Its Causes at Work in the British Empire.
The Rise and Fall of the Roman empire is by far the most remarkable and memorable event which has occurred in the whole history of mankind. It is hard to say whether the Rise or the Fall is most worthy of profound study and anxious examination. The former has hitherto most strongly attracted the attention of men, from the extraordinary spectacle it exhibited of human fortitude triumphing over every obstacle, and human perseverance at length attaining universal dominion. It was the spectacle most likely to rivet the attention of strenuous and growing nations—of men in that stage of existence when national ambition is strong and the patriotic passions ardent, and the selfish interests have not yet become so powerful as to have generally extinguished the generous affections. But it may be doubted whether the events that occurred in the later stages of the Roman empire, are not fraught with more valuable and important information than those of its earlier annals. Less interesting to the soldier, less animating to the citizen, less heart-stirring to the student, they are more instructive to the philosopher, more pregnant with warning to the statesman. They contain the only instance yet exhibited among men of a nation sinking from no external shock, but from the mere influence of internal decay; and point alone, of all passages in the annals of the species, to the provision made by nature, in the passions and selfishness of men, against the possibility of universal dominion.
To any one who attentively considers this all-important subject, two things must be apparent, of the very highest consequence in arriving at correct ideas on it. The first is, that the Roman empire did not sink under the external violence of the barbarians, but under the weakness and decline which had arisen in its own bosom. The second, that the causes hitherto assigned by historians and philosophers for this internal decay, are either vague generalities, having no definite meaning, and incapable of any practical application, or can be easily shown, even to the most superficial reader, not to have been the real causes of the phenomenon.
There can be no doubt that some of the irruptions of the barbarians—particularly those of the Goths into Romelia, which led to the fatal battles of Thessalonica and Adrianople; and of Alaric into Italy, which terminated in the capture of the Eternal City—were very formidable inroads, and might, in the best days of the empire, have taxed its strength and resolution to repel. But a little consideration must be sufficient to show, that, formidable as these invasions were, they could without much difficulty have been withstood, if the empire had possessed the strength which it did in the days of the republic, or in the first two centuries of the Cæsars. The Cimbri and Teutones, whom Marius combated and destroyed on the Rhone and in the north of Italy, were at least as formidable a body of barbarians as those which four centuries afterwards overturned the western empire. The forces whom Cæsar conquered in Gaul, Trajan on the Danube, were to the full as powerful as those which carried the standards of the Goths and Vandals to Athens and Carthage. Ætius, in the decline of the empire, and with the mingled Roman and barbarian force of Gaul alone, defeated Attila in the plenitude of his power, at the head of three hundred thousand men, on the field of Chalons.
Belisarius, with fifteen thousand men, recovered Africa from the Vandals; thirty thousand legionary soldiers did the same by Italy under Narses, and overthrew the whole power of the Goths. So high did the Roman soldiers still stand even in the estimation of their enemies, that Totila, the warlike monarch of the Goths, strove to bribe them into his service by offers of high pay. None had yet been approved equal to these legionary soldiers in battle; and the manner in which, with infinitely inferior forces, they repelled the barbarians on all sides, decisively demonstrates this superiority. The vigour and ability of Heraclius so restored the empire, when wellnigh sinking under the might of its enemies, that for a century it was regarded with awe by the barbarous nations all round its immense frontier. The five provinces beyond the Euphrates were conquered by the Romans from the Parthians during the decline of the empire. Nothing is so remarkable, in the last three centuries of Roman history, as the small number of the forces which combated around the Eagles, and the astonishing victories which, when led by ability, they gained over prodigious bodies of their enemies. The legions had dwindled into battalions, the battalions into cohorts. The four hundred and fifty thousand men who under Augustus guarded the frontiers of the empire, had sunk to one hundred and fifty thousand in the time of Justinian.[3] But this hundred and fifty thousand upheld the Eastern empire for a thousand years. So feeble were the assaults of the barbarians, that for above two centuries of that time the single city of Constantinople, with the aid of the Greek fire, defended itself with scarce any territory from which to draw support. It was not the strength of its enemies, therefore, but the weakness of itself, which, after an existence in the West and East of two thousand years, at length extinguished the Roman empire.
What, then, were the causes of decay which proved fatal at length to this immense and enduring dominion? Philosophers in all ages have pondered on the causes; but those hitherto assigned do not seem adequate to explain the phenomenon. Not that the causes of weakness are baseless or imaginary; on the contrary, many of them were most real and substantial sources of evil. But what renders them inadequate to explain the fall of Rome is, that they had all existed, and were in full operation, at the time when the commonwealth and empire were at their highest point of elevation, and centuries before either exhibited any symptoms of lasting decay. For example, the ancient historians, from Sallust downwards, are loud in their denunciation of the corruption of public morals, and the selfish vices of the patrician classes of society, as being the chief source of the decay which was going forward, while the growth of the republic had been mainly owing to the extraordinary virtue and energy of a small number of individuals.[4] But the very circumstance of these complaints having been made by Sallust in the time of Augustus, and the fact of the empire of the West having existed for four hundred, that of the East for fourteen hundred years afterwards, affords decisive evidence that this cause cannot be considered as having been mainly instrumental in producing their fall. How is the unexampled grandeur and prosperity of the empire under Nero, Adrian, Trajan, and the two Antonines, whose united reigns extended over eighty years, to be explained, if the seeds of ruin two centuries before had been sown in the vices and corruption of the rich patricians? In truth, so far was general luxury or corruption from being the cause of the ruin of the empire, the cause of its fall was just the reverse. It was the excessive poverty of its central provinces, and their inability to pay the taxes, which was the immediate cause of the catastrophe. The nobles and patricians often were luxurious, but they were not a thousandth part of the nation. The people was miserably poor, and got more indigent daily, in the later stages of its decay.
Modern writers, to whom the philosophy of history for the first time in the annals of mankind has become known, and who were aware of the important influence of general causes on social prosperity, independent of the agency of individual men, have assigned a different set of causes more nearly approaching the truth. Montesquieu says, the decay of the Roman empire was the natural consequence of its extension. This sounds well, and looks like an aphorism: but if the matter be considered with attention, it will be found that it is vox et præterea nihil. Those who, with so much complacency, rest in the belief that the fall of the Roman empire was the natural result of its extension, forget that its greatest prosperity was coexistent with that very extension. It is impossible to hold that the decay of the empire was the consequence of its magnitude, when the glorious era of the Antonines, during which it numbered a hundred and twenty millions of inhabitants under its rule, and embraced nearly the whole known habitable globe within its dominion, immediately succeeded its greatest extension by the victories, unhappily to us so little known, of Trajan.
More recent writers, seeing that Montesquieu's aphorism was a vague proposition which meant nothing, have gone a step further, and approached much nearer to the real explanation of the phenomenon. Guizot, Sismondi, and Michelet have concurred in assigning as the real cause of the decay of the Roman empire, the prevalence of slavery among its working population, and the great and increasing weight of taxes to support the imperial government. There can be no doubt that these were most powerful causes of weakness; and that they stand prominently forth from the facts recorded by contemporary annalists, as the immediate and visible causes of the decline of the empire. The history of these melancholy periods is full of eternal complaints, that men could not be got to fill the legions, nor taxes to replenish the treasury; that the army had to be recruited from the semi-barbarous tribes on the frontier; and that vast tracts of fertile land in the heart of the empire relapsed into a state of nature, or were devoted only to pasturage, from the impossibility of finding cultivators who either would till the land, or could afford to pay the taxes with which it was charged. Doubtless the large proportion—at least a half, perhaps nearly two-thirds—of the people who were slaves, must have weakened the elements of strength in the empire; and the enormous weight of the direct taxes, so grievously felt and loudly complained of,[ [5] must have paralysed, to a very great degree, both the industry of the people and the resources of government. But a very little consideration must be sufficient to show, that these were not the real sources of the decline of the empire; or rather, that if they had not been aided in their operation by other causes, which truly undermined its strength, it might have been great and flourishing to this hour.
Slavery, it must be recollected, was universal in antiquity, and is so over two-thirds of the human race at this hour. Much as we may feel its evils and deprecate its severities, we ourselves, till within these three centuries, were entirely fed by serfs; and a few years only have elapsed since the whole of our colonial produce was raised by slave labour. America and Russia—the two most rising states in existence—are, the former in part, the latter wholly, maintained by slaves. It was an army, in a great measure composed of men originally serfs, which repelled Napoleon's invasion, survived the horrors of the Moscow retreat, and carried the Russian standards to Paris, Erivan, and Adrianople. Alexander the Great conquered Asia with an army of freemen wholly fed by slaves. The Athenians, in the palmy days of their prosperity, had only 21,000 freemen, and 400,000 slaves. Rome itself, in its great and glorious periods, when it vanquished Hannibal, conquered Gaul, subdued the East—in the days of Scipio, Cæsar, and Trajan—was to the full as dependent on slave labour as it was in those of its decrepitude under Honorius or Justinian. Cato was a great dealer in slaves; the Sabine farm was tilled by the arms of slaves; Cincinnatus and Regulus worked their little freeholds entirely by means of slaves. Rome was brought to the verge of destruction, nearer ruin than it had been by the arms of the Carthaginians, by the insurrection of the slaves shortly after the third Punic contest, so well known under the appellation of the Servile war. It is perfectly ridiculous, therefore, to assign as a cause of the destruction of Rome, a circumstance in the social condition of its people which coexisted with their greatest prosperity, which has prevailed in all the most renowned nations of the earth in a certain stage of their progress, and is to be found, in our own times, in states the most powerful, and the most likely to attain vast and long-continued dominion.
