source of gain, and one that was really sordid, had been placed within
the reach of the Roman plebs urbana: it was possible to make money by
your vote in the election of magistrates. In that degenerate when the
vast accumulation of capital made it possible for a man to purchase
his way to power, in spite of repeated attempts to check the evil by
legislation, the old principle of honourable association was used to
help the small man to make a living by choosing the unprincipled and
often the incompetent to undertake the government of the Empire.

Apart, however, from such illegal means of making money, there was
beyond doubt in the Rome of the last century B.C. a large amount of
honest and useful labour done by free citizens. We must not run away
with the idea that the whole labour of the city was performed by
slaves, who ousted the freeman from his chance of a living. There was
indeed a certain number of public slaves who did public work for the
State; but on the whole the great mass of the servile population
worked entirely within the households and on the estates of the rich,
and did not interfere to any sensible degree with the labour of the
small freeman. As has been justly observed by Salvioli,[78] never at
any period did the Roman proletariat complain of the competition of
slave labour as detrimental to its own interests. Had there been no
slave labour there, the small freeman might indeed have had a wider
field of enterprise, and have been better able to accumulate a small
capital by undertaking work for the great families, which was done,
as it was, by their slaves. But he was not aware of this, and the two
kinds of labour, the paid and the unpaid, went on side by side without
active rivalry. No doubt slavery helped to foster idleness, as it did
in the Southern States of America before the Civil War;[79] no doubt
there were plenty of idle ruffians in the city, ready to steal,
to murder, or to hire themselves out as the armed followers of a