The most important event which ever occurred in the history of mankind, is the one concerning which contemporary writers have given us the least satisfactory accounts. Beyond all doubt the overthrow of Rome by the Goths was the most momentous catastrophe which has occurred on the earth since the deluge; yet, if we examine either the historians of antiquity or the earliest of modern times, we find it wholly impossible to understand to what cause so great a catastrophe had been owing. What gave, in the third and fourth centuries, so prodigious an impulse to the northern nations, and enabled them, after being so long repelled by the arms of Rome, finally to prevail over it? What, still more, so completely paralysed the strength of the empire during that period, and produced that astonishing weakness in the ancient conquerors of the world, which rendered them the easy prey of those whom they had so often subdued? The ancient writers content themselves with saying, that the people became corrupted; that they lost their military courage; that the recruiting of the legions, in the free inhabitants of the empire, became impossible; and that the semi-barbarous tribes on the frontier could not be relied on to uphold its fortunes. But a very little reflection must be sufficient to show that there must have been much more in it than this, before a race of conquerors was converted into one of slaves; before the legions fled before the barbarians, and the strength of the civilized was overthrown by the energy of the savage world. For what prevented a revenue from being raised in the third or fourth, as well as the first or second centuries? Corruption in its worst form had doubtless pervaded the higher ranks in Rome from the Emperor downward; but these vices are the faults of the exalted and the affluent only; they never have, and never will, extend generally to the great body of the community; for this plain reason, that they are not rich enough to purchase them. But the remarkable thing is, that in the decline of the empire, it was in the lower ranks that the greatest and most fatal weakness first appeared. Long before the race of the Patricians had become extinct, the free cultivators had disappeared from the fields. Leaders and generals of the most consummate abilities, of the greatest daring, frequently arose; but their efforts proved in the end ineffectual, from the impossibility of finding a sturdy race of followers to fill their ranks. The legionary Italian soldier was awanting—his place was imperfectly supplied by the rude Dacian, the hardy German, the faithless Goth. So completely were the inhabitants of the provinces within the Rhine and the Danube paralysed, that they ceased to make any resistance to the hordes of invaders; and the fortunes of the empire were, for several generations, sustained solely by the heroic efforts of individual leaders—Belisarius, Narces, Julian, Aurelian, Constantine, and many others—whose renown, though it could not rouse the pacific inhabitants to warlike efforts, yet attracted military adventurers from all parts of the world to their standard. Now, what weakened and destroyed the rural population? It could not be luxury; on the contrary, they were suffering under excess of poverty, and bent down beneath a load of taxes, which in Gaul, in the time of Constantine, amounted, as Gibbon tells us, to nine pounds sterling on every freeman? What was it, then, which occasioned the depopulation and weakness? This is what it behoves us to know—this it is which ancient history has left unknown.
It is here that the vast step in the philosophy of history made from ancient to modern times is apparent. From a few detached hints and insulated facts, left by the ancient annalists, apparently ignorant of their value, and careless of their preservation, modern industry, guided by the light of philosophy, has reared up the true solution of the difficulty, and revealed the real causes, hidden from the ordinary gaze, which, even in the midst of its greatest prosperity, gradually, but certainly, undermined the strength of the empire. Michelet, in his Gaule sous les Romains, a most able and interesting work—Thierry, in his Domination Romaine en Gaule, and his Histoire des Rois Merovingians—Sismondi, in the three first volumes of his Histoire des Français—and Guizot, in his Civilisation Européenne, and the first volumes of his Essais sur l'Histoire de France—have applied their great powers to this most interesting subject. It may safely be affirmed, that they have got to the bottom of the subject, and lifted up the veil from one of the darkest, and yet most momentous, changes in the history of mankind. Guizot gives the following account of the principal causes which silently undermined the strength of the empire, flowing from the peculiar organization of ancient society:—
"When Rome extended, what did it do? Follow its history, and you will find that it was everlastingly engaged in conquering or founding cities. It was with cities that it fought—with cities that it contracted—into cities that it sent colonies. The history of the conquest of the world by Rome, is nothing but the history of the conquest and foundation of a great number of cities. In the East, the expansion of the Roman power assumed, from the very outset, a somewhat dissimilar character; the population was differently distributed from the West, and much less concentrated in cities; but in the European world, the foundation or conquest of towns was the uniform result of Roman conquest. In Gaul and Spain, in Italy, it was constantly towns which opposed the barrier to Roman domination, and towns which were founded or garrisoned by the legions, or strengthened by colonies, to retain them when vanquished in a state of subjection. Great roads stretched from one town to another; the multitude of cross roads which now intersect each other in every direction, was unknown. They had nothing in common with that multitude of little monuments, villages, churches, castles, villas, and cottages, which now cover our provinces. Rome has bequeathed to us nothing, either in its capital or its provinces, but the municipal character, which produced immense monuments on certain points, destined for the use of the vast population which was there assembled together.