Equally futile is it to point to the weight of the taxes as the main cause of the long decline and final overthrow of Rome. Taxes no doubt are an evil; and if they become excessive, and are levied in a direct form, they may come in the end to ruin industry, and weaken all the public resources to such an extent as to render a nation incapable of defending itself. But a very little consideration must be sufficient to show that it was not, in the case of Rome, the increase of the taxes taken as a whole, but the decline in the resources of those who paid them, which rendered them so oppressive. If, indeed, the national establishment of the Roman empire had gone on increasing as it advanced in years, until at length their charges became excessive and crushing to industry, the theory would have been borne out by the fact, and afforded perhaps satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. But the fact was just the reverse. The military establishment of the Roman empire was so much contracted as it advanced in years that whereas it amounted to 450,000 men in the days of Augustus, in those of Justinian it had sunk, as already noticed to 150,000.[ [6] So far were the forces of Rome from being excessive in the later stages of the empire or disproportioned to an empire still, after all its losses, holding so large and fair a portion of the earth under its dominion, that on the other hand they were miserably small; and the disasters it underwent were mainly owing to the government of the Cæsars never being able to equip an adequate army to repel the attacks of the barbarians. The force with which Belisarius reconquered Africa and recovered Italy, never mustered seventeen thousand men; and the greater part of his successes were achieved by six thousand legionary followers. It was not the weight of the national establishments, therefore, but the diminished resources of those who were to pay them, which really occasioned the destruction of the empire.
There are two other facts of vital importance in considering the real causes of the gradual decay and ultimate ruin of the dominion of the legions.
The first of these is, that the extent of the decay was, in the latter stages of Rome, very unequal in the different provinces of the empire; and that while the central provinces, and those in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, were in the most wretched state of decrepitude, the remote districts were in the highest state of affluence and prosperity. This important fact is abundantly proved by unquestionable authority, and it sheds a flood of light on the real causes of the ruin which ultimately overtook them all.
The state of agriculture in the Italian plains under the Cæsars, is thus set forth by Gibbon:—
"Since the age of Tiberius, the decay of agriculture had been felt in Italy; and it was a just subject of complaint that the life of the Roman people depended on the accidents of the winds and the waves. In the division and decline of the empire, the tributary harvests of Egypt and Africa were withdrawn; the numbers of the inhabitants continually diminished with the means of subsistence; and the country was exhausted by the irretrievable losses of war, pestilence, and famine. Pope Gelasius was a subject of Odoacer, and he affirms, with strong exaggeration, that in Emila, Tuscany, and the adjacent provinces, the human species was almost extirpated."[7]
Of the progress and extent of this decay, Gibbon gives the following account in another part of his great work:—
"The agriculture of the Roman provinces was insensibly ruined; and in the progress of despotism, which tends to disappoint its own purpose, the emperors were obliged to derive some merit from the forgiveness of debts, or 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. lxi. t. 38, l. 2,) can be ascribed only to the administration of the Roman emperors."[8]
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 province and the allied kings. Aurelian did the same. Probus was obliged to transport from Germany men and oxen to cultivate Gaul.[9] 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 (320,000 acres) in a state of nature."[10]
So general, indeed, was the depopulation of the empire in the time of Justinian, that it suggested to many of the emperors the project of repeopling those favoured districts by a fresh influx of inhabitants. "Justinian II. had a great taste for these emigrations. He transported half the population of Cyprus to a new city near Cyzicus, called Justinianopolis after its founder. But it was all in vain. The desolation and ruin of the provinces continued, and up to the very gates of Constantinople, which was maintained entirely by grain imported at a low price from Egypt, and cattle from the Tauric Chersonesus."[11]
As a natural consequence of this entire or principal dependence of Rome on foreign or provincial raising of grain, there was, on any interruption of these foreign supplies, the greatest scarcity and even famine in the metropolis. All the vigilance of the emperors, which was constantly directed to this object, could not prevent this from taking place. Tacitus says, that in the scarcity under Claudius, there only remained a supply of fifteen days for the city.[12] Famine in Rome was frequent under Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero. Claudian laments, that after Egypt had been assigned to Constantinople, Rome had come to derive its subsistence solely from Lybia, and depended on the double chances of the seasons and the winds.
——"Nunquam secura futuri,
Semper inops, ventique fidem poscebat et anni."[13]
"When Africa revolted under Gildo, in the reign of Honorius, Rome," says Gibbon, "was on the brink of starvation, from which she was only saved by large importations from Gaul."[14] She still depended on her provinces; domestic agriculture was ruined. Claudian represents the genius of ancient Rome bewailing, in pathetic and eloquent terms, her dependence for food on the nations she had conquered, in words which all governments rendering their people dependent on foreign supplies would do well to bear in mind. "Formerly," says the poet, "my prayers used to be that my legions might triumph on the banks of the Araxes, or that the consul might display his eagles at Susa; now all I ask is a supply of food to avert the extremities of hunger. The province of Africa, which furnishes corn to my people, is under the power of Gildo. He intercepts our supplies, and our food is at his mercy. He sells the harvests which belong to the descendants of Romulus; he possesses the fields purchased by my blood. The warrior people which conquered the world, now dishonoured and in want, endures the miserable punishment of peace; blockaded by no enemy, they are like the inhabitants of a besieged town. Death impends at every moment; there remain only doubtful supplies for a few days. My greatness has been my ruin; I was safer when my territory was more limited; would that its boundaries were once more at my gates! But, if I am doomed to perish, at least let me have a different fate; let me be conquered by another Porsenna; let my city be burnt by a second Brennus. All things are more tolerable than hunger."[15]
Nor was the state of Greece, in the later stages of the empire, more favourable.
"No description could exaggerate the miseries of Greece in the later stages of the empire. The slave population, which had formerly laboured for the wealthy, had then disappeared, and the free labourer had sunk into a serf. The uncultivated plains were traversed by bands of armed Sclavonians, who settled in great numbers in Thessaly and Macedonia. The cities of Greece ceased to receive the usual supplies of agricultural produce from the country; and even Thessalonica, with its fertile territory and abundant pastures, was dependent on foreign importation for relief from famine. The smaller cities, destitute of the same advantages of situation, would naturally be more exposed to depopulation, and sink more rapidly to decay. The roads, after the seizure of the local funds of the Greek cities by Justinian, were allowed to go to ruin, and the transport of provisions by land became difficult. When the Byzantine writers, after the time of Heraclius, mention the Greeks and Peloponnesus, it is with feelings of aversion and contempt."[16]
Nor was Asia Minor in a more prosperous condition in the later stages of the empire. In Asia Minor the decline of the Greek race had been rapid. This decline, too, must be attributed rather to bad governments than to hostile invasions; for from the period of the Persian invasion, in the time of Heraclius, the greater part of that immense country had enjoyed almost a century of uninterrupted peace. The Persian invasions had never been very injurious to the sea-coast, where the Greek cities were wealthy and numerous; but the central provinces were entirely ruined. The fact that extensive districts, once populous and wealthy, were already deserts, is proved by the colonies which Justinian II. settled in various parts of the country. Population had disappeared even more rapidly than the agricultural resources of the country."[17]
But while this was the state of matters in Italy, Asia Minor, and Greece—that is, the heart of the empire—its remoter provinces, Spain, Lybia, and Egypt, not only exhibited no symptoms of similar decay, but were, down to the very close of the reigns of the Cæsars, in the highest state of wealth, prosperity, and happiness. Listen to Gibbon on this subject in regard to Spain:—
"The situation of Spain, separated on all sides from the enemies of Rome by the sea, the mountains, and intermediate provinces, had secured the long tranquillity of that remote and sequestered country; and we may observe, as a sure symptom of domestic happiness, that in a period of four hundred years, Spain furnished very few materials to the history of the Roman empire. The cities of Merida, Cordova, Seville, and Tarragona, were numbered among the most illustrious of the Roman world. The various plenty of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, was improved and manufactured by the skill of an industrious people; and the peculiar advantages of naval stores contributed to support an extensive and profitable trade. Many particulars concerning the fertility of Spain may be found in Huet's Commerce of the Ancients, c. 40."[18]
The state of Lybia was equally characteristic of the highest and most general prosperity, especially in relation to agricultural industry, at the time when Italy and Greece were thus languishing in the last stage of decrepitude and decay.
"The long and narrow tract," says Gibbon, "of the African coast was filled, when the Vandals approached its shores, with frequent monuments of Roman art and magnificence; and the respective degrees of improvement might be accurately measured by the distance from Carthage and the Mediterranean. A simple reflection will impress every thinking mind with the clearest idea of its fertility and cultivation. The country was extremely populous; the inhabitants reserved a liberal supply for their own use; and the annual exportation, particularly of wheat, was so regular and plentiful, that Africa deserved the name of the common granary of Rome and of mankind."[19]
Nor was the state of Egypt less prosperous in the last ages of the Roman empire; nor was its condition a less striking contrast to the miserable and languishing condition of the Italian and Grecian plains. It is thus described by Mr Finlay,[20] whose recent work has thrown so much light on the social condition of the inhabitants of the Roman empire in their later days:—"If the accounts of ancient historians can be relied on, the population of Egypt had suffered less from the vicious administration of the Roman empire, and from the Persian invasion, than any other part of their dominions; for at the time of its conquest by the Romans it contained seven millions and a half of inhabitants, exclusive of Alexandria; and in the last days of the empire it nourished almost as great a number. The Nile spread its fertilizing waters over the land; the canals were kept in a state sufficient for irrigation; and the vested capital of Egypt suffered little diminution, whilst war and oppression annihilated the accumulation of ages over the rest of the world. The immense wealth and importance of Alexandria, the only port which Egypt possessed for communicating with the empire, still made it one of the first cities in the universe for riches and population, though its strength had received a severe blow from the Persian conquest."[21]
Sicily was another exception from the general decrepitude and ruin of the Roman empire in the latter reigns of the Cæsars. "In the island of Sicily, the great bulk of the population was Greek, and few portions of the Greek race had succeeded so well in preserving their wealth and property uninjured."[22]
But in the other parts of the empire, to the north of the Mediterranean, the agricultural population was, in the time of Heraclius, absolutely destroyed. "The imperial armies," says Finlay, "which, in the time of Maurice, had waged an active war in Illyria and Thrace, and frequently invaded the territories of the Avars, had melted away during the disorders of the reign of Phocas. The loss was irreparable; for in Europe no agricultural population remained to supply the means of forming a body of local militia, or even a body of irregular troops."[23]
It may readily be supposed, that so entire a destruction of the rural population in Europe, as thus took place under the Emperors in the Roman empire, must have been attended with the most fatal effects to their means of defence and national power. The inhabitants of towns, accustomed to sedentary occupations, and habituated to the luxury of baths, the excitement of theatres, the gratuitous distributions of food, could not endure the fatigue, privations, and hardships of the military life. Substitutes were almost universally sought for, and they, amidst the desolation of the country, could be found only in the semi-barbarous tribes on the frontier. Thus the defence of the empire came to be intrusted almost entirely to the arms of the barbarians, and it was hard to say whether they were most formidable to their friends or foes. Nothing could supply the place of the rural population on the shores of the Mediterranean. The legions gave a master to the Roman world, and the legions were recruited from Gaul, Germany, Britain, and Pannonia. Thus the dominion of the Capitol was really at an end long before it was formally subverted; and Rome had received a master from the barbarians long before the days of Alaric.
