the remission of tributes, which their subjects were utterly incapable of paying. According to the new division of Italy, the fertile and happy province of Campania, the scene of the early victories and of the delicious retirements of the citizens of Rome, extended between the sea and the Apennines, from the Tiber to the Silarius. Within sixty years after the death of Constantine, and on the evidence of an actual survey, an exemption was granted in favour of 330,000 English acres of desert and uncultivated land, which amounted to one-eighth of the whole surface of the province. As the footsteps of the barbarians had not yet been seen in Italy, the cause of this amazing desolation, which is recorded in the laws, (Cod. Theod. Ixi. t. 38, 1. 2,) can be ascribed only to the administration of the Roman emperors."-GIBBON, vol. iii. c. xviii. p. 87. Edition in 12 volumes.

Michelet observes, in his late profound and able History of France

"The Christian emperors could not remedy the growing depopulation of the country any more than their heathen predecessors. All their efforts only showed the impotence of government to arrest that dreadful evil. Sometimes, alarmed at the depopulation, they tried to mitigate the lot of the farmer, to shield him against the landlord; upon this the proprietor exclaimed he could no longer pay the taxes. At other times, they abandoned the farmer, surrendered him to the landlord, and strove to chain him to the soil; but the unhappy cultivators perished or fled, and the land became deserted. Even in the time of Augustus, efforts were made to arrest the depopulation at the expense of morals, by encouraging concubinage. Pertinax granted an immunity from taxes to those who could occupy the desert lands of Italy, to the cultivators of the distant provinces, and the allied kings. Aurelian did the same. Probus was obliged to transport from Germany men and oxen to cultivate Gaul.* Maximian and Constantius transported the Franks and Germans from Picardy and Hainault into Italy: but the depopulation in the towns and the country alike continued. The people surrendered themselves in the fields to despair, as a beast of burden lies down beneath his load and refuses to rise. In vain the emperor strove, by offers of immunities and exemptions, to recall the cultivator to his deserted fields. Nothing could do so. The desert extended daily. At the commencement of the fifth century there was, in the happy Campania, the most fertile province of the empire, 520,000 jugera in a state of nature." LET, Histoire de France, i. 104-108.

-MICHE

Pursued to its very grave by the same deep-rooted cause of evil, the strength of Italy, even in the last stages of its decay, was still prostrated by the importation of grain from Egypt and Lybia. "The Campagna of Rome," says Gibbon, "about the close of the sixth century, was reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness, in which the land was barren, the waters impure, and the air infectious. Yet the number of citizens still exceeded the measure of subsistence; their precarious food was supplied from the

* "Arantur Gallicana rura barbaris bobus, et juga Germanica captiva præbent colla nostris cultoribus."-Probi Epist. ad Senatum Vopesio.

harvests of Egypt and Lybia; and the frequent repetitions of famine betray the inattention of the emperors to a distant province."-GIBBON, vol. viii. c. xlv. 162.*

Nor was this desolating scourge of foreign importation confined to Italy; it obtained also in Greece, equally with the Ausonian fields, the abode of early riches, opulence, and prosperity. "In the later stages of the empire," says Michelet, "Greece was almost entirely supported by corn raised in the fields of Podolia," (Poland.)-MICHelet,

i. 277.

Now, let it be recollected that this continual and astonishing decline of agriculture, and disappearance of the rural cultivators in the latter stages of the Roman empire, took place in an empire which contained, as Gibbon tells us, 120,000,000 of inhabitants, and 1600 great cities; was 3000 miles long and 2000 miles broad; contained 1,600,000 square miles, chiefly fertile and well-cultivated land, which embraced the fairest and most fertile portions of the earth, and which had been governed for eighty years under the successive sways of Nerva, Adrian, Trajan, and the two Antonines, with consummate wisdom and the most paternal spirit. The scourge of foreign war, the devastation of foreign armies, were alike unknown; profound tranquillity pervaded every part of the empire; and a vast inland lake, spreading its ample waters through the heart of the dominion, afforded to all its provinces the most perfect facility of intercourse with the metropolis and the central parts of the empire. Yet this period -the period which, Mr Hume has told us, the philosophers would select as the happiest the human race had ever known was precisely that during which agriculture so rapidly declined in the Italian and Grecian fields, during which the sturdy race of free cultivators disappeared, and the plains of Italy were entirely absorbed by pasturage, and maintained only vast herds of cattle tended by slaves.

What was it, then, which in an empire containing so immense a population, and such boundless resources, drawn forth and developed under so wise and beneficent a race of emperors, occasioned this constant and uninterrupted decay

"Quingena viginti octo millia quadringinta duo jugera, quæ Campania provincia, juxta inspectorum relationem, in desertis et squalidis locis habere dignoscitur, iisdem provincialibus concessum."-Cod. Theod. lxi. i. 2382.

