Industrial expansion, money, usury, private land, and mortgage thus progressed with the concentration and centralization of wealth in the hands of a small class, accompanied by the increasing impoverishment of the masses and the increasing mass of paupers. The new aristocracy of wealth, so far as it did not coincide with the old tribal nobility, forced the latter permanently into the background (in Athens, in Rome, among the Germans). And this division of free men into classes according to their wealth was accompanied, especially in Greece, by an enormous increase in the number of slaves38 whose forced labor formed the basis on which the whole superstructure of society was reared.
Let us now see what became of the gentile constitution through this revolution of society. Gentilism stood powerless in the face of the new elements that had grown without its assistance. It was dependent on the condition that the members of a gens, or of a tribe, should live together in the same territory and be its exclusive inhabitants. That had long ceased to be the case. Gentes and tribes were everywhere hopelessly intermingled, slaves, clients, and foreigners lived among citizens. The capacity for settling down permanently which had only been acquired near the end of the middle stage of barbarism, was time and again sidetracked by the necessity of changing the abode according to the dictates of commerce, different occupations and the transfer of land. The members of the gentile organizations could no longer meet for the purpose of taking care of their common interests. Only matters of little importance, such as religious festivals, were still observed in an indifferent way. Beside the wants and interests for the care of which the