This continued splendour and population of the towns, amidst the ruin of the country, in the declining periods of the Roman empire, has attracted the particular notice of one of the greatest historians of modern times. "In the midst," says Sismondi, "of the general desolation of the country, the continued existence and splendour of the great towns is not so easily explained; but the same thing is now to be witnessed in Barbary and Turkey, and in the whole Levant. Wherever despotism oppresses insulated man, he seeks refuge from its outrages in crowds. The great Roman towns, in the first three centuries of the empire, were in great part peopled by artisans, and freedmen, and slaves; but they contained also a number far greater than in our days of men who, limiting their wants to the mere support of existence, spent their lives in indolence. All that population was alike unarmed, unpatriotic, incapable of defence against a foreign enemy; but as it was collected together, and at hand, it always inspired fear to domestic authority. Accordingly, to keep it quiet, there was always a regular gratuitous distribution of corn in the larger towns, and numerous spectacles in the theatres, the amphitheatres, and the circus, maintained at the public expense. The carelessness of the future, the love of pleasure and indolence, which have always characterised the inhabitants of great towns, characterised the Roman provincials even to the latest days of the empire, and in the midst of their greatest calamities. Treves, the capital of the northern prefecture of Gaul, was not the only city of the empire which was surprised and pillaged by the barbarians, at the moment when its citizens, their heads crowned with garlands, were applauding with enthusiasm the victors in the games of the circus."[24]
The frequent custom of recruiting the legions by means of slaves, in the later period of the empire, which was wholly unknown in the days of the Republic, reveals, in the clearest manner, the weakness to which, in respect of military resources, it had arrived, long before the external symptoms of decay were visible in its fortunes. Even in the time of Marcus Aurelius, the legions which were to combat the Quadi and Marcomanni, on the Danube, were recruited from the servile class. Justinian went so far as to declare, by a public edict, every slave free who had served in the army.[25] "At last the army came to be composed entirely," says Finlay, "of the rudest and most ignorant peasants, of enfranchised slaves, and naturalised barbarians. This increased the repugnance, already sufficiently great, felt by the better class of citizens to enter the military life. The mercenaries formed the most valued and brilliant portions of the army, and it became the fashion to copy and admire the dress and manners of the barbarian cavalry."[26]
All the ancient historians concur in representing this impossibility of finding native soldiers in its central provinces, as the main cause of the overthrow of the empire. And that this, and not the power of the barbarians, was the real cause of the destruction of the empire, is proved by the fact, that whenever they were well directed, the superiority of the legions was as clearly evinced as in the days of Marius or Cæsar. "Whenever the invaders," says Finlay, "met with a steady and well-combined resistance, they were defeated without much difficulty. The victorious reigns of Claudius II., Aurelian, and Probus, prove the immense superiority of the Roman armies when properly commanded; but the custom which was constantly gaining ground, of recruiting the legions from among the barbarians, reveals the deplorable state of depopulation and weakness to which three centuries of despotism and bad administration had reduced the empire."[27]
But amidst this general prostration of the political and military strength of the Roman empire, in consequence of the decline and desolation of the country, the great towns still continued flourishing, and wealth to an extraordinary and unparalleled extent existed among the chief families, some of patrician, some of plebeian origin. That was the grand characteristic of Rome in its later days. The country, in the European part of the empire at least, was daily growing poorer; the cultivation of the fields was neglected; and the provinces, crushed under the weight of the direct taxes, which had become unavoidable, had in most cases sunk to half their former number of inhabitants. But the metropolis, whether in Italy or on the shores of the Bosphorus, was still the seat of opulence, luxury, and prosperity. The strength of Constantinople was sufficient to repel the barbarians, and prolong the life of the empire of the east, for many centuries after it had ceased to derive effective support from any of its provinces. It is recorded by Ammianus Marcellinus, that when Rome was taken by the Goths under Alaric, it was still inhabited by 1,200,000 souls, who were maintained chiefly by the expenditure of seventeen hundred and sixty great families, many of whom had £160,000 of yearly income, equal to at least £300,000 a-year of our money.[28] And of the flourishing condition of the cities of the empire, especially those which were on the shores of the Mediterranean, even so late as the eighth century, Mr Finlay gives the following account:—
"The strongest proof of the wealth and prosperity of the CITIES of Greece, even in the last days of the empire, is to be found in the circumstance of their being able to fit out the expedition which ventured to attempt wresting Constantinople from the grasp of a soldier and statesman such as Leo the Isaurian was known to be, when the Greeks deliberately resolved to overturn his throne. The rural districts, in the eighth century, were reduced to a state of desolation, and the towns were flourishing in wealth. Agriculture was at the lowest ebb, and trade in a prosperous condition."[29] Sismondi gives his valuable testimony to the same effect:—"It was at this very time, when industry in the country was declining, that the towns of the provinces arrived at their highest degree of opulence. Adrian excited the emulation of their rich citizens, and he extended to the furthest extremities of the empire the luxury of monuments and decorations, which had hitherto been reserved for the illustrious cities which scorned to be the depots of the civilisation of the world."[30] Such, in a few words, was the condition, generally speaking, of all the part of the empire to the north of the Mediterranean, in the decaying period of its existence. The towns were every where flourishing; but it was in Africa, Sicily, and Spain alone that agriculture was undecayed. And the decay and ruin of rural industry, and of the inhabitants of the country to the north of the Mediterranean, left them no adequate means of resisting the attacks of the brave but artless barbarians, who there pressed upon the yielding frontiers of the empire.
Coexistent with this fatal decline in the rural population and agricultural industry, was the increase of direct taxation, which was so keenly felt and loudly complained of in all the later stages of the Roman history. This is a branch of the subject of the very highest importance, because it leads to precisely the same conclusions, as to the real causes of the fall of Rome, as the others which have been already considered.
