But time was needed to effect these changes. For the present the reign of the capitalist was supreme, and the plantation system was dominant throughout the greater part of Italy. The most essential ingredient in this system was the slave,--an alien and a chattel, individually a thing of little account, but reckoned in his myriads the most powerful factor in the economic, and therefore in the political, life of the times, the gravest of the problems that startled the reformer. The soil of Italy was now peopled with widely varied types, and echoes of strange tongues from West and East could be heard on every hand. Italy seemed a newly discovered country, on which the refuse of all lands had been thrown to become a people that could never be a nation. The home supply of slaves, so familiar as to seem a product of the land, was becoming a mere trifle in comparison with the vast masses that were being thrust amongst the peasantry by war and piracy. At the time of the protest of Tiberius Gracchus against the dominance of slave labour in the fields scarcely two generations had elapsed since the great influx had begun. The Second Punic War had spread to every quarter of the West; Sicily, Sardinia, Cisalpine Gaul and Spain all yielded their tribute in the form of human souls that had passed from the victor to the dealer, from the dealer to the country and the town. Only one generation had passed since a great wave had swept from Epirus and Northern Greece over the shores of Italy. In Epirus alone one hundred and fifty thousand prisoners had been sold.[233] Later still the destruction of Carthage must have cast vast quantities of agricultural slaves upon the market.[234] Asia too had yielded up her captives as the result of Roman victories; but the Oriental visages that might be seen in the streets of Rome or the plains of Sicily, were less often the gift of regular war than of the piracy and the systematised slave-hunting of the Eastern Mediterranean. Rome, who had crushed the rival maritime powers that had attempted, however imperfectly, to police the sea, had been content with the work of destruction, and seemed to care nothing for the enterprising buccaneers who sailed with impunity as far west as Sicily. The pirates had also made themselves useful to the Oriental powers which still retained their independence; they had been tolerated, if they had not been employed, by Cyprus and Egypt when these states were struggling against the Empire of the Seleucids.[235] But another reason for their immunity was the view held in the ancient world that slave-hunting was in itself a legitimate form of enterprise.[236] The pirate might easily be regarded as a mere trader in human merchandise. As such, he had perhaps been useful to Carthage;[237] and, as long as he abstained from attacking ports or nationalities under the protectorate of Rome, there was no reason why the capitalists in power should frown on the trade by which they prospered.