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We have already made occasional reference to the accidents on which the new industrial methods that created the latifundia were designedly based.
Be that as it may, their extirpation helped to make inevitable the vicious system of large estates cultivated by slaves; a system which is judged by its own results; for it was ruinate before emancipation; and emancipation only gave the coup de grace. The 'Latifundia perdidere' the Antilles, as they did Italy of old. The vicious system brought its own Nemesis.
He saw in "LATIFUNDIA" huge estates the ruin of the Roman Empire, and its prevalence in the United Kingdom was the greatest danger ahead of it. In these young countries the tendency to build up large holdings was naturally fostered by what was the earliest of our industries.
The economic evils consequent on the conscription must have been felt with hardly less severity by such of the Italian allies as lived in the regions within which the latifundia were growing up. To these were added the pecuniary burdens which Rome had been forced to impose during the Second Punic War.
In the Roman latifundia, which overspread central and southern Italy after the Hannibalic war, absenteeism was a chronic feature and a curse. The overseers there were commonly not helpers in the proprietors' daily routine, but sole managers charged with a paramount duty of procuring the greatest possible revenues and transmitting them to meet the urban expenditures of their patrician employers.
Certain economic changes are helping in this work; so the wealth imported from America helps to break up the big properties, those latifundia which, says an Italian authority, "are synonymous with malaria." The ideal condition the extirpation of anophelines will never be attained; nor is it of vital importance that it should be. Far more pressing is the protection of man against their attacks.
To our eyes its effects are clearer still. Slave labour and slave-discontent, 'latifundia, decrease of population, depreciation of the land, received a fresh impetus, and the triumphant optimates pushed the State step by step further down the road to ruin.
One result of the war will be to discredit the policy and methods of this oligarchy and to hasten the break-up of the vast latifundia of the great magnates and the Church, and those other drastic land reforms without which Hungary cannot hope to attain her full economic value as the granary of central Europe.
By the combined effect of division, machinery, net product, and interest, monopoly extends its conquests in an increasing progression; its developments embrace agriculture as well as commerce and industry, and all sorts of products. Everybody knows the phrase of Pliny upon the landed monopoly which determined the fall of Italy, latifundia perdidere Italiam.
"Verumque confitentibus latifundia perdidere Italiam." PLINY, Hist. Nat.xviii. 7. MICHELET, i. 96. AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS, c. xvi. See also GIBBON, vi. 264. GIBBON, vi. 262. The free traders seem not insensible to these inevitable results of their favourite principles; but they meet them by describing such consequences as rather advantageous than injurious.
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