though it is true that reflection of the miseries of the slaves is to be found in the chronic brigandage and piracy that infested ancient civilisation during its whole period. But as the Empire contracted its boundaries, and actual war drew near its centre, while its grasping and corrupt 50 tax-gathering bureaucracy dried up its resources, destroyed its markets, and withered its population, the approach of sheer ruin shattered the foundation of chattel-slavery on which it rested. And it must be remembered, once for all, that neither prosperity nor adversity, neither good emperors nor bad, neither peace nor war, could release Roman society from this plague of tax-gathering, any more than any increasing sense of the responsibility of the rich for the lives of the poor, or any fresh aspirations towards individual righteousness, can free modern society from the thraldom of the hunt for profit.
The great commercial estates of the Romans, under the name of Latifundia, had absorbed all the agricultural industry of the earlier Roman state, which had once been in the hands of the blood relations and household slaves of the paterfamilias. But now the profit of working these lands by the instrument of wellorganised slavery was vanishing, owing to the break up of the ancient world-market, and the consequently impending ruin. Nothing now remained for the masters 51 of these slaves but to shake off the responsibility for their livelihood, and allow them to cultivate the land in a rough and unorganised way, as partially independent peasants, paying rent in kind and service to the landowners. This seems to have been one of the methods of the merging of the chattel-slave into the medieval serf.
At the same time, not only did this go on very gradually, but domestic slavery and the servile condition of the craftsmen was synchronous with it.
The other element towards the birth of the feudal system was added by the tribal barbarians who broke in on the last days of the Empire. These