the lot would have chosen a worthy and competent mayor. That the world has progressed some or much is no proof that, except for constantly recurring domination of little minorities of rich men,the outworkings of monopoly,-it would not have progressed much more.

Not alone in Greece did monopoly in the ancient world work its dire effects. In turn imperial Rome herself succumbed to the same cause and the proud conqueror of the world was likewise conquered by her own prosperity. In Rome the same process which ruined Greece was repeated. The land was likewise monopolized. The only difference was that for cattle and sheep there were substituted the olive and the vine.

Gradually Italy produced wine and olives more largely till enormous vineyards and olive orchards covered her hillsides. Later when the Roman populace were starving for the corn which had to be brought at all hazards from Egypt or Asia Minor, the fertility of Italy was producing in great abundance the finest and most costly wines. These the people could not buy and did not drink. They could not buy because the land from which they might have produced something to exchange was monopolized. All this had come about very gradually and properly according to the existing system.

No rich man had stolen his land or in violation of the strict Roman law, it may be assumed, ejected

any poor farmer by force. The poor farmer had been glad to sell. He received a good price and went to the city where, after spending his money unproductively, he hoped to get free corn. The little he was likely to get looked more promising than anything he could get at home. The basic fund was mostly economic corpse though wine and olives. The farmer could raise only some of the things he wished to eat. More could probably be obtained in the city for various client services. The farmer's small products had lost most of their exchangeability because few at home had anything to exchange for them except those who had wine and olives. They had raw products enough of their own and wished money, or other luxuries, for wine and olives. Consequently they were high as the effective demand for money was slight.

Effective demand for money was so slight that everything was high,-the only difference among commodities being that some were higher than others. In this situation no one could raise enough raw products to buy anything worth while. Transportation was also high and there was little profit in sending corn to the city. Practically all he obtained from his farm was what he ate himself. Naturally the Roman citizen felt it was more cheerful to eat in the city among his compeers at the expense of the state. Eating was equally the sole benefit in either place and in the city it came with less work

and more society. All this was caused by the monopolization of the source of production, the land. In feudal Europe, pre-revolutionary France and in a modern instance, Ireland, the same effect upon the middle class was produced by the same

cause.

Ferrero in his Greatness and Decline of Rome, which, in the language of this eminent historian, "includes in its survey the entire course of one of the most remarkable societies in history, from its birth to its death-from the far-distant morning when a small clan of peasants and shepherds felled the forests on the Palatine to raise altars to its tribal deities, down to the tragic hour in which the sun of Græco-Latin civilization set over the deserted fields, the abandoned cities, the homeless, ignorant and brutalized peoples of Latin Europe," thus begins: "In the second half of the fifth century before Christ Rome was still an aristocratic community of free peasants, occupying an area of nearly 400 square miles, with a population, certainly not exceeding 150,000, almost entirely dispersed over the countryside and divided into seventeen districts or rural Tribes. Most of the families had a small holding and cottage of their own, where father and sons lived and worked together, growing corn for the most part, with here and there a strip of vine or olive" (Vol. I, pp. 1-2).

These conditions did not continue. After three

hundred years the small holdings were mostly collected in the hands of large landowners. There remained the public lands. These in large areas were then largely held on lease from the state by wealthy proprietors from among the Roman aristocracy.

The author thus continues: "Tiberius Gracchus had been brought up in his father's house under the most distinguished Greek philosophers of the day. He was familiar from boyhood with discussions on the difficulties that beset the Roman State. He had heard Rome's most notable statesmen lamenting the symptoms of social and military decadence, and crying out for some reform which would avert the impending chaos. What disquieted them most was the wholesale disappearance of the country population upon which the army relied for its recruits" (I, 55).

The story of how the Gracchi in turn tried to divide these public lands among the landless-only to result in turn in the murder of Tiberius and Caius at the hands of these same wealthy proprietorsis Roman history. Meanwhile the troubles of the remaining moderate proprietors increased. It was, of course, a progressive process. "They no longer found it possible to make a living on the old system by cultivating the vine and the olive for private use and growing corn for sale, and were now trying to grow no more corn than they needed for home con

sumption, and to place oil and wine upon the market. Oil and wine not only fetched a relatively higher price than corn, but were also more easy to transport to customers at a distance” (I, 55).

"The fate of Tiberius and his schemes had demonstrated that it was useless to try to remedy the distress at Rome without first breaking down, or at least humiliating, the powerful faction of the great public landlords" (I, 57). This faction, however, proved too powerful for its opponents. "The great landlords, for their part, did not hesitate to take action. Profiting by their sudden access of power, after the murder of Caius, they carried through the Senate, the very year after his death, a law abolishing the inalienability of the lands assigned by the Commissioners" (I, 69). This left even the public lands free to be acquired by the same large proprietors and they did not neglect their opportunity.

"A new line of cleavage appeared in Italian society. On the one side was the great host of men who had lost all they had to lose in the world, the bankrupt traders and ruined landowners who were to be found in every corner of Italy; on the other, a small and grasping clique of parvenue millionaires. The moderate incomes, which might have bridged the gulf between the two, were gradually disappearing. It was a narrow and exclusive ring of capitalists, composed of a few surviving nobles, of some of the ancient Italian aristocracy and of