Columella, I own, advises the master to give a reward, and even liberty to a female slave that had reared him above three children, a proof that sometimes the ancients propagated from their slaves, which, indeed, cannot be denied. Were it otherwise the practice of slavery, being so common in antiquity, must have been destructive to a degree which no expedient could repair. All I pretend to infer from these reasonings is that slavery is in general disadvantageous both to the happiness and populousness of mankind, and that its place is much better supplied by the practice of hired servants. The laws, or, as some writers call them, the seditions of the Gracchi, were occasioned by their observing the increase of slaves all over Italy, and the diminution of free citizens. Appian ascribes this increase to the propagation of the slaves; Plutarch to the purchasing of barbarians, who were chained and imprisoned, βαρβαρικα δεσμωτηρια. It is to be presumed that both causes concurred. Sicily, says Florus, was full of _ergastula_, and was cultivated by labourers in chains. Eunus and Athenio excited the servile war by breaking up these monstrous prisons and giving liberty to 60,000 slaves. The younger Pompey augmented his army in Spain by the same expedient. If the country-labourers throughout the Roman Empire were so generally in this situation, and if it was difficult or impossible to find separate lodgings for the families of the city-servants, how unfavourable to propagation, as well as to humanity, must the institution of domestic slavery be esteemed. Constantinople at present requires the same recruits of slaves from all the provinces which Rome did of old, and these provinces are of consequence far from being populous. Egypt, according to Monsieur Maillet, sends continual colonies of black slaves to the other parts of the Turkish Empire, and receives annually an equal return of white; the one brought from the inland parts of Africa, the other from Mingrella, Circassia, and Tartary. Our modern convents are no doubt very bad institutions, but there is reason to suspect that anciently every great family in Italy, and probably in other parts of the world, was a species of convent. And though we have reason to detest all those popish institutions as nurseries of the most abject superstition, burdensome to the public and oppressive to the poor prisoners, male as well as female, yet may it be questioned whether they be so destructive to the populousness of a state as is commonly imagined. Were the land which belongs to a convent bestowed on a nobleman, he would spend its revenue on dogs, horses, grooms, footmen, cooks, and housemaids, and his family would not furnish many more citizens than the convent.