to find a livelihood, each craft devoting itself to the supply of a single branch of those wants which the village household had attempted very imperfectly to satisfy by its own labours."

As in mediaeval Europe, so in early Rome, the same conditions produced the same results: we find the craftsmen of the town forming themselves into gilds, not only for the protection of their trade, but from a natural instinct of association, and providing these gilds, on the model of the older groups of family and gens, with a religious centre and a patron deity. The gilds (collegia) of Roman craftsmen were attributed to Numa, like so many other religious institutions; they included associations of weavers, fullers, dyers, shoemakers, doctors, teachers, painters, etc.,[75] and were mainly devoted to Minerva as the deity of handiwork. "The society that witnessed the coming of Minerva from Etruria … little knew that in her temple on the Aventine was being brought to expression the trade-union idea."[76] These collegia opificum, most unfortunately, pass entirely out of our sight, until they reappear in the age of Cicero in a very different form, as clubs used for political purposes, but composed still of the lowest strata of the free population (collegia sodalicia).[77] The history and causes of their disappearance and metamorphosis are lost to us; but it is not hard to guess that the main cause is to be found in the great economic changes that followed the Hannibalic war,—the vast number of slaves imported, and the consequent resuscitation of the old system of the economic independence of the great households; the decay of religious practice, which affected both public and private life in a hundred different ways; and that steady growth of individualism which is characteristic of eras of town life, and especially of the last three centuries B.C. It is curious to notice that by the time these old gilds emerge into light again as clubs that could be used for political purposes, a new source of gain, and one that was really sordid, had been placed within the reach of the Roman plebs urbana: it was possible to make money by your vote in the election of magistrates. In that degenerate when the vast accumulation of capital made it possible for a man to purchase his way to power, in spite of repeated attempts to check the evil by legislation, the old principle of honourable association was used to help the small man to make a living by choosing the unprincipled and often the incompetent to undertake the government of the Empire.

Apart, however, from such illegal means of making money, there was beyond doubt in the Rome of the last century B.C. a large amount of honest and useful labour done by free citizens. We must not run away with the idea that the whole labour of the city was performed by slaves, who ousted the freeman from his chance of a living. There was indeed a certain number of public slaves who did public work for the State; but on the whole the great mass of the servile population worked entirely within the households and on the estates of the rich, and did not interfere to any sensible degree with the labour of the small freeman. As has been justly observed by Salvioli,[78] never at any period did the Roman proletariat complain of the competition of slave labour as detrimental to its own interests. Had there been no slave labour there, the small freeman might indeed have had a wider field of enterprise, and have been better able to accumulate a small capital by undertaking work for the great families, which was done, as it was, by their slaves. But he was not aware of this, and the two kinds of labour, the paid and the unpaid, went on side by side without active rivalry. No doubt slavery helped to foster idleness, as it did in the Southern States of America before the Civil War;[79] no doubt there were plenty of idle ruffians in the city, ready to steal, to murder, or to hire themselves out as the armed followers of a political desperado like Clodius; but the simple necessities of the life of those who had no slaves of their own gave employment, we may be certain, to a great number of free tradesmen and artisans and labourers of a more unskilled kind.