of agriculture, and at length the total destruction of the rural population in the heart of the empire? How did it happen that Italian cultivation receded, as Tacitus and Gibbon tell us it did, from the time of Tiberius; and equally under the wisdom of the Antonines, as under the tyranny of Nero, or the civil wars of Vitellius? Some general and durable cause must have been in operation during all this period, which at first depressed, and at length totally destroyed, the numerous body of free Italian cultivators, who so long had constituted the strength of the legions, and had borne the Roman eagles, conquering and to conquer, to the very extremities of the habitable earth. The cause is apparent. It was the free importation of Egyptian and Lybian grain, consequent on the extension of the Roman dominion over these fertile fields, which effected the result. Were England to extend its conquering arms over Poland and the Ukraine, and, as a necessary consequence, expose the British farmer to the unrestrained competition of Polish and Russian wheat, precisely the same result would ensue. If the shores of Hindostan were within three or four days' sail of the mouth of the Thames, as those of Lybia were from the mouth of the Tiber, this result would long ago have taken place. Let Polish and Russian grain be admitted without a protecting duty into the British harbours, as Lybian and Egyptian were into those of Italy, and we shall soon see the race of cultivators disappear from the fields of England, as they did from those of old Rome; and the words of Tacitus will, by a mere change of proper names, become a picture of our condition; three hundred thousand acres will soon be reduced to a state of nature in Kent and Norfolk, as they were in the Campania Felix. "Nec nunc infecunditate laboramur, Podoliam potius et Scythiam exercemus, navibusque et casibus vita populi Anglici permissa est.'

* Sir R. Peel has, in 1839, in language equally beautiful and just, painted the disastrous effects of such a change on British industry. "Could you prove to us that the true principles of commercial dealing required us to purchase corn in the cheapest market, and to withdraw the capital which has fertilised the inferior soils of this country, for the purpose of applying it to the rich but unprofitable wastes of Poland, still we should hesitate. We should remember with pain the cheerful smiling prospects which were thus to be obscured. We should view with regret cultivation receding from the hill-top, which it has climbed under the influence of protection, and from which it surveys with joy the progress of successful toil. If you convinced us that your most sanguine hopes would be realised-that

The Free-traders allege that the decay of agriculture in the central provinces of the Roman Empire, to which, by the concurring testimony of all historians, the ruin of the dominion of the Cæsars was chiefly owing, is to be ascribed, not to the free importation of grain from Egypt, Podolia, and Lybia, but to the tyranny of the emperors, the gratuitous distribution of grain to the Roman populace, and the dreadful evils of domestic slavery. A very slight consideration, however, must be sufficient to show that these causes, how powerful soever in producing general evils over the empire, could not have been instrumental in occasioning those peculiar and separate causes of depression, which so early began to check, and at length totally destroyed, the agriculture of its central provinces.

The tyranny of the Cæsars, the oppression of the Proconsuls, the avarice of the Patricians, were general evils, affecting alike every part of the empire; or rather, they were felt with more severity in the remote provinces than in the districts nearer home, in consequence of the superior opportunities of escape which distance from the central government afforded to iniquity, and the lesser chance of success which the insurrection of a remote province held forth to the "wild revenge" of rebellion. Muscovite oppression, accordingly, is more severely felt at Odessa or Taganrog than St Petersburg; and British rule is far from being restrained by the same considerations of justice on the banks of the Ganges or the Indus, as on those of the Thames. The gratuitous distribution of grain by the Emperors to the populace of Rome, could never have occasioned the ruin of the Italian cultivators. Supposing that the two or three hundred thousand lazy and turbulent plebeians, who were nourished by the bounty or fed by the terrors of the Cæsars, were the most useless, worthless, and dangerous set of men that ever existed, (which they probably this country would become the workshop of the world-would blight, through the cheapness of food and the demand for foreign corn, the manufacturing industry of every other country, would present the dull succession of enormous manufacturing towns connected by railways, intersecting the abandoned tracts which it was no longer profitable to cultivate; we should not forget, amid all these passages of complete happiness, that it has been under the influence of protection to agriculture, continued for two hundred years, that the fen has been drained, the wild heath reclaimed, the health of a whole people improved, their life prolonged,— and all this, not at the expense of manufacturing prosperity, but concurrently with its wonderful advancement."

were,) that circumstance could never have uprooted the race of cultivators from the plains of Lombardy, Umbria, or the Campania Felix. The greatest possible good to a nation, according to the Free-trader, is cheap grain, and never more so than when it is purchased or imported from foreign growers. If this be true, the importation of the harvests of Egypt and Africa into the Italian harbours, either by the voluntary purchase of the Roman emperors, or by the forced tribute in grain which they exacted from those provinces, must have been the greatest possible benefit to the Italian people. How then, if there be no mischief in such foreign importations, is it possible to ascribe the ruin of Italian cultivation, and with it of the Roman empire, to these forced contributions? If the Free-traders have recourse to such an argument, they concede the very point in dispute, and admit that the introduction of foreign grain is injurious, and may, in the end, prove fatal to the agriculture and existence of a state.

Slavery, though a great evil, will as little explain the peculiar and extraordinary decline of Italian and Grecian cultivation in the later stages of the Roman empire. The greater part of the labour of the ancient world, as every one knows, was conducted by means of slaves. They were slaves who held the plough, and tilled the land, and tended the flocks, equally in Lybia, in Campania, in Egypt, as in Umbria. Nay, the number of freemen, at least in the days of the Roman Republic, and the earlier periods of the empire, was incomparably greater in Italy and Greece, the abode of celebrated, powerful, and immortal republics, than in Lybia and Egypt, which from the earliest times had been subject to the despotic sway of satraps, kings, and tyrants. So numerous were the free citizens of Rome in the early days of the empire, that, by the census of Claudius, we are told by Gibbon they amounted to 6,945,000 men,* the greater proportion of whom, of course, were residents in Italy, the seat of government, and the centre of wealth, power, and enjoyment. While so great was the multitude of free citizens which the Republic bequeathed to the empire, resident and exercising unfettered industry in Italy, the cultivators of Africa and Egypt were all serfs and slaves,

* Gibbon, chap. i. 68.