When the Senate sold captured lands at auction, it was in the interest of the treasury and of public welfare.
When the patricians bought up possessions and property, they realized the purpose of the Senate's decrees; when they lent at high rates of interest, they took advantage of a legal privilege.

"Property," said the lender, "is the right to enjoy even to the extent of abuse, _jus utendi et abutendi_; that is, the right to lend at interest,--to lease, to acquire, and then to lease and lend again." But property is also the right to exchange, to transfer, and to sell.

If, then, the social condition is such that the proprietor, ruined by usury, may be compelled to sell his possession, the means of his subsistence, he will sell it; and, thanks to the law, accumulated property--devouring and anthropophagous property--will be established.[56] The immediate and secondary cause of the decline of the Romans was, then, the internal dissensions between the two orders of the republic,--the patricians and the plebeians,--dissensions which gave rise to civil wars, proscriptions, and loss of liberty, and finally led to the empire; but the primary and mediate cause of their decline was the establishment by Numa of the institution of property.
I end with an extract from a work which I have quoted several times already, and which has recently received a prize from the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences:-- "The concentration of property," says M.Laboulaye, "while causing extreme poverty, forced the emperors to feed and amuse the people, that they might forget their misery.

_Panem et circenses:_ that was the Roman law in regard to the poor; a dire and perhaps a necessary evil wherever a landed aristocracy exists.
"To feed these hungry mouths, grain was brought from Africa and the provinces, and distributed gratuitously among the needy.

In the time of Caesar, three hundred and twenty thousand people were thus fed.