Note 255 — Chapter XX

I met with the following passage in a work of high and deserved reputation. “The Romans, notwithstanding their prodigious losses in the incessant wars which they carried on for centuries, never experienced any want of men in the early periods of the commonwealth; but were even able to send colonies abroad out of their redundant population. Afterwards, in the time of the Emperors, when the armies were generally kept in camps and garrisons, where a soldier is perhaps the healthiest of all professions, the Roman population in Italy had greatly diminished, and was visibly declining every day, owing to a change in the division of property, and to the pernicious and monstrous increase of domestic slavery, which had left the poorer class of free citizens without any means of subsistence, but public charity.”—Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, by C. W. Pasley, Captain (now Colonel) in the corps of Royal Engineers. Note to p. 505.