Book IV: Chapter 7 - Page 2

it the manners and customs of those times
rendered it difficult for a freeman to maintain his independency.
In the present times, though a poor man has no land of his own,
if he has a little stock, he may either farm the lands of
another, or he may carry on some little retail trade ; and if he
has no stock, he may find employment either as a country
labourer, or as an artificer. But among the ancient Romans, the
lands of the rich were all cultivated by slaves, who wrought
under an overseer, who was likewise a slave; so that a poor
freeman had little chance of being employed either as a farmer or
as a labourer. All trades and manufactures, too, even the retail
trade, were carried on by the slaves of the rich for the benefit
of their masters, whose wealth, authority, and protection, made
it difficult for a poor freeman to maintain the competition
against them. The citizens, therefore, who had no land, had
scarce any other means of subsistence but the bounties of the
candidates at the annual elections. The tribunes, when they had a
mind to animate the people against the rich and the great, put
them in mind of the ancient divisions of lands, and represented
that law which restricted this sort of private property as the
fundamental law of the republic. The people became clamorous to
get land, and the rich and the great, we may believe, were
perfectly determined not to give them any part of theirs. To
satisfy them in some measure, therefore, they frequently proposed
to send out a new colony. But conquering Rome was, even upon such
occasions, under no necessity of turning out her citizens to seek
their fortune, if one may so, through the wide world, without
knowing where they were to settle. She assigned them lands
generally in the conquered provinces of Italy, where, being
within the dominions of the republic, they could never form any
independent state, but were at best but a sort of corporation,
which, though it had the power of enacting bye-laws for its own
government, was at all times subject to the correction,
jurisdiction, and legislative authority of the mother city. The
sending out a colony of this kind not only gave some satisfaction
to the people, but often established a sort of garrison, too, in
a newly conquered province, of which the obedience might
otherwise have been doubtful. A Roman colony, therefore, whether
we consider the nature of the establishment itself, or the
motives for making it, was altogether different from a Greek one.
The words, accordingly, which in the original languages denote
those different establishments, have very different meanings. The
Latin word (colonia) signifies simply a plantation. The Greek
word (apoixia), on the contrary, signifies a separation of