These facts seem to show clearly that the question of the currency had really little or nothing to do with the decay of the Roman fibre. This decay began under one set of currency conditions, and continued unchanged when these conditions became precisely reversed. An infinitely more important cause, as Mr. Adams himself shows, was the immense damage done to the Italian husbandman by the importation of Asiatic and African slaves; which was in all probability the chief of the causes that conspired to ruin him. He was forced into competition with races of lower vitality; races tenacious of life, who possessed a very low standard of living, and who furnished to the great slave-owner his cheap labor. Mr. Adams shows that the husbandman was affected, not only by the importation of vast droves of slaves to compete with him in Italy, but by the competition with low-class labor in Egypt and elsewhere. These very points, if developed with Mr. Adams’s skill, would have enabled him to show in a very striking manner the radical contrast between the present political and social life of civilized states, and the political and social life of Rome during what he calls the capitalistic or closing period. At present, the minute that the democracy becomes convinced that the workman and the peasant are suffering from competition with cheap labor, whether this cheap labor take the form of alien immigration, or of the importation of goods manufactured abroad by low-class working-men, or of commodities produced by convicts, it at once puts a stop to the competition. We keep out the Chinese, very wisely; we have put an end to the rivalry of convict contract labor with free labor; we are able to protect ourselves, whenever necessary, by heavy import duties, against the effect of too cheap labor in any foreign country; and, finally, in the civil war, we utterly destroyed the system of slavery, which really was threatening the life of the free working-man in a way in which it cannot possibly be threatened by any conceivable development of the “capitalistic” spirit.