It will therefore be scarcely possible to estimate the free population of the peninsula at more than from 6 to 7 millions.

If its whole population at this time was equal to that of the present day, we should have to assume accordingly a mass of slaves amounting to 13 or 14 millions.

It needs however no such fallacious calculations to render the dangerous tension of this state of things apparent; this is loudly enough attested by the partial servile insurrections, and by the appeal which from the beginning of the revolutions was at the close of every outbreak addressed to the slaves to take up arms against their masters and to fight out their liberty.
If we conceive of England with its lords, its squires, and above all its City, but with its freeholders and lessees converted into proletarians, and its labourers and sailors converted into slaves, we shall gain an approximate image of the population of the Italian peninsula in those days.
The economic relations of this epoch are clearly mirrored to us even now in the Roman monetary system.

Its treatment shows throughout the sagacious merchant.

For long gold and silver stood side by side as general means of payment on such a footing that, while for the purpose of general cash-balances a fixed ratio of value was legally laid down between the two metals,( 39) the giving one metal for the other was not, as a rule, optional, but payment was to be in gold or silver according to the tenor of the bond.
In this way the great evils were avoided, that are otherwise inevitably associated with the setting up of two precious metals; the severe gold crises--as about 600, for instance, when in consequence of the discovery of the Tauriscan gold-seams( 40) gold as compared with silver fell at once in Italy about 33 1/3 per cent--exercised at least no direct influence on the silver money and retail transactions.