Ancient Rome and Modern America; A Comparative Study of Morals and Manners

by Guglielmo Ferrero

But the reader will say: “But that is not happening, and never will happen, to contemporary civilisation. Even if it cannot be denied that there is a certain analogy between the history of the first two centuries of the Empire and that of modern times, the analogy stops short at this point. The world will never witness another catastrophe like that of the Roman Empire; or at any rate, nobody now alive will witness it.”

I heartily concur in this opinion. Modern civilisation will resist the ills which assail it better than ancient civilisation resisted them. But it will be able to do so because it is stronger, not because it does not contain within itself the germ of the cancer which destroyed the Roman world. Many symptoms prove this. I will dilate upon one of them only, the most serious, the most salient, the most generally recognised and felt, even though few up to the present have seen in it an analogy and a resemblance to the great historical crisis of the fall of the Roman Empire. I refer to the rise in the cost of living.

To-day, Europe and America resound from one end to another with a chorus of complaints from men and women who have to live in the cities. Rent, bread, milk, meat, vegetables, eggs, clothes—everything, in short, is rising in price. Even people in the thirties can remember having witnessed times of fable, a kind of mythical golden age, in which things were worth practically nothing compared with their price to-day. Governments are besieged with entreaties, threats, and prayers to provide supplies, but they do not know how to do so. What is the cause, what the remedy, of this strange phenomenon? Some lay the blame on the taxes; some on Protection; some on the merchants and speculators.

And indeed, at first sight, the phenomenon seems inexplicable. At no period of history was there such a determined rush to make money as at the present time. No age had at its disposal so many and such effective means of making it. The men of to-day are obsessed to such an extent by the frenzy for work that they no longer have time to live. Statistics tell us in exact figures the yearly increase in the production of the world. So the earth ought to be wallowing in abundance, an abundance such as the world has never seen heretofore. How comes it, then, that men everywhere complain, and most loudly in the richest countries, of the intolerable dearness of everything? What is the object, what the effect, of the work of the man of to-day, if not abundance but scarcity is the recompense of daily toil?

This scarcity is a graver and more complex phenomenon than those who most complain of it suppose, and is not the fault of government or traders. It is a veritable recommencement de l’histoire, and the study of the Roman Empire can be of the greatest service in helping us to understand it. It is the first serious, universally felt symptom of that excessive urbanisation which was the ruin of ancient Rome. This modern society arises from the over-development of the cities, from the too rapid increase in the needs and luxuries of the multitudes who live in the cities. Men and money concentrate in the cities, and swell the urban industries and luxury, public and private, intent on putting into operation all the marvels which the fertile modern genius, inspired by competition in the race for progress, is continually inventing. The countryside, on the other hand, has in the last half-century been left too much to itself, and agriculture has been too much neglected, exactly as began to be the case in the Roman Empire at the beginning of the second century of the Christian era. It is easy to guess what must be the natural consequence of this lop-sided arrangement. The cities grow bigger; industries increase in number and in size; the luxury and the needs of the masses, crowded together in the cities, augment. On the other hand, there is no proportionate increase in the productiveness of the land. And so the increase in wealth is accompanied by an increasing scarcity of the fruits of the earth; and the things which serve to clothe and feed us—cotton, linen, hemp, wool, cereals, meat, vegetables—nearly all rise in price much more than do manufactured goods. This explains the scarcity that vexes the cities in proportion to their growth in size.

In no country is this phenomenon more apparent and interesting than in the United States. Which of the nations of the world could more easily revel in the most marvellous abundance of everything which it is possible to conceive? The United States has no lack of territories to cultivate; or of capital, which accumulates every year in immeasurable quantity; or of strong arms, Europe providing her with immigrants in the prime of life; or of the spirit of enterprise and of untiring energy. And yet, in no country of Europe are complaints of the expense of living more generally and loudly raised than in the United States. Why? Because in America the disproportion between the progress of the country and that of the cities, between industrial progress and agricultural progress, is even greater than in Europe, the home of populations which for centuries have been accustomed to a country life. Consequently the scarcity is greater and more vexatious in the United States, because the wealth of that country is greater than that of Europe.

