In theory, I
say, for in point of fact there was enough of viciousness in the Roman
system to prevent it from achieving permanent success. Historians have
been fond of showing how the vitality of the whole system was impaired
by wholesale slave-labour, by the false political economy which taxes
all for the benefit of a few, by the debauching view of civil office
which regards it as private perquisite and not as public trust,
and--worst of all, perhaps--by the communistic practice of feeding an
idle proletariat out of the imperial treasury. The names of these deadly
social evils are not unfamiliar to American ears. Even of the last we
have heard ominous whispers in the shape of bills to promote mendicancy
under the specious guise of fostering education or rewarding military
services. And is it not a striking illustration of the slowness with
which mankind learns the plainest rudiments of wisdom and of justice,
that only in the full light of the nineteenth century, and at the cost
of a terrible war, should the most intelligent people on earth have got
rid of a system of labour devised in the crudest ages of antiquity and
fraught with misery to the employed, degradation to the employers, and
loss to everybody? [Sidenote: Its slow development]
These evils, we see, in one shape or another, have existed almost
everywhere; and the vice of the Roman system did not consist in the fact
that under it they were fully developed, but in the fact that it had no
adequate means of overcoming them.
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