It is well known that when the Romans first conquered Macedonia, the senate proclaimed a general liberation from taxes and imposts of every kind to the Roman citizens, as the reward of their victories. This state of matters, however, could not long continue in an old state charged with the duty, and under the necessity of keeping up, a large establishment to maintain its dominion over its subject provinces. For some time, indeed, the wealth brought by the conquest of Asia and Egypt into the Roman treasury was so considerable, that the necessity of taxes levied on its own citizens was not felt; and as long as the people had a direct share in the government, they took care to uphold an exemption in their own favour. But when one master was given to the whole Roman world, this invidious system of one class living upon another class was erelong abandoned. "Augustus," says Gibbon, "had no sooner assumed the reins of government, than he frequently intimated the insufficiency of the tributes from the provinces, and the necessity of throwing an equitable proportion of the public burdens upon Rome and Italy. In the prosecution of this unpopular design, however, he advanced with slow and cautious steps. The introduction of customs was followed by the establishment of an excise; and the scheme of taxation was completed by an artful assessment of the real and personal property of the Roman citizens, who had been exempted from every kind of contribution for above a century and a half."[31]
Customs on foreign goods imported into Italy was the first species of taxation attempted on the Roman people. "In the reign of Augustus and his successor," says the same historian, "duties were imposed on every kind of merchandise, which, through a thousand channels, flowed to the great centre of opulence and luxury; and in whatever manner the law was expressed, it was the Roman purchaser, and not the provincial merchant, who paid the tax. The rate of the customs varied from the eighth to the fortieth part of the value of the commodity. There is still extant a long, but imperfect, catalogue of Eastern commodities, which, about the time of Alexander Severus, were subject to the payment of duties. Precious stones, Parthian and Babylonian leather, cottons, silks, raw and manufactured, ebony, ivory, and eunuchs, were among the taxed articles. An excise also was introduced by Augustus, of one per cent on whatever was sold in the markets or by public auction; and this extended from the most considerable purchase of lands or houses, to those minute objects which commonly derive their value from their infinite multitude and daily consumption."[32]
But erelong these indirect taxes proved unproductive, and recourse was had to the lasting scourge of direct taxes. One of 5 per cent on legacies and inheritances was first imposed by Augustus, and adhered to by him, in spite of the indignant murmurs of the Roman nobles and people. The rate was raised by Caracalla to a tenth of all inheritances; and, when the privilege of Roman citizenship was extended to the whole provincials of the empire, they were subjected at once both to the former burdens which they had paid as provincials, and the new tax levied on them as Roman citizens.[33] From that time, the direct burdens became daily more oppressive, and at length proved an almost insurmountable bar to industry. "The noxious weed," says Gibbon, "sprung up with the most luxuriant growth, and in the succeeding age darkened the Roman world with its deadly shade. In the course of this history, we shall be too often summoned to explain the land-tax, the capitation, and the heavy contributions in corn, wine, oil, and meat, which were exacted from the provinces for the use of the court, the army, and the capital."[34]
These direct taxes soon became fearfully oppressive, and it is proved, by the clearest evidence, that they were among the leading causes of the decline of the empire. "The whole landed property of the empire," says Gibbon, "without excepting the patrimonial estates of the monarch, was the object of ordinary taxation, and every new purchaser contracted the obligations of the former proprietor. An accurate survey was made of what every citizen should contribute to the public service, and this was made anew every fifteen years. The number of slaves and cattle constituted an essential part of the report; an oath was administered to the proprietors, which obliged them to disclose the true state of their affairs; and any attempt to prevaricate or elude the vigilance of the legislature, was severely watched, and punished as a capital crime, which included the double guilt of treason and sacrilege. A large portion of the tribute was paid in money; and, of the current coin of the empire, gold alone could be legally accepted. The remainder of the taxes, according to the proportion observed in the annual indiction, was levied in a manner still more direct and still more oppressive. According to the different value of lands, their real produce, in the various articles of wine or oil, corn or barley, wood or iron, was transported by the labour, or at the expense of the provincials, to the imperial magazines, from whence they were occasionally distributed for the use of the court, the army, and the two capitals, Rome and Constantinople. The commissioners of the revenue were so frequently obliged to make considerable purchases, that they were strictly prohibited from allowing any compensation, or from receiving in money the value of those articles which were exacted in kind."[35]
"Either from accident or design, the mode of assessment seemed to unite the substance of a land to the form of a capitation-tax. The return which was sent from every province and district expressed the number of tributary subjects, and the amount of the public impositions. The latter of these sums was divided by the former; and the estimate, that each province and each head was rated at a certain sum, was universally received not only in the popular but the legal computation. Some idea of the weight of these contributions per head may be formed by the details preserved of the taxation of Gaul. The rapacious ministers of Constantine had exhausted the wealth of that province, by exacting twenty-five gold pieces (£12, 10s.) for the annual tribute of every head. The humane policy of his successor reduced the computation to seven pieces. A moderate proportion between these two extremes of extravagant oppression and transient indulgence, therefore, may be fixed at sixteen gold pieces, or about nine pounds sterling, as the common standard of the impositions of Gaul. The enormity of this tax is explained by the circumstance, that, as the great bulk of the people were slaves, the rolls of tribute were filled only with the names of citizens in decent circumstances. The taxable citizens in Gaul did not exceed 500,000; and their annual payments were about £4,500,000 of our money; a fourth part only of the modern taxes of France."[36] The ordinary land-tax in the eastern provinces was a tenth, though in some cases it rose by the operation of the survey to a fifth, in others fell to a twentieth of the produce. It was valued for a term of years, and paid, unless when exacted in kind, commonly in money.[37]
There was one circumstance which rendered the direct taxes peculiarly oppressive in the declining periods of the Roman empire, and that was the solid obligation, as the lawyers term it, which attached to the municipalities, into which the whole empire was divided, of making good the amount of their fixed assessment to the public treasury. Of course, if the municipality was declining, and the same quota required to be made up from its assessable inhabitants by the magistracy, who were responsible for its amount, it augmented the burden on those who remained within its limits; and if they dwindled, by public calamities or emigration, to a small number, it might, and often did become of a crushing weight. This system is general over the East; and its oppressive effect in the declining stage of states, is the chief cause of the rapid decay of Oriental empires. There is a remarkable authentic instrument, which attests the ruinous influence of this system in the later stages of the Roman dominion. This is a rescript of the Emperior Majorian, which sets forth:—"The municipal corporations, the lesser senates, as antiquity has justly styled them, deserve to be considered as the heart of the cities, and the sinews of the Republic. And yet so low are they now reduced, by the injustice of magistrates and the venality of collectors, that many of their numbers, renouncing their dignity and their country, have taken refuge in distant and obscure exile." He strongly urges, and even ordains their return to their respective cities; but he removes the grievances which had forced them to desert the exercises of their municipal functions, by directing that they shall be responsible, not for the whole sum assessed on the district, but only for the payments they have actually received, and for the defaulters who are still indebted to the public.[38] But this humane and wise interposition was as shortlived as it was equitable. Succeeding emperors returned to the convenient system of making the municipal corporations responsible for the sum assessed on their respective districts, and it continued to be the general law of the empire down to its very latest day. Sismondi, in his Décadence de l'Empire Romaine, and Michelet, in his Gaule sous les Romains, concur in ascribing to this system the rapid decline and depopulation of the empire in its later stages.
But although there can be no question that the conclusions of these learned writers are in great part well founded, yet this system of taxation by no means explains the decline and fall of the Roman empire. It requires no argument, indeed, to show, that such a system of solid obligations, and of levying a certain sum on districts without any regard to the decline in the resources or number of those who were to pay them, must, in a declining state of society, be attended with the most disastrous, and it may be in the end fatal consequences. But it does not explain how society should be declining. That is the matter which it behoves us to know. When the reverse is the case—when industry and population are advancing, the imposition of fixed tributes on districts is not only no disadvantage, but the greatest possible advantage to a state—witness the benefit of the perpetual settlement to the ryots of Hindostan—or of a perpetual quit-rent to English landholders. And that, bad as this system was when applied to a declining state of society, it was not the cause of the ruin of the Roman empire, and would not have proved injurious if the state had been advancing, is decisively proved by several considerations.
1. In the first place, the taxes and system of municipalities, being responsible for a fixed sum, was not confined to the European provinces of the Roman dominion, viz.—Italy, Greece, Gaul, Macedonia, and Romelia, where the progress of decay was so rapid, but it was the general law of the empire, and obtained equally in Spain, Lybia, Egypt, and Sicily; as in the provinces which lay to the north of the Mediterranean. But these latter provinces, it has been shown, were, when overrun by the barbarians about the year 400, not only nowise in a state of decrepitude, but in the very highest state of affluence and prosperity. They had become, and deserved the appellation of, "the common granary of Rome and of the world." They maintained the inhabitants of Italy, Greece, Rome, and Constantinople, by the export of their magnificent crops of grain. Spain was at least twice as populous as it is at this time, Lybia contained twenty millions, Egypt seven millions of inhabitants. Sicily was in affluence and prosperity, while the adjoining plains of Italy were entirely laid out in pasturage, or returned to a state of desolation and insalubrity. It is in vain, therefore, to seek a solution of the decline of the empire in a system, which, universally applied, left some parts of it in the last stages of decrepitude and decay, and others in the highest state of prosperity and affluence.
2. In the next place, the taxes of the empire were by no means at first of such weight as to account, if there had been nothing else in the case, for the decay of its industry. The tax on inheritances, it has been shown, was at first five, afterwards ten per cent; and the land-tax was ten per cent on the produce. The former tax of ten per cent on successions, is the present legacy-tax on movable succession to persons not related to the deceased, in England; and ten per cent on the produce, is the tithe, and no more than the tithe, which has so long existed in the European monarchies, and even when coexisting with many other and more oppressive burdens, has nowhere proved fatal to industry. Income of every sort paid ten per cent in Great Britain during the war—the land paid the tithe and poor's-rate in addition—and the other taxes yielded a sum four times as great; yet industry of every kind flourished to an extraordinary degree during that struggle. Ever since the termination of the Revolution, the land-tax in France has been far heavier than it was in Rome, varying, according to the Cadastre, or valuation, from fifteen to twenty-five per cent; but yet it is well known public wealth and agricultural produce have increased in an extraordinary degree during that period. It was not, therefore, the weight of the impositions, but the simultaneous circumstances, which rendered the northern provinces of the empire unable to bear them, which was the real cause of the ruin of its industry.
3. In the third place, whether the magnitude of the naval and military establishments, or the absolute amount of its public revenue, is taken into consideration, it is equally apparent that the Roman empire was at first not only noways burdened with heavy, but was blessed with singularly light government impositions. Gibbon states the population of the whole empire, in the time of Augustus, at 120,000,000, or about half of what all Europe, to the westward of the Ural mountains, now contains; and its naval and military establishments amounted to 450,000 armed men—"a force," says the historian, "which, formidable as it may seem, was equalled by a monarch of the last century, (Louis XIV.) whose kingdom was confined within a single province of the Roman empire."[39] Compared with the military and naval forces of the European powers in time of peace, this must seem a most moderate public establishment. France, in the time of Napoleon, with 42,000,000 inhabitants, had 850,000 regular soldiers in arms, besides 100,000 sailors; and Great Britain, in its European dominions alone, with a population of 18,000,000 souls, had above 500,000 regular soldiers and sailors in the public service. France has now, in peace, with a population of 32,000,000 souls, about 360,000 men, between the army and navy, in the public service; and England, with a population of 28,000,000, upwards of 150,000, besides double that number in India. Russia, with 62,000,000 inhabitants, has 460,000 soldiers in the public service. Austria, with 33,000,000, has 260,000. All these peace establishments are twice as heavy in proportion to the numbers of the people, as that of Rome was in the time of Augustus; and, in subsequent reigns, the number of armed men maintained by the state, was so far from increasing, that it was constantly diminishing, and, in the time of Justinian, had sunk down to 140,000 soldiers, maintained by an empire more extensive than that of Russia at this moment.
