bankers, merchants, were scattered everywhere in thousands. Money poured
in upon them in rolling streams of gold. The largest share of the spoils
fell to the Senate and the senatorial families. The Senate was the
permanent Council of State, and was the real administrator of the Empire.
The Senate had the control of the treasury, conducted the public policy,
appointed from its own ranks the governors of the provinces. It was
patrician in sentiment, but not necessarily patrician in composition. The
members of it had virtually been elected for life by the people, and were
almost entirely those who had been quaestors, aediles, praetors, or
consuls; and these offices had been long open to the plebeians. It was an
aristocracy, in theory a real one, but tending to become, as civilization
went forward, an aristocracy of the rich. How the senatorial privileges
affected the management of the provinces will be seen more particularly as
we go on. It is enough at present to say that the nobles and great
commoners of Rome rapidly found themselves in possession of revenues which
their fathers could not have imagined in their dreams, and money in the
stage of progress at which Rome had arrived was convertible into power.

The opportunities opened for men to advance their fortunes in other parts
of the world drained Italy of many of its most enterprising citizens. The
grandsons of the yeomen who had held at bay Pyrrhus and Hannibal sold
their farms and went away. The small holdings merged rapidly into large
estates bought up by the Roman capitalists. At the final settlement of
Italy, some millions of acres had been reserved to the State as public
property. The "public land," as the reserved portion was called, had been
leased on easy terms to families with political influence, and by lapse of
time, by connivance and right of occupation, these families were beginning
to regard their tenures as their private property, and to treat them as
lords of manors in England have treated the "commons." Thus everywhere the
small farmers were disappearing, and the soil of Italy was fast passing