Not only that, but slavery undermines free labor, and breaks down the farming class. Cheap food poured into Rome, and the farmers were ruined, and their sons drifted into the cities. The lands of Italy were mortgaged, and the money-lenders got them. Wealthy merchants and officials returning from the provinces became owners of vast estates, while the cities were crowded with a hungry mob, idle, dissolute--and victimized by the owners of slum tenements. You may see every bit of that reproduced in the United States today, for chattel slavery and wage slavery are in their economic effects the same. The only difference is that a process which took six or eight centuries in Rome is taking one century under the stimulus of machinery. The Roman mob had the vote, and they used it to get something for themselves. There came class struggles, bitter and ferocious. Two young brothers of the aristocracy, Caius and Tiberius Gracchus, became champions of the common people--what we call “parlor Socialists.” They were assassinated, and the partisans of privilege, the “old gang,” proceeded to slaughter everybody in Italy who threatened their power. There followed two generations of civil strife, and then came a strong man, Julius Cæsar, who put an end to political democracy. In history books that are taught to our school children today you will read that Cæsar was a great and virtuous protector of law and order; because the class which is paying for school text-books in capitalist America is waiting hopefully for the arrival of exactly such a man to put an end to the threat of industrial democracy. So Rome became in form what it was in fact, an empire, the most colossal machine for plundering that had ever been seen on earth. A little inside gang of rich men ran it, and kept the mob satisfied by bread and circuses and gladiatorial shows. The Roman emperors tried every form of debauchery and blood-thirsty cruelty, incest and unnatural vice, and crowned it by having themselves made into gods with their statues set up to be worshiped in the temples. Their heirs took to murdering and poisoning each other, and Rome was governed by palace revolutions. Then the army discovered that it could share the graft, and the troops took to revolting and setting up their leaders as emperors and gods. All the while the tribute continued to roll in--the wealth of the whole world squandered in one mad orgy-- “Look here,” says Mrs. Ogi; “you have got in a solid chapter of preaching--and we are trying to find out about art!” “I’m all through now,” says her husband, humbly. “But no one could understand Roman art without understanding the economics of slavery.” CHAPTER XXIII DUMB PIOUS ÆNEAS