4. The same conclusion results from the consideration of the absolute amount of the public revenue levied in the Roman empire, compared with what is extracted from modern states. Gibbon estimates the public revenue of the whole empire in the time of Augustus, at "fifteen or sixteen millions sterling;"[40] and in the time of Constantine the revenue derived from Gaul was £4,500,000 a-year.[41] The first of these sums is less than a third of what is now levied in time of peace on Great Britain, with less than thirty millions of souls, instead of the hundred and twenty millions who swelled the population rolls of the Roman empire: the last is little more than an eighth of what is now extracted from France, having nearly the same limits as ancient Gaul. Supposing that the value of money has declined, from the discovery of the South American mines, a half, (and at this time, owing to the decline of those mines, it has not sunk more,) still it is apparent that the public burdens of modern times are at least three times as heavy as they were in the Roman empire in the highest period of its greatness. As its strength and military establishment constantly declined after that period, there is no reason to suppose that the absolute amount of the public taxes was at any subsequent time greater, although unquestionably, from the decline in the resources of those who were to bear them, they were felt as infinitely more oppressive. And that these taxes were not disproportioned to the strength of the empire, when its resources were unimpaired, and its industry flourishing, is decisively proved by the extremely prosperous condition in which it was during the eighty years when Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, and the two Antonines filled the imperial throne. "At that period," says Gibbon, "notwithstanding the propensity of mankind to exalt the past and depreciate the present, the tranquil and prosperous condition of the empire was warmly felt and honestly confessed by the provincials as well as the Romans."[42] "They affirm," says a contemporary writer, "that, with the increase of the arts, the human species has visibly multiplied. They celebrate the increasing beauty of the cities, the beautiful face of the country, cultivated and adorned like an immense garden, and the long festival of peace which was enjoyed by so many nations, forgetful of their ancient animosities, and delivered from the apprehension of future danger."[43]
Ancient as well as modern historians are full of complaints, in the later periods of the Roman empire, of the prodigious increase of wealth in the hands of the rich, and decline in the remuneration of industry to the poor. Their complaints on this subject are so numerous, and supported by such an array of facts, as to leave no room for doubt that they are well founded. Indeed, it seems to have been generally true of the whole empire north of the Mediterranean, what Mr Finlay shows was the case down to the very latest periods in Greece, that while industry and population in the country were ruined, the towns were in a state of affluence and prosperity. Even so early as the time of Plutarch, the accumulation of debts had come to be complained of as an extensive evil.[44] "These debts," says Finlay, "were generally contracted to Roman money-lenders. So injurious did their effects become to the provinces, that they afforded to one class the means of accumulating enormous fortunes by forcing others into abject poverty. The property of the provincial debtors was at length transferred to a very great extent to Roman creditors. Instead of invigorating the upper classes, by substituting an industrious timocracy for an idle aristocracy, it had a very different effect. It introduced new feelings of rivalry and distrust, by filling the country with foreign landlords. The weight of debts seems to have been the chief cause of revolutions in the ancient world. The Greeks could not long maintain the struggle, and they sunk gradually lower in wealth, until their poverty introduced an altered state of society, in which they learned the prudential habits of small proprietors, and escape not only from the eye of history but even of antiquarian research."[45]
This constant tendency of wealth, in the later periods of the Roman empire, to accumulate in the hands of the great capitalists, accompanied by the progressive deterioration of the condition of the middle and working classes, is amply proved and forcibly illustrated by Sismondi, in his admirable work on the Decline of the Roman Empire. "During the long peace," says he, "which followed the victories of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, those colossal fortunes were accumulated, which, according to Pliny, ruined Italy and the empire.[46] A single proprietor, by degrees, came to buy up whole provinces, the conquest of which had in former days furnished the occasion of many triumphs to the generals of the Republic. While this huge capitalist was amassing riches, wholly disproportioned to the capacity of man, the once numerous and respectable, but now beggared, middle class, disappeared from the face of the earth. In districts where so many brave and industrious citizens were to be seen in former times, alike ready to defend or cultivate their fields, were to be found nothing but slaves, who rapidly declined in number as the fields came to be exclusively devoted to pasturage. The fertile plains of Italy ceased to nourish its inhabitants; Rome depended entirely for its subsistence on the harvests which its fleets brought it from Sicily, Africa, and Egypt. From the capital to the farthest extremity of the provinces, depopulation and misery in the country coexisted with enormous wealth an the towns. From this cause the impossibility of recruiting the legions with native Romans was experienced even in the time of Marcus Aurelius. In his war against the Quadi and the Marcomanni, which had been preceded by a long peace, he was obliged to recruit the legions with the slaves and robbers of Rome."[47] It is impossible to give a stronger proof of the extent to which this enormous evil of the vast fortunes accumulated in the towns, and the entire ruin of industry in the country, had gone in the last days of the empire, than is to be found in the fact already mentioned, that when Rome was taken by Alaric, in the year 404 after Christ, while Italy could furnish no force to resist the invaders, the capital itself contained seventeen hundred and sixty great families, many of them with incomes of £160,000 a-year, equal to £300,000 of our money, whose expenditure maintained an urban population of 1,200,000 souls.[48]
It may readily be conceived, that when this prodigious concentration of wealth in the hands of the great proprietors of towns, and ruin of industry in the country, came to coexist with the solid obligations of the rural municipalities for the sum assessed on their districts, the burden of the public taxes, though light at first, compared with what is little complained of in modern times, came to be altogether overwhelming. This accordingly was the case in all the Northern provinces of the empire in its later stages. What every where preceded their ruin, was the desertion of the inhabitants in consequence of the crushing weight of the public burdens. From the entire failure of the indirect taxes amidst the ruin of agricultural, and the imposition of taxation on urban industry, it had become necessary to make progressive additions to the direct taxes till they became exterminating. "Three great direct taxes," says Sismondi, "alike ruinous, impended over the citizens. The first was the Indictions or Land-Tax, estimated in general at a tenth of the produce, or a third of the clear revenue, and often doubled or tripled by the Super indictions which the necessities of the provinces compelled them to impose. Secondly: the Capitation-Tax, which sometimes rose as high as 300 francs (£12) ahead on the free and taxable citizens; and, third, the Corvées, or forced contributions in labour, which were for the service of the imperial estates, or the maintenance of the public roads. These direct imposts in the declining days of the empire, so entirely ruined the proprietors of rural estates, that they abandoned them in all quarters. Vast provinces in the interior were deserted; the enrolment for the army became daily more difficult from the disappearance of the rural population; the magistrates of municipalities in town or country, rendered responsible for the assessment of their districts and the levy of their quota of soldiers, fled the country, or sought under a thousand pretexts to escape the perilous honour of public office. So far did the desertion of the magistracy go in the time of Valentinian, (364-375, after Christ,) that when that cruel tyrant ordered the heads of three magistrates of towns in a particular province to be brought to him for some alleged offences, 'Will your Imperial Majesty be pleased to direct,' said the prefect Florentius, 'what we are to do in those towns where three magistrates cannot be found?' The order was upon this revoked."[49]
The disastrous state of the rural districts amidst this accumulation of evils is thus forcibly described by Mr Finlay:—"In many provinces, the higher classes had been completely exterminated. The loss of their slaves and serfs, who had often been carried away by the invaders, had reduced many to the humble condition of labourers. Others had emigrated, and abandoned their land to the cultivators, from being unable to obtain any revenue from it in the miserable state to which the capture of the stock, the loss of a market, and the destruction of the agricultural buildings had reduced the country. In many of the towns, the diminished population was reduced to misery by the ruin of the rural districts in their neighbourhood. The higher classes in the country disappeared under the weight of the municipal duties they were called upon to perform. Houses remained unlet; and even when let, the portion of rent which was not absorbed by the imperial taxes was insufficient to supply the demands of the local expenditure. The labourer and the artisan alone could find bread; the walls of cities were allowed to fall into ruins; the streets were neglected, public buildings had become useless; aqueducts remained unrepaired; internal communications ceased; and with the extinction of the wealthy and educated classes in the provincial towns, the local prejudices of the lower orders became the law of society."[50]
Such, on a nearer survey, was the condition of the Roman empire which preceded its fall. From it may be seen how widely the real causes of its decline differed from the vague generalities of Montesquieu, that the ruin of the empire was the necessary consequence of its extension; or the still vaguer declamations of the scholars, that it was the corruption incident to great and long-continued wealth which enervated the people, and rendered them incapable of defending themselves against the Northern nations. In truth, both these causes did operate, and that too in a most powerful manner, in bringing about the ruin of the empire; but they did so, not in the way supposed by these authors, but in an indirect way, by inducing a new set of evils, which destroyed industry in the most important of its provinces, by depriving the industrious of a market for their industry, and rendering the public burdens overwhelming, by changing the value of money. The operation of these causes can now be distinctly traced by us, because we feel them working among ourselves: their existence has not hitherto been suspected, or their effects traced by philosophers, because no state in modern Europe but our own, in recent times, had come within the sphere of their influence. And to see what these causes really were, it is only necessary to recall, in a few propositions, to the reader's mind, the general result of the foregoing deduction:—
I. During the Republic, and till the commencement of the empire, agriculture was in the most flourishing state in Italy; and it was in its sturdy, free cultivators, that the legions were recruited which conquered the world.
II. From the time of Tiberius, cultivation declined in the Italian and Grecian plains, and continued to do so to the fall of the empire. Pasturage came to supersede agriculture; population disappeared in the fields; the race of free cultivators, the strength of the legions, were ruined; the flocks and herds were tended only by slaves; the small proprietors became bankrupt, or fled the country; and the whole land in the European provinces of the empire fell into the hands of a limited number of territorial magnates, who resided at Rome or Constantinople, and mainly upheld, by their profuse expenditure, the prosperity of those capitals of the empire.
