Among the pretty nearly useless remedies employed, besides those described in § 79, I may mention the following also: the great number of agrarian laws intended to lessen estates of too great extent owned by one person, and to restore a free peasant population, in the years 133, 123, 100, 91, 59 before Christ; the law in Hannibal's time (_Livy_, XXI, 63) that no senator should own a ship with a capacity of more than 300 amphora; the provision (_Sueton._, Caes., 42) that all great herd-owners should take at least one-third of their shepherds from the ranks of freemen; the many laws _de repetundis_, the first of which was promulgated 149 before Christ, intended to protect the provinces against spoliation by the governors; the L. Gabinia, 56 before Christ, which prohibited the loaning by the provinces in Rome; lastly, a rigid enforcement of police provisions against slaves, especially against their bearing arms, which were carried to such an extent, that slaves who had killed a boar with a spear were crucified. (_Cicero_, in Verr., II, 3.) The chief rule of every real oligarchy of money is, while they hold the lower classes in general under their yoke with great severity, to keep dangerous elements in good humor at the expense of the state. Among these are especially the rabble in large cities and the soldiery. Compare _Roscher_, Betrachtungen über Socialismus und Communismus, 436, 437.] [Footnote 204-11: In medieval Italy, also, popular freedom was lost through a moneyed oligarchy and a proletariat. _Popolo grasso_ and _minuto_ (_bourgeoisie_--_peuple_) in Florence. The former were reproached especially with the breach of trust in the matter of the public moneys (_Sismondi_, Gesch. der Ital. Republiken, II, 323, seq.), which reminds one of the French cry, _corruption_ in 1847. _Machiavelli_ gives a masterly description of the class contrasts during the last quarter of the fourteenth century, in his Istoria Fiorent., III, a. 1378, 4. The poor, whose spokesmen recall the most desperate shibboleths of modern socialists, dwell principally on this, that there is only one important difference, that between rich and poor; that all men are by nature entirely equal; that people get rich only through deceit or violence; that the poor want revenge etc. It is significant how, in Florence, the largest banker finally became absolute despot, and that contemporaneously in Genoa, the Bank of St. George, in a measure, absorbed the state; the former supported by numerous loans made to influential persons like Crassus (_Machiavelli_, Ist. Fior., VII); the latter by the overstraining of the system of national debt.] SECTION CCV. DISTRIBUTION OF THE NATIONAL INCOME.--HEALTHY DISTRIBUTION.