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.
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