If we turn to rural Italy, the prospect is hardly less dreary. Incalculable damage had been done to agriculture in the great war, and agriculture, in the broad sense of the word, was almost the only Italian industry. Corn, wine, oil, wool and leather had formerly been produced in sufficient quantities to keep the inhabitants in food and clothing, each community growing what it needed, as in mediæval England. But this simple form of agricultural economy must have suffered a severe shock, not only from the ravages of armies, but from the decrease of the working population owing to war and pestilence. In order to restore a decaying industry you must have the men to work it. Depopulation as the result mainly of war was a disease epidemic in the Mediterranean in this age; and in Italy we know for certain how rife it was, for we have the records of the census of the body of Roman citizens, which show a steady falling-off in this period, and we must suppose that the same causes were at work among the non-Roman population of the peninsula. There was, indeed, a remedy, but it was almost worse than the disease—I mean the vast numbers of slaves now available for labour. The unskilled slaves, captured or kidnapped in Spain, Gaul, Epirus, Thrace or Asia Minor, were cheap in the Roman market, and would do well enough to run a farm with, especially if that farm were chiefly a pastoral one, with flocks and herds needing no great experience or skill to look after. This cheapness, and the physical conditions of rural life in a mountainous country, made cattle-running and sheep-tending a profitable industry. Large districts of Italy, especially in the centre and south, became covered in this period with huge estates owned by capitalists, and worked by rough and often savage slaves, who were locked up at night in underground prisons and treated simply as “living tools.” No ray of hope ever broke in on these miserable beings; no free citizen gave a thought either to their condition or the economic danger of the system; philanthropy and political economy were unknown in the Roman world, for imagination and reflection were alike foreign to the Roman mental habit