"From this peculiar conformation of society in Europe, under the Roman dominion, consisting of a vast conglomeration of cities, with each a dependent territory, all independent of each other, arose the absolute necessity for a central and absolute government. One municipality in Rome might conquer the world: but to retain it in subjection, and provide for the government of all its multifarious parts, was a very different matter. This was one of the chief causes of the general adoption of a strong concentrated government under the empire. Such centralized despotism not only succeeded in restraining and regulating all the incoherent members of the vast dominion, but the idea of a central irresistible authority insinuated itself into men's minds every where, at the same time, with wonderful facility. At first sight, one is astonished to see, in that prodigious and ill-united aggregate of little republics, in that accumulation of separate municipalities, spring up so suddenly an unbounded respect for the sacred authority of the empire. But the truth is, it had become a matter of absolute necessity, that the bond which held together the different parts of this heterogeneous dominion should be very powerful; and this it was which gave it so ready a reception in the minds of men.
"But when the vigour of the central power declined during a course of ages, from the pressure of external warfare, and the weakness of internal corruption, this necessity was no longer felt. The capital ceased to be able to provide for the provinces, it rather sought protection from them. During four centuries, the central power of the emperors incessantly struggled against this increasing debility; but the moment at length arrived, when all the practised skill of despotism, over the long insouciance of servitude, could no longer keep together the huge and unwieldy body. In the fourth century, we see it at once break up and disunite; the barbarians entered on all sides from without, the provinces ceased to oppose any resistance from within; the cities to evince any regard for the general welfare; and, as in the disaster of a shipwreck, every one looked out for his individual safety. Thus, on the dissolution of the empire, the same general state of society presented itself as in its cradle. The imperial authority sunk into the dust, and municipal institutions alone survived the disaster. This, then, was the chief legacy which the ancient bequeathed to the modern world—for it alone survived the storm by which the former had been destroyed—cities and a municipal organization every where established. But it was not the only legacy. Beside it, there was the recollection at least of the awful majesty of the emperor—of a distant, unseen, but sacred and irresistible power. These are the two ideas which antiquity bequeathed to modern times. On the one hand, the municipal régime, its rules, customs, and principles of liberty: on the other a common, general, civil legislation; and the idea of absolute power, of a sacred majesty, the principle of order and servitude."—(Civilization Européenne, 20, 23.)
The causes which produced the extraordinary, and at first sight unaccountable, depopulation of the country districts, not only in Italy, but in Gaul, Spain, and all the European provinces of the Roman empire, are explained by Guizot in his Essays on the History of France, and have been fully demonstrated by Sismondi, Thierry, and Michelet. They were a natural consequence of the municipal system, then universally established as the very basis of civilization in the whole Roman empire, and may be seen urging, from a similar cause, the Turkish empire to dissolution at this day. This was the imposition of a certain fixed duty, as a burden on each municipality, to be raised, indeed, by its own members, but admitting of no diminution, save under the most special circumstances, and on an express exemption by the emperor. Had the great bulk of the people been free, and the empire prosperous, this fixity of impost would have been the greatest of all blessings. It is the precise boon so frequently and earnestly implored by our ryots in India, and indeed by the cultivators all over the East. But when the empire was beset on all sides with enemies—only the more rapacious and pressing, that the might of the legions had so long confined them within the comparatively narrow limits of their own sterile territories—and disasters, frequent and serious, were laying waste the frontier provinces, it became the most dreadful of all scourges; because, as the assessment on each district was fixed, and scarcely ever suffered any abatement, every disaster experienced increased the burden on the survivors who had escaped it; until they became bent down under such a weight of taxation, as, coupled with the small number of freemen on whom it exclusively fell, crushed every attempt at productive industry. It was the same thing as if all the farmers on each estate were to be bound to make up, annually, the same amount of rent to their landlord, no matter how many of them had become insolvent. We know how long the agriculture of Britain, in a period of declining prices and frequent disaster, would exist under such a system.
