Cato loved to make money and knew very well how to do it, as his own treatise on agriculture plainly shows; but he wished to do it in a legitimate way, and to spend profitably the money he made, and he spared no pains to prevent others from making it illegally and spending it unprofitably.

He saw clearly that the sudden influx of wealth was disturbing the balance of the Roman mind, and that the desire to make money was taking the place of the idea of duty to the State.

He knew that no Roman could serve two masters, Mammon and the State, and that Mammon was getting the upper hand in his views of life.

If the accumulation of wealth had been gradual instead of sudden, natural instead of artificial, this could hardly have happened; as in England from the fourteenth century onwards, the steady growth of capital would have produced no ethical mischief, no false economic ideas, because it would have been an _organic_ growth, resting upon a sound and natural economic basis.[107] As the French historian has said with singular felicity,[108] "Money is like water of a river: if it suddenly floods, it devastates; divide it into a thousand channels where it circulates quietly, and it brings life and fertility to every spot." It was in this period of the great wars, so unwholesome and perilous economically, that the men of business, as defined at the beginning of this chapter--the men of capital outside the ordo senatorius--first rose to real importance.

In the century that followed, and as we see them more especially in Cicero's correspondence, they became a great power in the State, and not only in Rome, but in every corner of the Empire.