Ancient as well as modern historians are full of complaints, in the later periods of the Roman empire, of the prodigious increase of wealth in the hands of the rich, and decline in the remuneration of industry to the poor. Their complaints on this subject are so numerous, and supported by such an array of facts, as to leave no room for doubt that they are well founded. Indeed, it seems to have been generally true of the whole empire north of the Mediterranean, what Mr Finlay shows was the case down to the very latest periods in Greece, that while industry and population in the country were ruined, the towns were in a state of affluence and prosperity. Even so early as the time of Plutarch, the accumulation of _debts_ had come to be complained of as an extensive evil.[44] "These debts," says Finlay, "were generally contracted to Roman money-lenders. So injurious did their effects become to the provinces, that they afforded to one class the means of _accumulating enormous fortunes by forcing others into abject poverty_. The property of the provincial debtors was at length transferred to a very great extent to Roman creditors. Instead of invigorating the upper classes, by substituting an industrious timocracy for an idle aristocracy, it had a very different effect. It introduced new feelings of rivalry and distrust, by filling the country with foreign landlords. The weight of debts seems to have been the chief cause of revolutions in the ancient world. The Greeks could not long maintain the struggle, and they sunk gradually lower in wealth, until their poverty introduced an altered state of society, in which they learned the prudential habits of small proprietors, and escape not only from the eye of history but even of antiquarian research."[45]