After the patricians were restored to power by Sylla, they found that war and hereditary slavery did not supply the necessary quantity of slaves; and they consequently began to kidnap and enslave poor freemen--even their Roman fellow-citizens. To rob and take violent possession of the remaining freeholds became now a matter of course. In the time of Cicero nearly all handicrafts in the city, which had once been in the hands of freemen and clients, were carried on by slaves, either directly for their masters, or indirectly by being hired out to others. It became more and more common to hire out skilful slaves and to train them up with the view of receiving the revenues of their proficiency. It was then just as it is now; for then Italy, as now the slave states, was owned by slave-drivers, worked by slaves, and guarded by heartless overseers and bloodhounds. In the beginning of his career, Cæsar tried to create a free yeomanry by distributing the public domain among the poor free citizens and the disabled soldiers. After the victory over the oligarchs and Pompey, he colonized eighty thousand of the proletarians of Rome. But it was forever too late; and besides, the oligarchs and slaveholders opposed his attempts. Scarcely any free laborers existed; the domain of the slave-driver was universal; indeed it was such an epoch as is now again so ardently desired by small senators, would-be statesmen, and the whole vanguard of the knight-errant army of chattelhood. Freeholds disappeared from Italy, and almost from the world, with the exception perhaps of the valleys in the Apennines and the Abruzzi. The region from the modern Civita Vecchia across Tusculum to Boiæ and Naples, where once a dense population of Latin and Italian free yeomanry ploughed the soil and reaped the harvest, was now covered with splendid villas for the masters and with _ergastula_ for their chattels. But the proud inhabitants of the villas, the rich patricians and slaveholders, were themselves soon to become political slaves. Central Italy and the lands around Rome which nursed the armies, and from which were recruited the conquerors of the Carthaginians, Numidians and the phalanxes of Macedonia, was now a waste, depopulated solitude, owned by a few wealthy planters. Domestic slavery now brought Rome into the condition to which it had reduced Greece and the oriental world centuries before. The Italy of Varro and of Cicero resembled the Greece of Polybius, Carthage on the eve of its fall, or Asia as found by Alexander. _What will be the full and ripe crop of this dragon-teeth-seed in America?_ Whenever domestic slavery is planted and takes enduring root in a country, even the beauty of nature is ravaged and destroyed. Do the chattel-cabins enliven the landscape of Virginia or beautify the coast of Carolina? The living rill or river gloriously reflects a thousandfold the rays and colors of light, but stagnant sewers are everywhere alike fetid and abominable.