come? Peasant farmers do not live in cities, and plunderers do not
accumulate. Rome had around her what was then a rich and peopled plain;
she stood at a meeting-place of nationalities; she was on a navigable
river, yet out of the reach of pirates; the sea near her was full of
commerce, Etruscan, Greek, and Carthaginian. Her first colony was Ostia,
evidently commercial and connected with salt-works, which may well have
supplied the staple of her trade. Her patricians were financiers and
money-lenders. We are aware that a different turn has been given to this
part of the story, and that the indebtedness has been represented as
incurred not by loans of money, but by advances of farm stock. This,
however, completely contradicts the whole tenor of the narrative, and
especially what is said about the measures for relieving the debtor by
reducing the rate of interest and by deducting from the principal debt
the interest already paid. The narrative as it stands, moreover, is
supported by analogy. It has a parallel in the economical history of
ancient Athens, and in the "scaling of debts," to use the American
equivalent for _Seisachtheia_, by the legislation of Solon. What
prevents our supposing that usury, when it first made its appearance on
the scene, before people had learned to draw the distinction between
crimes and defaults, presented itself in a very coarse and cruel form?
True, the currency was clumsy, and retained philological traces of a
system of barter; but without commerce there could have been no currency
at all.

Even more decisive is the proof afforded by the early political history
of Rome. In that wonderful first decade of Livy there is no doubt enough
of Livy himself to give him a high place among the masters of fiction.
It is the epic of a nation of politicians, and admirably adapted for the
purposes of education as the grand picture of Roman character and the
richest treasury of Roman sentiment. But we can hardly doubt that in the