Needless to say most inns and even the better restaurants enjoy such an evil reputation among the high and mighty that the latter never frequent them save, as does Lollius, for the naughty “experience.” Even when traveling through Italy, so general is the custom of extending hospitality, that only rarely will a great man like Calvus have to lodge with his retinue at an inn. The result is that country inns are hardly more select than those in the city, with sometimes the additional reputation of being the holds of unabashed robbers. Ladies and gentlemen, and even their more fastidious slaves, groan when they have to put up at country taverns, and what Cicero, Horace, Propertius, and other writers have thought of inns and inn-keepers has passed into literary history. CHAPTER XIII ECONOMIC LIFE OF ROME: II. THE INDUSTRIAL QUARTERS. THE GRAIN TRADE. OSTIA. THE TRADE GUILDS =210. Industrial Quarters by the Tiber.=--We have said that Rome was not primarily an industrial or commercial city. A million and a half people cannot, however, exist without a great deal of local manufacturing and an elaborate organization for importing staples and luxuries. If we go down the Vicus Tuscus or some other streets leading near the Tiber and toward the southern part of the city, the fine mansions grow fewer, the insulæ become more squalid, and even these last are interspersed with dingy structures of concrete which by the noise and smells proceeding thence are obviously factories. These industrial plants are for the most part small according to the standards of another age; there is also a marked absence of complicated machinery and a conspicuous dependence simply on patient man-power; but some establishments are really on a great scale. The noble House of Afer, for example, has a practical monopoly of the brick industry.[129] Its products are used all over the city, as may be proved by the name stamped on almost every brick, and in the Afer yards and kilns are employed several thousands of slaves and free workers. =211. Conditions of Industrial Labor.=--Slave labor has crowded free labor hard but has not actually destroyed it. You can never get quite the same efficiency from a “speaking tool” as from a man to whom life affords honest prospects. Furthermore, the supply of slaves is unsteady. While the legions were overrunning helpless kingdoms, it was easy enough to buy a hundred more hands for your pottery works or metal factory; but now the campaigns of Trajan (the last period, it will prove, of the great conquests) are over. There are barely enough prisoners in the slave market at present to provide a fair supply of servants.