“However, although it is certain the number of permanent poor or professional beggars was not very numerous up to the beginning of the third century, there occurred terrible epochs when this number was fearfully augmented. It was in years of famine--in years when the harvests failed in Sicily or in Africa, or when the two corporations of shippers and bakers--one charged with superintending the importations and the other with the distribution of bread and flour--were suddenly brought to a standstill, that occurred those horrible famines from which the superior administration of modern times preserves the people of our times; it was then that all the slaves of Italy, no longer fed by their masters, were seen flocking to Rome to demand bread; but as this increase of population soon threatened Rome itself with starvation, they were expelled the city upon a given day, to go and die where they might. This was the ordinary course adopted by Roman administrations in critical times; and Symmachus, who was prefect of Rome about the year 383, wrote thus:--‘We fear the total failure of provisions at Rome, even after having chased away all the stranger-population which took refuge amongst us, and which the city subsisted.’ “On their side, the Christians inveighed loudly against the burgesses of Rome for refusing to divide their superfluity with the strangers who sought relief within her walls. St. Ambrose, who makes mention of this expulsion in several parts of his works, inveighs indignantly against this want of feeling on the part of the pagans. ‘Those,’ says he, ‘who banish the poor strangers from Rome are much to blame. It is inhuman to repulse a fellow-creature at the moment he craves succour at your hands. Brute beasts do not treat their kind so: ’tis only man that behaves so to man.’ Sometimes the pagans themselves protested against the expulsion of strangers when famine threatened the towns they had fled from.” This, it will be observed, took place after the legal establishment of Christianity under Constantine. M. de Cassagnac continues:--