After the first successes of the slaves dissensions broke out among them. Such hordes can nowhere long preserve a higher object than the momentary gratification of their passions—a fact which shields human society from their rage. Piracy, also, is another side of this proletarian system. It found its strongest aliment in the system of spoliation practiced by the Romans in Asia Minor. The oppressed along the whole coast, joined the pirates "preferring to do violence rather than to suffer." (Appian, B. Mithr., 92, Dio C., XXXII, 3.) The temples and the wealthy Romans were in special danger. But the worst feature in the horrible picture was that many of the great shared in the spoils with the robbers. They bought slaves and other booty from them at mock prices, even close by the gates of Rome. (Strabo, XIV, 668 seq., Dio C., XXXVI, 5.) Precisely as the slave-wars were looked upon with pleasure by the poorer free men. Incendiarism was one of the chief weapons of mutinous pauperism. (Drumann, IV, 282.) The celebrated bacchanalian trial and the questions of poisoning which followed it as a consequence (186 before Christ) may be looked upon, in Rome, as the first marked symptoms of the disruption between the oligarchy of money and the proletariat. This put the morality of the higher classes in a bad light, while, at the same time, a large slave conspiracy in Apulia, which was not suppressed until the year 185, exhibited the reverse of the picture. Cato, the censor, endeavored to oppose this tendency by high sumptuary taxes, and by establishing proletarian colonies. At the same time we see the various parties among the nobility uniting and the publicans joining them. (Nitzsch, Gracchen, 124 ff.) The history of the last hundred years of the Republic turns chiefly on the three great attempts made by the proletariat to overthrow the citadel of the moneyed oligarchy, under the Gracchi, under Marius and under Cæsar. The last was permanently successful but entailed the loss of the freedom of both parties.
Among the pretty nearly useless remedies employed, besides those described in § 79, I may mention the following also: the great number of agrarian laws intended to lessen estates of too great extent owned by one person, and to restore a free peasant population, in the years 133, 123, 100, 91, 59 before Christ; the law in Hannibal's time (Livy, XXI, 63) that no senator should own a ship with a capacity of more than 300 amphora; the provision (Sueton., Caes., 42) that all great herd-owners should take at least one-third of their shepherds from the ranks of freemen; the many laws de repetundis, the first of which was promulgated 149 before Christ, intended to protect the provinces against spoliation by the governors; the L. Gabinia, 56 before Christ, which prohibited the loaning by the provinces in Rome; lastly, a rigid enforcement of police provisions against slaves, especially against their bearing arms, which were carried to such an extent, that slaves who had killed a boar with a spear were crucified. (Cicero, in Verr., II, 3.) The chief rule of every real oligarchy of money is, while they hold the lower classes in general under their yoke with great severity, to keep dangerous elements in good humor at the expense of the state. Among these are especially the rabble in large cities and the soldiery. Compare Roscher, Betrachtungen über Socialismus und Communismus, 436, 437.
[204-11] In medieval Italy, also, popular freedom was lost through a moneyed oligarchy and a proletariat. Popolo grasso and minuto (bourgeoisie—peuple) in Florence. The former were reproached especially with the breach of trust in the matter of the public moneys (Sismondi, Gesch. der Ital. Republiken, II, 323, seq.), which reminds one of the French cry, corruption in 1847. Machiavelli gives a masterly description of the class contrasts during the last quarter of the fourteenth century, in his Istoria Fiorent., III, a. 1378, 4. The poor, whose spokesmen recall the most desperate shibboleths of modern socialists, dwell principally on this, that there is only one important difference, that between rich and poor; that all men are by nature entirely equal; that people get rich only through deceit or violence; that the poor want revenge etc. It is significant how, in Florence, the largest banker finally became absolute despot, and that contemporaneously in Genoa, the Bank of St. George, in a measure, absorbed the state; the former supported by numerous loans made to influential persons like Crassus (Machiavelli, Ist. Fior., VII); the latter by the overstraining of the system of national debt.
DISTRIBUTION OF THE NATIONAL INCOME.—HEALTHY DISTRIBUTION.
Hence a harmony of the large, medium and small incomes may be considered the indispensable condition of the economic prosperity of a people.[205-1] This prosperity is best secured when the medium-class income prevails, when no citizen is so rich that he can buy the others, and no one so poor that he might be compelled to sell himself. (J. J. Rousseau.)[205-2] Where there is not a numerous class of citizens who have time enough to serve the state even gratis, as jurymen, overseers of the poor, municipal officers, representatives of the people etc. (compare § 63), and property enough to be independent of the whims and caprices of others, and to maintain themselves and the state in times of need, even the most excellent of constitutions must remain a dead letter. Nor should there be an entire absence of large fortunes, and even of inherited large fortunes. The changes of ministry which accompany constitutional government are fully possible only when the choice of men who would not lose their social position by a cessation of their salaries as public functionaries is not altogether too limited.[205-3] Thus the transaction of the most important political business, especially that which relates to foreign affairs, requires a peculiar elasticity of mind, and a capacity for routine on the grandest scale, which with very rare exceptions, can be acquired only by habituation to them from childhood, and which are lost as soon as the care for food is felt. The bird's-eye-view of those who are born "great" does not, by any means, embrace the whole truth of human things, but it does a very important side of it. Among this class, as a rule, it is easiest to find great party leaders, while leaders who have to be paid by their party, generally become in the long run, mere party tools.[205-4] It is true that it requires great intellectual and moral power to resist the temptations which a brilliant hereditary condition presents; temptations especially to idleness, to pride and debauchery. For ordinary men, it is a moral and, in the end, an economic blessing, that they have to eat their bread in the sweat of their brow,[205-5] and that they can grow rich only by long-continued frugality.[205-6] However, the distribution of the national income, and every change in that same distribution, constitute one of the most important but at the same time one of the most obscure departments of statistics.[205-7] When inequality increases because the lower classes absolutely decline, there is no use in talking any longer about the prosperity of the nation.[205-8] It is different, of course, when only the higher classes become, relatively speaking, higher yet. But even this latter kind of inequality may operate disastrously, inasmuch as it nourishes the most dangerous tendency of democracy, that of envy towards those who are better off.
[205-1] Verri Meditazioni, VI.
[205-2] Aristotle's view that, in a good state, the middle class should preponderate. (Polit. IV, 6, Sch.) Sismondi says: la richesse se réalise en jouissances; mais la jouissance de l'homme riche ne s'accroît pas avec ses richesses. (Etudes sur l'Economie politique, 1837, I, 15.)
[205-3] If state offices were to be filled by doctors or lawyers who live by their practice, after a time, only those could be had who had no large practice to sacrifice, that is, beginners or obscuranti.
[205-4] Per contra, see Bazard, Doctrine de Saint Simon, 323. But Sismondi is certainly right: nous ne croyons point, que les hommes qui doivent servir à l'humanité de flambeau naissent le plus souvent au sein de la classe riche; mais elle seule les apprécie et a le loisir de jouir de leurs travaux. (Etudes, I, 174.)