Someone will say: “However that may be, if this scarcity which we are experiencing is the most obvious symptom of the excessive urbanisation from which our civilisation is suffering, the suffering cannot be a very serious matter; it must be far from assuming the grave and dangerous aspect which it bore in the time of the Roman Empire. So in this respect also we can consider ourselves lucky; this excessive urbanisation does not cause us more than a certain material uneasiness, which is felt by the middle and lower classes in the cities. In the Roman Empire, on the other hand, it produced a historical catastrophe.” All that is true, without a doubt, but precisely on this account ought the lesson, with which the history of the fall of the Roman Empire is pregnant, to be read and pondered.

In the Roman Empire, too, for a long time, just as now in Europe and America, this excessive urbanisation only occasioned a by-no-means intolerable material uneasiness to the most numerous and poorest classes of town-dweller. In the first and second centuries,—that is to say, in the two most prosperous and splendid centuries of the Empire,—numerous inscriptions remind us of gifts made by rich citizens or precautions taken by the cities to meet the scarcity of victuals which pressed hard upon the poorer classes. It is scarcely necessary to mention Rome in this connection, so notorious is the fact. From the day when it became the metropolis of a vast Empire, the scarcity of victuals became a permanent feature of the city; and the State had to furnish the city with the famous frumentationes, which were, in the last two centuries of the Republic and throughout the Empire, one of Rome’s most serious preoccupations. Mistress of a mighty Empire, Rome was for centuries sure of being obeyed in the most distant provinces by the people that her sword had conquered; but there was never a day in the year when she was sure of keeping the wolf from the door!

In the Roman Empire also, then, for a long time the excessive urbanisation made itself felt in the shape of a troublesome, but by no means intolerable, rise in the cost of living in the cities. Why did it gradually bring about a terrific social dissolution? Because the Roman Empire, instead of leaving its cities to fight down this evil, tried to abolish it by artificial means; and those artificial means it applied ever more and more extensively, the more serious the evil became. The crisis of the cities of the Empire began in the third century, which saw the depopulation of the countryside, and the diminution of agricultural production, while in the cities, on the other hand, victuals were rising in price, and the number of beggars was increasing in a most alarming way. If the State had allowed this crisis to run its natural course, what would have happened? Of course things would of themselves have regained their equilibrium little by little. Part of the urban proletariat, unable to live in the overcrowded cities, and seeing themselves condemned to a sort of chronic famine and gradual extinction, would have returned to work in the fields. When the drain on the population of the countryside becomes too great, the evil admits of only one remedy: and that is, that life in the cities should be allowed to become unbearable to a certain number of the citizens, so that they may be tempted to exchange it for life and work in the fields.

But the Roman State could not bring itself to let the evil follow its natural course. The large cities, beginning with Rome, had too great influence with the Government; and throughout the Empire the city beautiful and rich had come to represent the model of civilisation. Little by little, the State let itself be persuaded to do for each of its cities what it had done for Rome ever since its earliest conception of a world-policy under the delusion that it could thus stave off the impending crisis. With a view to easing the misery of the urban proletariat, it took public works in hand in every direction, regardless of their utility. It distributed victuals free or at half-price. It multiplied philanthropic institutions and encouraged the wealthy families to imitate and to assist it. But all these schemes cost money, which the State could secure only by increasing the taxes on agriculture, while the wealthy families had to spend in the cities the bulk of the wealth which they derived from their country property. The result was that life was artificially made easier and more comfortable in the cities, and harder and more difficult in the country, whereas the natural trend of circumstances would have produced the opposite effect. The evil, treated in so ridiculous a way, became worse. The exodus of the peasants into the cities increased, and brought a corresponding increase in the demands on the public purse for the amelioration of the conditions of city life. The intensification of the evil was met by an increase in the dose of the very remedy which aggravated it—useless expenditure in the cities, ruinous taxes on agriculture. Matters went from worse to worse, until the system reached the limit of its elasticity, and the whole social fabric collapsed in a colossal catastrophe.