But, curiously enough, Mr. Adams himself shows that all this really occurred during the two centuries, or thereabouts, extending from the end of the second Punic war through the reign of the first of the Roman emperors; and this was a period of currency expansion, not of currency contraction. Moreover, it was emphatically a period when the military and not the economic type was supreme. The great Romans of the first and second centuries before Christ were soldiers, not merchants or usurers, and they could only be said to possess the economic instinct incidentally, in so far as it is possessed by every man of the military type who seizes the goods accumulated by the man of the economic type. It was during these centuries, when the military type was supreme, and when prices were rising, that the ruin, the enslavement and the extermination of the old rural population of Italy began. It was during these centuries that the husbandmen left the soil and became the mob of Rome, clamoring for free bread and the games of the amphitheatre. It was toward the close of this period that the Roman army became an army no longer of Roman citizens, but of barbarians trained in the Roman manner; it was toward the close of this period that celibacy became so crying an evil as to invoke the vain action of the legislature, and that the Roman race lost the power of self-perpetuation. What happened in the succeeding centuries,--the period of the contraction of the currency and the rise of prices,--was merely the completion of the ruin which had already been practically accomplished.