III. In the midst of the general decline of rural industry in all the provinces to the north of the Mediterranean, the wealth and prosperity of the great cities remained undecayed. The small provincial towns were in great part ruined; but the great cities, especially such as were on the sea-coast, continued flourishing, and received in their ample bounds all the refluent population from the country. Rural industry languished and expired, but commerce was undecayed; the fortunes of the great capitalists were daily accumulating; and in no period in the history of mankind, were urban incomes so great as in the city of Rome, on the eve of its capture by the Goths.
IV. While this was the state of matters to the north of the Mediterranean, that is, in the heart of the empire, the remoter agricultural provinces of Spain, Sicily, Lybia, and Egypt, were in the very highest state of prosperity; they fed all the great cities of the Roman world by their immense exportations of grain, and yet enough remained, down to their conquest by the Vandals under Genseric, to maintain a vast population at home, greater than has ever since existed in those countries, in a state of affluence and comfort.
V. Taxation, from the time of its first introduction under Augustus, was at first chiefly indirect, and by no means oppressive. Gradually, however, the produce of the indirect taxes failed, or became inadequate to the wants of the empire, and recourse was had to direct taxes, levied chiefly on landed property and successions. But these direct taxes were at first light, and not a third part of those levied on Britain or France during the war; and the public establishments of the Roman government were not a fourth, in proportion to the population, of those now maintained by the great European monarchies during peace.
VI. In process of time, however, the resources of the people, in the principal provinces of the empire, and especially those to the north of the Mediterranean, declined to such a degree, that though the military and naval establishments of the empire were reduced to a third of their former amount, and became inadequate to defend its frontiers against its enemies, the direct taxes required to be continually increased, till they became so oppressive as to destroy industry, and prove the immediate cause of the depopulation and ruin of the empire.
Such are the facts, as established by the unanimous and concurring testimony of all the best informed historians; and now for the causes which produced these facts. They are set forth and supported by an equally clear and undisputable array of authorities.
Even so early as the latter days of the Republic, the system was introduced of feeding the Roman people with grain derived by tribute from the provinces. In the time of Augustus, the annual quantity distributed to the poorer citizens of Rome was 1,200,000 modii, or 35,156 quarters. But Tiberius went a step further, and actually gave bounties on the importation of foreign grain. "An enormous quantity," says Finlay, "of grain was distributed in this way, which was received as tribute from the provinces. Cæsar found 320,000 persons receiving this gratuity. It is true he reduced the number to one-half. The greater part of this grain was drawn from Sicily, Africa, and Egypt. In the time of Alexander, generally 75,000 modii was distributed daily. This distribution enabled the poor to live in idleness, and was itself extremely injurious to industry; but another arrangement was adopted by the Roman government, which rendered the cultivation of land around Rome unprofitable to the proprietors. A large sum was annually employed by the state in purchasing grain in the provinces, and in transporting this supply to Rome, where it was sold at a fixed price to the bakers. Augustus appointed an officer, styled Prefectus Annonæ, whose duty was to provide by government purchases for the subsistence of the people. An allowance was also made to the private importers of grain, in order to ensure a constant supply.[51] In this way, a very large sum was expended to keep grain cheap in a city where a variety of circumstances tended to make it dear. This singular system of annihilating capital, and ruining agriculture and industry, was so deeply rooted in the Roman administration, that similar gratuitous distributions of grain were established at Antioch and Alexandria, and introduced into Constantinople when that city became the capital of the empire."[52]
The necessary effect of this system was the cessation of agriculture in Italy, the ruin of the small proprietors, and the engrossing of the land in the provinces by a few great landholders, who cultivated their extensive estates by means of slaves. "Riches, far exceeding the wealth of modern sovereigns, flowed into the hands of the great proprietors; villas and parks were formed over all Italy on a scale of the most stupendous grandeur; and land became more valuable as hunting-ground than as productive farms. The same habits were introduced into the provinces. In the neighbourhood of Rome, agriculture was ruined by the public distribution of grain received as tribute from the provinces, and by the bounty granted to merchants importing to secure a maximum price of bread. The same system proceeded in the provinces; and similar distributions at Alexandria and Antioch must have been equally injurious."[53] When Constantine established his new capital on the shores of the Bosphorus, he was under the necessity of adopting, and even extending, the same ruinous system. "Wealthy individuals from the provinces were compelled to keep up houses at Constantinople, pensions were conferred upon them, and a right to distributions of provisions to a considerable amount was annexed to those dwellings. These rations consisted of bread, oil, wine, meat, and formed an important branch of revenue even to the better class of citizens. These distributions were entirely different from the public ones at Rome, which were established as a gratification by the state to the poor citizens who had no other means of livelihood. The tribute of grain from Egypt was appropriated to supply Constantinople, and that of Africa was left for the consumption of Rome. This was the tie which bound the capital to the emperors, and the cause of the toleration shown to its factions. They both felt they had a common interest in supporting the despotic power by which the provinces were drained of money to support the expenditure of the court, and supply provisions for the people."[54]
Although, however, these public distributions of grain in the chief towns of the empire had some effect in checking the cultivation of corn in Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor, by depriving its cultivators of their best market, yet the private importation of grain from these great corn countries must have been a far more serious and general evil. Gibbon states the number who received rations at Constantinople daily in the time of Constantine at 80,000, and in Rome in the time of Tiberius it was 180,000. Supposing the other great towns were fed in the same proportion, perhaps a million of persons in the Roman world were nourished at the expense of the state on Egyptian or African grain. But a million of persons consume annually a million of quarters of grain; not a sixtieth part of the annual consumption of the British empire at this time, and probably not a two-hundredth part required by the 120,000,000 souls who composed the Roman empire in the days of the Antonines. But though the state paupers were thus but a small fraction of the whole consumers of foreign grain, yet the general importation was immense, and became erelong so great as to constitute the entire source from which the population of Italy, as well as Constantinople and the adjacent provinces of Romelia, Macedonia, and Greece, were fed. It was this general importation, not the gratuitous distributions, which ruined Italian agriculture; for it alone was on a scale commensurate with the population of the Italian peninsula, and could alone account for its general ruin. Tacitus expressly says, it was the preference given to African agriculture, not the gratuitous distributions, which destroyed Italian cultivation. "At, Hercule, olim ex Italia legionibus longinquas in provincias commeatus portabantur: nec nunc infecunditate laboratur; sed Africam POTIUS et Egyptum excercemus, navibusque et casibus vita populi Romani permissa est.[55]" The supply of grain for the Roman world was entirely obtained from Spain, Sicily, Africa, and Egypt, while Greece was maintained by corn imported from Poland.[56] It was not that the Italian and Grecian fields had become sterile: Tacitus expressly says the reverse,—"nec nunc infecunditate laboratur." But the country in which grain produced fifteen fold, as Italy did, could not compete with that which produced sixty or eighty fold, on the banks of the Nile. Nor could the industry of the centre of the empire, where money was plentiful, comparatively speaking, and labour was therefore dear, stand against the competition of the remoter provinces, where it was scarce, and labour was therefore cheap.
The ruin of Italian and Grecian agriculture from this cause is so evident, that it is admitted by the ablest advocates of an unlimited freedom in the corn trade. "The first effect of this system," says a late able and learned writer on the liberal side, "was the ruin of Italian agriculture. The natural market for the corn of the Italian farmer was, to a great extent, destroyed by the artificial supplies obtained from the provinces. Hence, as Dureau de la Malle has remarked, (ii. 218,) the history of the seventh and eighth centuries of Rome presents this singular contrast—that the agriculture, the population, and products of Italy, diminish progressively as she extends her conquests and power. The fatal influence which the gratuitous supplies from the provinces would exercise upon the native agriculture, was perceived by Augustus; but he abandoned his intention of altering the system, from a conviction it would be restored by his successor. The result was, that southern and central Italy, instead of being tilled by a race of hardy active farmers, themselves freemen, and working on their own land, was divided into plantations cultivated by slaves."[57] This explains how it came to pass that Spanish agriculture took such a start from the time of Tiberius; and how, in the general ruin of the empire, Spain, Africa, and Egypt, were the only provinces which retained their prosperity. It will be recollected that it was in the reign of Tiberius that bounties were first given by the Roman government to the private importers of foreign grain.
Of the main dependence of the Western empire in its declining days on Africa, not merely for the necessary supply of food, but even for the chief resources and strength of the state in the midst of the desolation of its European fields, Sismondi gives a striking account—"The loss of Africa was at this period, (439 after Christ,) perhaps the greatest calamity which the empire of the West could have undergone. It was its only province the defence of which cost no trouble; the only one from which they drew money, arms, and soldiers, without its ever requiring any back. It was at the same time the granary of Rome and of Italy. The gratuitous distributions of grain at Rome, Milan, and Ravenna, had, over the whole Italian peninsula, destroyed the cultivation of grain. Experience had proved that the return could not pay its expense; and the reason was, that the more fertile fields of Africa furnished a part of the harvest destined for the nourishment of the people of Italy. The sudden stoppage of that supply by the conquest of Africa by the Vandals, caused a cruel famine in Italy; which still further reduced its wretched inhabitants."[58] And so entirely did Constantinople become dependent on foreign importation of sea-borne grain from Egypt and the Ukraine for its support, that "when the Persians, in the year 618, overran Egypt, and stopped the usual supplies of grain from that province, the famine became so alarming, that the government determined upon transferring the seat of empire to Carthage in Africa, as the most likely point from whence the dominion of Syria and Egypt might be regained."[59] The latter of these had long been regarded as the most valuable province of the empire.[60]
When this entire dependence of the great cities in the northern parts of the empire, for centuries together, on Spain, Sicily, Africa, and Egypt, is considered, it must with every rational mind cease to be a matter of surprise that its west and northern provinces declined in industry and population; that these grain provinces to the south of the Mediterranean alone retained their numbers and prosperity; and that under the constant decline, in the European provinces, in the market for agricultural produce, the rural population disappeared, and the recruiting of the army in the country became impossible. It is not surprising that while they were enrolling slaves in Italy, and enlisting barbarians on the Danube and the Rhine, to defend the frontiers, from Africa and Spain alone they drew supplies both of money and soldiers, without requiring to send back any. The latter provinces were the granary and garden of the empire; the only part of it where rural industry met with remunerating prices or adequate encouragement. And the same circumstances explain in a great degree how it happened, that while the rural districts of Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, and Romelia, were continually declining in population, rental, and revenue, their towns, especially on the sea-coast, were, down to the last days of their existence, in a flourishing condition. These towns were the seat of manufactures and commerce. It was by their capital that the vast corn trade by which all the cities of the empire were fed was carried on. It was their fabrics which mainly furnished the means of purchasing the immense proportion of this grain, which, being imported by private importers, required to be paid for in some species of manufactured produce. And the reason why grain was raised so much cheaper, and therefore profitably, in Egypt, Lybia, and Spain, than in Italy and Greece, was, partly, that the former of these countries were by nature blessed with a more prolific soil and a warmer sun than the latter; and, partly, that as Rome and Constantinople were the two capitals of the empire, the greater part of its wealth was attracted, either by taxes, tribute, or the concourse of the rich, to them, and, consequently, the abundance of riches rendered money cheap, labour dear, and cultivation, when exposed to foreign competition, unprofitable.
