The dying republic had suffered under this incongruity, and whatever efforts Augustus might make to mitigate the evil, it was too deep-seated to be radically cured. The number of citizens who had to be maintained by regular donations of provisions from the public storehouses and by charitable gifts amounted to half a million, and yet this aid was but an inadequate makeshift; many of those disqualified to receive it were in no better case. There were thousands of free Romans who had no shelter but the public halls and colonnades of the temples, whose hopes were set upon the luck of the next minute, whose cares did not extend beyond the coming morrow. The distress was the less capable of remedy because, under the most galling circumstances, the free Roman cherished the proud consciousness that he was a member of the ruling race, and was withheld by his innate pride of nationality and hereditary prejudice from the humble tasks which furnished the alien, the freedman, and the slave with a tolerable livelihood and occasionally with wealth. He felt it less disgraceful to starve or live upon alms and gifts than to labour with his hands; he scorned the physical toils of agriculture and handicraft, and the trouble of serving another; but he had no scruples about begging for his living, and regarded the distributions of corn and the popular entertainments as no more than his due. The free beggar looked haughtily upon the bedizened slave, whose alms he took as he would have taken the fruit of the woodland tree or the draught from a spring. The easy life of the capital attracted needy and indolent persons from all parts of Italy to Rome, the city swarmed with beggars and vagrants, with idlers and proletarians, who all claimed their maintenance from the state.