CHAPTER XIV.

HOW SLAVERY GROWS IN ENGLAND.


The Roman people sought to centralize within their walls the power of
governing and taxing all the nations of the earth, and to a great
extent they succeeded; but in the effort to acquire power over others
they lost all power over themselves. As the city grew in size and as
its great men became greater, the proportions of the people everywhere
became less. The freemen of the Campagna had almost disappeared even
in the days of the elder Scipio, and their humble habitations had
given way to palaces, the centre of great estates, cultivated by
slaves. Step by step with the increase of power abroad came increased
consolidation of the land at home, and, as the people were more and
more driven from the soil the city grew in numbers and magnificence,
and in the poverty and rapacity of its inhabitants. The populace
needed to be fed, and that they might be so there was established a
great system of poor-laws, carried into effect by aid of the taxation
of distant provinces, at whose expense they were both fed and
entertained. They demanded cheap food, and they obtained their desires
at the cost of the cultivators, abroad and at home, who became more
and more enslaved as Rome itself was more cheaply supplied. Desires
grew with their indulgence, and the greater the facility for living
without labour, the greater became the necessity for seeking "new
markets" in which to exercise their powers of appropriation, and the
more extensive became the domain of slavery. Bankers and middlemen