contribute to the extension of the prince’s estates, and to further the general expulsion of the peasantry from their holdings.”[128] The example of the Roman Empire shows, as nothing else can, how inevitable this process becomes. When we first meet Rome in history the conception of serfdom or bondage has already been forgotten. When the “modern period” of Rome opens, only slavery is known. And yet, within fifteen centuries, the free peasantry again sink into economic dependence, after Rome has become an overextended, unwieldy empire, whose border districts have more and more dissolved from the central control. The great landed proprietors, having been endowed with the lower justice and police administration on their own estates have “reduced their servants, who may originally have been free proprietors of the ‘_ager privatus vectigalis_’ to a state of servitude, and have thus developed a sort of actual _glebæ adscriptus_, within the boundaries of their ‘immunities.’”[124] The invading Germans found this feudal order worked out in Gaul and the other provinces. At this particular time, the immense difference formerly existing between slaves and free settlers (_coloni_) had been completely obliterated, first in their economic position, and then, naturally, in their constitutional rights. Wherever the common freemen sink into political and economic dependence on the great territorial magnates, when, in other words, they become bound either to the court or to the lands, the social group formerly subject to them tend in a corresponding measure to improve their status. Both layers tend to meet half-way, to approximate their position, and finally to amalgamate. The observations just made concerning the free settlers and the agricultural slaves of the later Roman Empire hold true everywhere. Thus in Germany, freemen and serfs together formed, when fused, the economic and legally unital group of _Grundholde_, or men bound to the soil.[125] The elevation of the former “subjects,” hereafter for the sake of brevity to be called “plebs,” flows from the same source as the debasement of the freeman, and arises by the same necessity from the very foundations on which these states are themselves erected, viz., the agglomeration of the landed property in ever fewer hands.