Slave labour universally employed.] In trades, mining, grazing,
levying of revenue, and every field of speculation, slave-labour
was universally employed. If it is certain that even unenfranchised
Italians, however poor, could be made to serve in the Roman army, it
was a proprietor's direct interest from that point of view to employ
slaves, of whose services he could not be deprived.

[Sidenote: Whence the slaves came. Their treatment.] A vast impetus
had been given to the slave-trade at the time of the conquest of
Macedonia, about thirty-five years before our period. The
great slave-producing countries were those bordering on the
Mediterranean--Africa, Asia, Spain, &c. An organized system of
man-hunting supplied the Roman markets, and slave-dealers were part of
the ordinary retinue of a Roman army. When a batch of slaves reached
its destination they were kept in a pen till bought. Those bought
for domestic service would no doubt be best off, and the cunning,
mischievous rogue, the ally of the young against the old master of
whom we read in Roman comedy, if he does not come up to our ideal
of what a man should be, does not seem to have been physically very
wretched. Even here, however, we see how degraded a thing a slave was,
and the frequent threats of torture prove how utterly he was at the
mercy of a cruel master's caprice. We know, too, that when a master
was arraigned on a criminal charge, the first thing done to prove his
guilt was to torture his slaves. But just as in America the popular
figure of the oily, lazy, jocular negro, brimming over with grotesque
good-humour and screening himself in the weakness of an indulgent
master, merely served to brighten a picture of which the horrible
plantation system was the dark background; so at Rome no instances of
individual indulgence were a set-off against the monstrous barbarities
which in the end brought about their own punishment, and the ruin