THE ROMAN EMPIRE 35 that province. Bookkeeping was a universal Roman prac- tice, and we hear of large transactions made on credit. It is certain that many large fortunes were amassed, and that capital was abundant. There was, however, a prejudice against the professional money-lender; and the Emperor Augustus degraded a noble from the equestrian rank, be- cause he had borrowed money at a low rate of interest and then loaned it out again at a higher rate. A greater proportion of the trade was in raw products and less in manufactured articles than to-day. Millions of bushels of wheat were brought each year from Egypt and North Africa to supply the populace of Rome ; marble columns and other building materials were transported for public works. But there were no great man- ufacturing establishments, such as exist to-day, where hun dreds of machines turned out vast quantities of copies of the same article for diffusion over the face of the earth. Articles were hand-made by individual workmen, who usually sold what they made each from his own tiny workshop, and whose entire set of utensils and stock in trade could usually be packed up in two or three big earthenware jars. Local retail merchants also had small shops; there was nothing resembling the modern department store. Articles were generally bargained for, not sold at a fixed price. In a city of any size each trade had its own street or quarter. Some- times those engaged in the same trade banded together in a loose social and religious union; but the imperial govern- ment at first was quite unfavorable to such societies, and the Emperor Trajan even forbade one of his provincial governors to allow a city in Bithynia to organize a fire com- pany for fear that it might prove a hotbed of sedition. A rich man might have an entire household of slaves working at the same trade, but still their labor was manual and so quite different from the modern factory system. A few mil- itary engines and building appliances seem to have been about the only machinery known to the Romans. It is some- times said that the Romans possessed industrial processes ich are lost to the world to-day. If this be true, it is wh