But there was more in the case than this. Simultaneously with the vast and increasing importation of foreign grain, which at length destroyed cultivation in all the northern provinces of the empire, a continual diminution of its circulating medium was going forward; and it was to the combined and cotemporaneous operation of these two causes, that the ruin of the empire is beyond all question to be ascribed.
So early as the days of Tiberius, the abstraction of the gold and silver currency of the empire by the incessant drain of foreign commerce, was loudly complained of by the Roman writers; and there is the most decisive proof, that in the course of time the supply of the precious metals on the empire became so inadequate to the wants of its inhabitants, that their value was enhanced to a great and ruinous degree. It was the commerce of the East which first induced this destructive drain upon the metallic treasures of the empire. "The objects," says Gibbon, "of oriental traffic were splendid and trifling; silk—a pound of which was esteemed worth a pound of gold—precious stones, and a variety of aromatics, were the chief articles. The labour and risks of the voyage were rewarded with almost incredible profit; but it was made on Roman subjects, and at the expense of the public. As the nations of Arabia and India were contented with the produce and manufactures of their own country, silver, on the side of the Romans, was the principal, if not the only instrument of commerce. It was a complaint worthy of the gravity of the senate, that in the pursuit of female ornaments, the wealth of the state was irrecoverably given away to foreign and hostile nations. The annual loss is computed by a writer of an inquisitive but censorious temper, (Pliny,) at £800,000 sterling. Such was the style of discontent brooding over the dark prospect of approaching poverty."[61] Eight hundred thousand pounds a-year, equivalent to about two millions of our money, must have been a severe drain upon the supply of the precious metals in the Roman empire; and we, who have seen in 1839 the Bank of England reel, and the United States bank fall, under the effect of an exportation of six or seven millions of sovereigns to buy foreign grain in a single year, can appreciate the effect of such a constant drain upon a state, the metallic resources of which were much less considerable than those of England at this time.
The immense importation also of African and Egyptian grain, which continued from the time of Tiberius down to the very close of the empire, must have occasioned a great additional abstraction of the precious metals from the Roman world. It has already been shown that a very small proportion of the grain imported from these distant provinces was remitted in the shape of tribute. By far the greater part, probably nineteen-twentieths of the whole supply, was imported by private merchants for sale, as it could be got from them cheaper than it could be raised at home. This imported corn, of course, required to be paid for in something. But the inhabitants of the countries from which it came—Spain, Sicily, Africa, and Egypt—for the most part slaves, blessed with a fine climate, requiring little covering, and nearly destitute of artificial wants, did not require, and could not consume, any considerable amount of Italian or Grecian fabrics. Thus, by far the greatest part of the price of the imported grain was paid in gold and silver, for which there is a constant demand in all countries, savage or civilized. A nation which imports foreign grain largely, must in all ages export the precious metals as largely; because the corn, of course, is brought from those countries where it is raised the cheapest—and the countries where this is the case, are those where labour is cheap, money scarce, and artificial wants unknown. Money is what these countries want, and money is what their surplus produce is nearly all exchanged for. And this explains how it happened, that in the decline of the empire, Spain, Africa, and Egypt, alone retained their flourishing aspect, and were the only provinces from which money and soldiers could be obtained, while they required none. The whole commerce between them and Italy, or Greece, was one in which grain was exchanged for the precious metals; and when they once got these, great part was hoarded, as it now is in the East, and very little ever returned.
In addition to this, the mines which supplied the Roman world failed to a considerable extent under the emperors. "The poverty of Greece, as of the whole empire," says Finlay, "was further increased by the gradual rise in the value of the precious metals; an evil which began to be generally felt about the time of Nero, and affected Greece with great severity, from the altered distribution of wealth in the country with which it was attended. Greece had once been rich in mines, which had been a source of wealth and prosperity to Siphnos and Atticus, and had laid the foundation of the power of Philip of Macedon. The fiscal measures of the Romans soon rendered it a ruinous speculation for individuals to attempt working mines of the precious metals; and, in the hands of the state, they soon proved unprofitable. Many mines were exhausted; and even though the value of the precious metals was enhanced, some mines beyond the sphere of the Roman power were abandoned from those causes which, after the second century of the Christian era, produced a sensible diminution in the commercial transactions of the Old Hemisphere.[62] Greece shared in the general decay: her commerce and manufactures, being confined to supplying the consumption of a diminished and impoverished population, sunk into insignificancy. An accumulation of debts became general throughout the country, and formed an extensive evil, as already observed, in the time of Plutarch."[63]
As this great diminution on the supply, and drain upon the treasures of the precious metals in the time of the emperors, lowered the value of every species of produce, so it proportionally augmented debts, and swelled the already overgrown fortunes of the capitalists. What Finlay says of Greece was true of the whole European provinces of the empire:—"The property of the Grecian debtors was at last transferred to a very great extent to the Roman creditors."[64] The gradual diminution in the supply of, or abstraction of the precious metals, by contracting the currency, lowered prices, and thus diminished the returns of industry; while it proportionally augmented debts, and added to the fortunes of the great capitalists and landholders. This again produced another effect upon the manners of the inhabitants of the great cities, which had an equally powerful effect in increasing the drain upon that portion of the precious metals which was employed in the public currency. The rich patricians of Rome, Antioch, and Constantinople, possessed of colossal fortunes to which nothing in modern times will bear a comparison, and nursed in habits of luxury and expense beyond any thing we can even conceive, daily augmented the amount of their immense incomes, which was devoted to the purposes of extravagance. "The historians of the second and third centuries," says Finlay, "are filled with lamentations on this subject."[65] It is not surprising that it was so. Men possessed, in private stations, of as much as three or four hundred thousand pounds a-year of modern money, could not get through their incomes without indulging in the habitual purchase of the most costly articles. Society in this way had come to verify the saying of Bacon—"Above all things, good policy is to be used that the treasure and money in a state be not gathered into few hands. For otherwise, a state may have a great stock and yet starve. And money is like muck, not good unless it be spread."
Hence the consumption and permanent fixing of gold and silver in the form of plate and costly ornaments, increased in the great families down to the very close of the empire; and while the currency was constantly declining, and prices in consequence falling in the provinces, the colossal capitalists of Rome and Constantinople were daily absorbing more of the precious metals in these beautiful but unproductive objects. The quantity of gold and silver moulded into the form of vases, statues, tripods, and personal ornaments, which was accumulated in Rome at the time it was taken by the Goths, would exceed belief if not attested by the unanimous testimony of all the contemporary writers. Great part of it was thrown into the Tiber, where it still remains covered by the alluvial deposits of fourteen centuries; the most precious of the spoils were buried with Alaric in the bed of a stream in Calabria, where that redoubtable conqueror was overtaken by the common fate of mortality. The place where he was interred was kept a profound secret, and the slaves who dug his grave in the bed of the river, of which the course had been turned aside for the purpose, were put to death, and buried with him and his treasures; and the river itself was immediately let into its old channel, that its ceaseless flow might secure, as it since has done, the grave of the mighty chief from disturbance, and enable him to present himself loaded with his earthly spoils in the land of spirits.[66]
The concurring operation of these causes produced, in the three last centuries of the Roman empire, a very great scarcity in the supply of the precious metals for the purposes of the public currency, and consequently a most distressing fall in prices, and diminution in the remuneration of industry, accompanied by a proportional increase in the weight of debt and taxes. And the progressive effect of these changes appeared in the clearest manner, in the repeated changes which were made by successive emperors in the value of the gold and silver coins which passed current in the empire. Gold became progressively so scarce in proportion to silver, that the proportion between the two, which at first had been 1 to 10 in the time of Augustus, rose in time to 1 to 12½, and was fixed by Constantine the Great at 1 to 14⅖ths.[67] In consequence of this rise in the value of gold—the precise counterpart of what was experienced in Great Britain in the later years of the war, when a light guinea sold for 25s.—the quantity of gold in the aureus, or chief gold Roman coin, was progressively diminished, till it came to contain little more than half its former weight of that precious metal. The learned Greaves has shown, after diligent inquiry, that while in the time of the Antonines the aureus weighed 118, in the time of Majorian, in the fifth century, it had come to weigh only 68 grains.[68] This is a clear indication, that 68 grains of gold were now equal in value to what 118 grains had been three centuries before; for Majorian, by a special decree, ordered all aurei of whatever reign, the Gallic solidus alone excepted, to pass, not according to weight but standard.[69] That is the most decisive proof to what a grievous extent the currency had, from the operation of the causes which have been mentioned, come to be contracted; for as gold constitutes, from its superior value, at least nine-tenths of the circulating medium of every civilized state, so great a rise in its value could only have been occasioned by a very great contraction of the whole currency. We know in what state the metallic currency of Great Britain was when the light guinea was selling for twenty-five shillings.
