How well this state, now completed in its main outlines, suited the social condition of the Athenians was apparent by the rapid growth of wealth, commerce and industry. The distinction of classes on which the social and political institutions are resting was no longer between nobility and common people, but between slaves and freemen, aliens and citizens. At the time of the greatest prosperity the whole number of free Athenian citizens, women and children included, amounted to about 90,000; the slaves of both sexes numbered 365,000 and the aliens--foreigners and freed slaves--45,000. Per capita of each adult citizen there were, therefore, at least eighteen slaves and more than two aliens. The great number of slaves is explained by the fact that many of them worked together in large factories under supervision. The development of commerce and industry brought about an accumulation and concentration of wealth in a few hands. The mass of the free citizens were impoverished and had to face the choice of either competing with their own labor against slave labor, which was considered ignoble and vile, besides promising little success, or to be ruined. Under the prevailing circumstances they necessarily chose the latter course and being in the majority they ruined the whole Attic state. Not democracy caused the downfall of Athens, as the European glorifiers of princes and lickspittle schoolmasters would have us believe, but slavery ostracizing the labor of the free citizen. The origin of the state among the Athenians presents a very typical form of state organization. For it took place without any marring external interference or internal obstruction--the usurpation of Pisistratos left no trace of its short duration. It shows the direct rise of a highly developed form of a state, the democratic republic, out of gentile society. And finally, we are sufficiently acquainted with all the essential details of the process. CHAPTER VI. GENS AND STATE IN ROME. The legend of the foundation of Rome sets forth that the first colonization was undertaken by a number of Latin gentes (one hundred, so the legend says) united into one tribe. A Sabellian tribe (also said to consist of one hundred gentes) soon followed, and finally a third tribe of various elements, but again numbering one hundred gentes, joined them. The whole tale reveals at the first glance that little more than the gens was borrowed from reality, and that the gens itself was in certain cases only an offshoot of an old mother gens still existing at home. The tribes bear the mark of artificial composition on their foreheads; still they were made up of kindred elements and after the model of the old spontaneous, not artificial tribe. At the same time it is not impossible that a genuine old tribe formed the nucleus of every one of these three tribes. The connecting link, the phratry, contained ten gentes and was called curia. Hence there were thirty curiae.