A direct outgrowth of the presence in Rome of this great multitude of the idle free poor was the evil of the corn laws. The indiscriminate public free distribution of corn to the poorer citizens--prompted, for the most part, not by genuine humanitarian feelings but by unworthy political and personal motives--had a most debauching effect upon morals. It intensified the very evil it was supposed to ameliorate. It attracted still greater crowds of the idle to the capital, depressed to a still greater degree agriculture in Italy,--grain for distribution being imported in the main from Egypt and North Africa,--and checked every tendency toward the formation of habits of industry, self-reliance, and thrift in the lower classes. The evil attained its climax when the largesses became an undisguised bid by the corrupt demagogue for popular favor--the naked price paid by rich plotters against the commonwealth for the support of the morally debauched and fickle proletariat. [Sidenote: (_f_) Gladiatorial games] The idle population of Rome had not only to be fed but to be amused. The same motives that had led to the enormous increase in the largesses of grain to the free poor contributed also to the multiplication of the spectacles of the circus and the amphitheater, particularly of the gladiatorial games, which, introduced at Rome in the third century B.C., had now become the favorite amusement of the Roman populace. “That not only men, but women in an advanced period of civilization,--men and women who not only professed but very frequently acted upon a high code of morals,--should have made the carnage of men their habitual amusement, that all this should have continued for centuries, with scarcely a protest, is one of the most startling facts in moral history.”[538] But this fact is by no means an isolated or unique one in the ethical history of mankind. The student of the history of morals is often brought face to face with similar facts in the annals of every race and of every age. The fact with which the moralist is here confronted is hardly more startling than the hideously barbarous treatment of their enemies by the deeply pious Jews; the heartless massacre at times of their prisoners by the naturally humane Greeks; the savage severity of the medieval inquisitors toward heretics, while in general showing the greatest compassion and sympathy for those in pain and distress; the atrocious cruelty of the punishments meted out to offenders against society by the Christian governments of Europe down almost to the last century; the callous insensibility, until just now, of modern society to “the bitter cry of the children” of its city slums; and, above all, the glorification of war by the professed followers of Him whose most distinctive title is the Prince of Peace.