In the latter days of the empire, when the invasions of the barbarians began, and its provinces were liable to be pierced through and overrun by columns of their predatory hordes, the universal and well-founded terror produced a general hoarding of the precious metals, which entirely withdrew them from circulation, until they were forced from the trembling inhabitants by threats of massacre or conflagration. The effect of this, in contracting the currency, and causing the little that remained to disappear altogether from the circulation, of course was prodigious. It lowered to almost nothing the money-price of every species of industry, and proportionally augmented the weight of public and private debts—the subject of such loud and constant complaints from ancient historians. Nor was this evil confined to the latest periods of the empire of the West—the years which immediately preceded its fall. From the time of Commodus, who succeeded Marcus Antoninus, the incursions of the barbarians into the northern provinces of the empire had been severely felt; and from the time of the separation of the empires of the East and West, they were almost perpetual, and sometimes extended far into its interior provinces. The effect of these alarms and dangers, in producing a universal disposition to hoard, and consequently rendering money every where scarce, prices cheap, and debts and taxes oppressive, was very great, and may be regarded as one of the chief causes of the excessive and crushing weight which the direct burdens of the state acquired in the later periods of the empire.
The resource so well known, and so often had recourse to with the happiest effects, in modern times, to supply the void produced by a temporary or permanent drain of the precious metals, was unknown in antiquity. They had no paper currency. Even bills of exchange were unknown. They, as is well known, were a contrivance of the Jews, in the middle ages, to transport their wealth in a commodious form, when threatened with persecution, from one country to another. To what an extent paper of these various kinds has come to supply the place of gold and silver, may be judged of by the fact, that during the war, the paper currency of Great Britain and Ireland rose to £60,000,000 sterling; and that, at the present time, the private bills in circulation in it are estimated at £132,000,000 sterling. But this admirable resource, by which an accidental or temporary dearth of the precious metals is supplied by a paper currency, circulating at par with it, and fully supplying, as long as credit lasts, its place, was unknown in the ancient world. Gold, silver, and copper were their sole circulating mediums; and consequently, when they were progressively withdrawn, by the causes which have been mentioned, from the currency, there was nothing left to supply their place. Instantly, as if by the stroke of a fell necromancer, disasters of every kind accumulated on the wretched inhabitants. Credit was violently shaken; money disappeared; prices fell to a ruinous degree; industry could obtain no remuneration; the influence and ascendancy of realized capital became irresistible; and the only efficient power left in the state was that of the emperor, who wrenched his taxes out of the impoverished hands of his subjects, or of the creditors and landlords, who, by legal process, exacted their debts from their debtors, and drove them to desperation. This was exactly the social state of the empire in its declining days. We can appreciate its horrors, from having had a foretaste of them during the commercial crises with which, during the last twenty-five years, this country has been visited.
From what has now been said, it is evident that the two circumstances which occasioned the fall of the Roman empire, were the destruction of its domestic agriculture, by the importation of grain from its distant provinces, and the accumulation of debts and taxes, arising from the contraction of the currency. If these causes be attentively considered, it will be found that they not only afford a perfect solution of its fall, but explain how it happened at the period it did, and had not occurred at an earlier period. They show what it was which, slowly but steadily, wasting away the vitals of the empire, successively destroyed its rural population and agricultural industry, and at length crushed its property under the increasing load of debts and taxes. They explain how it happened that the indirect taxes, which at first were sufficient, with a moderate imposition of five per cent on inheritances, to support the large military and naval establishments of Augustus, became gradually unproductive, and were at length succeeded by direct taxes on land, of severe, and in the end destructive amount. They show what every page of contemporary history demonstrates, that it was neither the superior military power of the barbarians, nor the diminished skill and courage of the legions, which occasioned the overthrow of the mighty fabric, but the wasting away of its internal resources—which was the real cause of its decay. They tell us that it was not the timidity of the legions, but the inability of government to array them in sufficient strength, which rendered them unequal to the contest with an enemy whom, during the vigour of the state, they had so often repelled. They explain how it happened that Italy and Greece had become deserts in their rural districts, before one of the barbarians had crossed either the Alps or the Hæmus and how Africa, Spain, and Egypt, alone of the provinces, retained their prosperity, when rural industry was wellnigh extinct in all the other parts of the empire. Lastly, they explain how it happened, that while the rural districts to the north of the Mediterranean were so generally relapsing into a state of desolation, the great cities of Greece and Italy long retained their prosperity, and the wealth of the capitalists and great proprietors who inhabited them, was continually increasing, while all other classes were ground to the earth under the weight of public or private burdens.
It must appear, at first sight, not a little extraordinary that the very causes which thus evidently led to the destruction of Rome, viz., the unlimited importation of foreign grain and contraction of the currency, are those which have been most the object of the policy of the British government, for the last quarter of a century, by every possible means to promote in this country. They were imposed upon Rome by necessity. The extension of the empire over Spain, Africa, and Egypt, as well as the magnanimous policy of its government towards all its subjects, rendered a free trade in grain with the provinces, and large importations from the great corn countries, unavoidable. Public misfortunes, the increasing luxury of the rich, that very great importation of grain itself, the failure of the Spanish and Grecian mines, and the entire want of any paper currency to supply the place of the metals thus largely abstracted, necessarily and unavoidably forced this calamitous contraction of the currency upon the Roman empire. But the British policy has adopted the same principles, and done the same things, when no necessity or external pressure rendered it unavoidable. A free trade in grain is to be introduced, not in favour of distant provinces of the empire, but of its neighbours and its enemies. The currency has been contracted, not by public calamities, or any deficiency in the means of supplying the failure of the ordinary sources of gold and silver, but by the fixed determination of government, carried into execution by repeated acts of Parliament in 1819, 1826, and 1844, to abridge the paper circulation, and deprive the nation of the benefit of the great discovery of modern times, by which the calamitous effects of the diminution in the supply of the precious metals throughout the world have been so materially prevented.
Such a result must appear under all circumstances strange, and would be inexplicable, if we did not reflect, that the same impulse which was communicated to the measures of government in Rome by the influence of the capitalists and the clamorous inhabitants of great towns, is equally felt in the same stage of society in modern times. The people in our great cities do not call out, as in ancient days, for gratuitous distributions of corn from Lybia or Egypt; but they clamour just as loudly for free trade in grain with Poland and the Ukraine, which has the effect of swamping the home-grower quite as completely. The great capitalists do not make colossal fortunes by the plunder of subject provinces, as in the days of the Roman proconsuls; but they never cease to exert their influence to procure a contraction of the currency by the measures of government, which answers the purpose of augmenting their fortunes at the expense of the industrious classes just as well. Political writers, social philosophers, practical statesmen, fall in with the prevailing disposition of the most influential classes; they deceive themselves into the belief that they are original, and promulgating important truths, when they are merely yielding to the pressure of the strongest, or at least the most noisy, class at the moment in society. The Reform Bill gave three-fifths of the British representation to the members for boroughs. From that moment the eventual adoption of legislative measures favourable to the interests of capital, and agreeable to the wishes of the inhabitants of towns, how destructive soever to those of the country, was as certain as the daily distribution of Egyptian grain to the inhabitants of Rome, Antioch, and Constantinople was, when the mob of these cities became, from their formidable numbers, an object of dread to the Roman government.
The only answer which the partisans of free trade in grain have ever attempted to these considerations is, that the ruin of the agriculture in the central provinces of the Roman empire was owing, not to the importation of foreign corn as a mercantile commodity, but to its distribution gratuitously to the poorer citizens of Rome, Constantinople, and some of the larger cities in the empire. They admit, in its fullest extent, the decay of domestic agriculture, and consequent ruin of the state, but allege it was owing to this gratuitous distribution, which was in fact a poor-law, and not to the free trade in grain.[70] But a very little consideration must be sufficient to show that this is an elusory distinction; and that it was the unrestricted admission of foreign wheat by purchase, which in reality, coupled with the contraction of the currency, destroyed the dominion of the legions.
1. In the first place, the number who received these gratuitous distributions was, as already shown, so small, when compared to the whole body of the grain-consuming population, that they could not materially have affected the market for agricultural produce in Italy. Not more than 150,000 persons received rations in Rome daily, and perhaps as many in the other cities of Italy. What was this in a peninsula containing at that period sixteen or eighteen millions of souls, and with 2,300,000 in its capital alone?[71] It is evident that the gratuitous distributions of grain, taking those at their greatest extent, could not have embraced a fiftieth part of the Italian population. What ruined the agriculturists, who used to feed the remaining forty-nine fiftieths? The unlimited importation of cheap grain from Spain, Egypt, Sicily, and Lybia, and nothing else.
2. In the next place, even if the gratuitous distributions of grain had embraced twenty times the number which they did, nothing can be clearer than that the effect on agriculture is the same, whether cheap foreign grain is imported by the private importer, or bought and distributed by the government. If the home-grower loses his market, it is the same thing to him whether he does so from the effects of private importation or public distribution; whether his formidable competitor is the merchant, who brings the Lybian grain to the Tiber; or the government, which exacts it as a tribute from Sicily or Egypt. The difference is very great to the urban population, whether they receive their foreign grain in return for their own labour, or get it doled out to them from the government store as the price of keeping quiet. But to the rural cultivator it is immaterial, whether destruction comes upon him in the one way or the other. It is the importation of foreign grain which ruins him; and the effect is the same, whether the price paid for is the gold of the capitalist, or the blood of the legions.