 

 the banks of the Danube. Hence the emperors 



