History of Rome from the Earliest Times down to 476 AD | Page 7

these paupers, when provided for,
would prove to be efficient farmers capable of maintaining a position
which many of them had already lost. Again, if such an assignment was

to be made, it should be made on land immediately after it had passed
from the possession of the enemy to that of Rome; if time had elapsed
since the date of annexation, it was almost certain that claims of some
kind had been asserted over the territory, and shadowy as these claims
might be, the Roman law had, in the interest of the State itself, always
tended to recognise a de facto as a de jure right. The claims of the allies
and the municipalities had also to be considered; for assignments to
Roman citizens on an extensive scale would inevitably lead to difficult
questions about the rights which many of these townships actually
possessed to much of the territory whose revenue they enjoyed. If the
allies and the municipal towns did not suffer, the loss must fall on the
Roman State itself, which derived one of its chief sources of stable and
permanent revenue--the source which was supposed to meet the claims
for Italian administration[14]--from its domains in Italy, on the
contractors who collected this revenue, and on the Enterprising
capitalists who had put their wealth and energy into the waste places to
which they had been invited by the government, and who had given
these devastated territories much of the value which they now
possessed. Lastly, these enterprising possessors were strongly
represented in the senate; the leading members of the nobility had
embarked on a new system of agriculture, the results of which were
inimical to the interest of the small farmer, and the conditions of which
would be undermined by a vast system of distribution such as could
alone suffice to satisfy the pauper proletariate. The feeling that a future
agrarian law was useless from an economic and dangerous from a
political point of view, was strengthened by the conviction that its
proposal would initiate a war amongst classes, that its failure would
exasperate the commons and that its success would inflict heavy
pecuniary damage on the guardians of the State.
Thus the simple system of territorial expansion, which had continued in
an uninterrupted course from the earliest days of conquest, might be
now held to be closed for ever. From the point of view of the Italian
neighbours of Rome it was indeed ample time that such a closing
period should be reached. If we possessed a map of Italy which showed
the relative proportions of land in Italy and Cisalpine Gaul which had
been seized by Rome or left to the native cities or tribes, we should

probably find that the possessions of the conquering State, whether
occupied by colonies, absorbed by the gift of citizenship, or held as
public domain, amounted to nearly one half of the territory of the
whole peninsula.[15] The extension of such progress was clearly
impossible unless war were to be provoked with the Confederacy
which furnished so large a proportion of the fighting strength of Rome;
but, if it was confessed that extension on the old lines was now beyond
reach of attainment and yet it was agreed that the existing resources of
Italy did not furnish an adequate livelihood to the majority of the
citizens of Rome, but two methods of expansion could be thought of as
practicable in the future. One was agrarian assignation at the expense
either of the State or of the richer classes or of both; the other was
enterprise beyond the sea. But neither of these seemed to deserve
government intervention, or regulation by a scheme which would
satisfy either immediate or future wants. The one was repudiated, as we
have already shown, on account of its novelty, its danger and its
inconvenience; the other seemed emphatically a matter for private
enterprise and above all for private capital. It could never be available
for the very poor unless it assumed the form of colonisation, and the
senate looked on transmarine colonisation with the eye of prejudice.[16]
It took a different view of the enterprise of the foreign speculator and
merchant; this it regarded with an air of easy indifference. Their wealth
was a pillar on which the State might lean in times of emergency, but,
until the disastrous effects of commercial enterprise on foreign policy
were more clearly seen, it was considered to be no business of the
government either to help or to hinder the wealthy and enterprising
Roman in his dealings with the peoples of the subject or protected
lands.
Rome, if by this name we mean the great majority of Roman citizens,
was for the first time for centuries in a situation in which all movement
and all progress seemed to be