208 INFLUENCE OF THE 



CHAP. IX. 



man during the term of his military service, was 

 obliged to abandon the cultivation of his farm. 

 The lands of Italy, which had been originally 

 divided among the families of free and indi- 

 gent proprietors, wer^ insensibly purchased or 

 usurped by the avarice of the nobles ; and in 

 the age which preceded the fall of the republic, 

 it was computed that only two thousand were 

 possessed of any independent substance. Yet as 

 long as the people bestowed by their suffrages, 

 the honours of the state, the command of legions, 

 and the administration of wealthy provinces, 

 their conscious pride alleviated in some measure 

 the hardships of poverty; and their wants were 

 seasonably supplied by the ambitious liberality 

 of the candidates who aspired to secure a venal 

 majority in the thirty-five tribes, or the hundred 

 and ninety-three centuries, of Rome. But when 

 the prodigal commons had imprudently alienated 

 not only the use, but the inheritance of power, 

 they sank, under the reign of the Caesars, into 

 a vile and wretched populace, which must, in 

 a few generations, have been totally extin- 

 guished, if it had not been continually recruited 

 by the manumission of slaves and the influx of 

 strangers." 



It does not fall immediately into the design 

 of this inquiry to examine further than is here 

 done the structure of society, such as it existed 

 in the ancient world, whether under the form of 