Add to this the necessary effect which the free circulation of grain throughout the whole Roman world had in depressing the agriculture of Italy, Gaul, and Greece. They were unable to withstand the competition of Egypt, Lybia, and Sicily—the storehouses of the world; where the benignity of the climate, and the riches of the soil, rewarded seventy or an hundred fold the labours of the husbandman. Gaul, where the increase was only seven-fold—Italy, where it seldom exceeded twelve—Spain, where it was never so high, were crushed in the struggle. The mistress of the world, as Tacitus bewails, had come to depend for her subsistence on the floods of the Nile. Unable to compete with the cheap grain raised in the more favoured regions of the south, the cultivators of Italy and Gaul gradually retired from the contest. They devoted their extensive estates to pasturage, because live cattle or dairy produce could not bear the expense of being shipped from Africa; and the race of agriculturists, the strength of the legions, disappeared in the fields, and was lost in the needy and indolent crowd of urban citizens, in part maintained by tributes in corn brought from Egypt and Lybia. This augmented the burdens upon those who remained in the rural districts; for, as the taxes of each municipality remained the same, every one that withdrew into the towns left an additional burden on the shoulders of his brethren who remained behind. So powerful was the operation of these two causes—the fixity in the state burdens payable by each municipality, and the constantly declining prices, owing to the vast import from agricultural regions more favoured by nature—that it fully equaled the effect of the ravages of the barbarians in the frontier provinces exposed to their incursions; and the depopulation of the rural districts was as complete in Italy and Gaul, before a barbarian had passed the Alps or set his foot across the Rhine, as in the plains between the Alps or the Adriatic and the Danube, which had for long been ravaged by their arms.
Domestic slavery conspired with these evils to prevent the healing power of nature from closing these yawning wounds. Gibbon estimates the number of slaves throughout the empire, in its latter days, at a number equal to that of the freemen; in other words, one half of the whole inhabitants were in a state of servitude;[[17]] and as there were 120,000,000 souls under the Roman sway, sixty millions were in that degraded condition. There is reason to believe that the number of the slaves was still greater than this estimate, and at least double that of the freemen; for it is known by an authentic enumeration, that, in the time of the Emperor Claudius, the number of citizens in the empire was only 6,945,000 men, who, with their families, might amount to twenty millions of souls; and the total number of freemen was about double that of the citizens.[[18]] In one family alone, in the time of Pliny, there were 4116 slaves.[[19]] But take the number of slaves, according to Gibbon's computation, at only half the entire population, what a prodigious abstraction must this multitude of slaves have made from the physical and moral strength of the empire! Half the people requiring food, needing restraint, incapable of trust, and yet adding nothing to the muster-roll of the legions, or the persons by whom the fixed and immovable annual taxes were to be made good! In what state would the British empire now be, if we were subjected to the action of similar causes of ruin? A vast and unwieldy dominion, exposed on every side to the incursions of barbarous and hostile nations, daily increasing in numbers, and augmenting in military skill; a fixed taxation, for which the whole free inhabitants of every municipality were jointly and severally responsible, to meet the increasing military establishment required by these perils; a declining, and at length extinct, agriculture in the central provinces of the empire, owing to the deluge of cheap grain from its fertile extremities, wafted over the waters of the Mediterranean; multitudes of turbulent freemen in cities, kept quiet by daily distribution of provisions at the public expense, from the imperial granaries; and a half, or two-thirds, of the whole population in a state of slavery—neither bearing any share of the public burdens, nor adding to the strength of the military array of the empire. Such are the discoveries of modern philosophy, as to the causes of the decline and ultimate fall of the Roman empire, gleaned from a few facts, accidentally preserved by the ancient writers, apparently unconscious of their value! It is a noble science which, in so short a time, has presented such a gift to mankind.
Guizot has announced, and ably illustrated, a great truth, which, when traced to its legitimate consequences, will be found to go far towards dispelling many of the pernicious innovating dogmas which have so long been afloat in the world. It is this, that whenever an institution, though apparently pernicious in our eyes, has long existed, and under a great variety of circumstances, we may rest assured that it in reality has been attended with some advantages which counterbalance its evils, and that upon the whole it is beneficial in its tendency. This important principle is thus stated:—
"Independent of the efforts of man, there is established by a law of providence, which it is impossible to mistake, and which is analagous to what we witness in the natural world, a certain measure of order, reason, and justice, without which society cannot exist. From the single fact of its endurance we may conclude, with certainty, that a society is not completely absurd, insensate, or iniquitous; that it is not destitute of the elements of reason, truth, and justice—which alone can give life to society. If the more that society developes itself, the stronger does this principle become—if it is daily accepted by a greater number of men, it is a certain proof that in the lapse of time there has been progressively introduced into it more reason, more justice, more right. It is thus that the idea of political legitimacy has arisen.