Hence those immense landed estates which luxury condemns to barrenness and which for the gratification of one man deprive a population of existence who would otherwise be born to cultivate it.

— MARMONTEL, Address in Favor of the Peasants of the North,

(1757), Oeuvres, Vol. X., p. 68.

It is the wide-spread domains that have been the ruin of Italy, and soon will be that of the provinces as well.

— PLINY, Natural History, Book XVIII., Chap. 7.