2) THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 
metals; but mines and river beds yielded them in the spare 
measure most favorable to stability of value in the medium of 
exchange, and, consequently, to the regularity of commercial 
transactions. The ornaments of the barbaric pride of the 
East, the pearl, the ruby, the sapphire, and the diamond— 
though not unknown to the luxury of a people whose conquests 
and whose wealth commanded whatever the habitable world 
could contribute to augment the material splendor of their 
social life—were scarcely native to the territory of the empire ; 
but the comparative rarity of these gems in Europe, at some- 
what earlier periods, was, perhaps, the very circumstance that 
led the cunning artists of classic antiquity to enrich softer stones 
with engravings, which invest the common onyx and cornelian 
with a worth surpassing, in cultivated eyes, the lustre of the 
most brilliant oriental jewels. 
Of these manifold blessings the temperature of the air, the 
distribution of the rains, the relative disposition of land and 
water, the plenty of the sea, the composition of the soil, and 
the raw material of the primitive arts, were wholly gratuitous 
gifts. Yet the spontaneous nature of Europe, of Western 
Asia, of Libya, neither fed nor clothed the civilized inhabitants 
of those provinces. The luxuriant harvests of cereals that 
waved on every field from the shores of the Rhine to the banks 
of the Nile, the vines that festooned the hillsides of Syria, of 
Italy and of Greece, the olives of Spain, the fruits of the gar- 
dens of the Hesperides, the domestic quadrupeds and fowls 
known in ancient rural husbandry—all these were original pro- 
ducts of foreign climes, naturalized in new homes, and gradu- 
ally ennobled by the art of man, while centuries of persevering 
labor were expelling the wild vegetation, and fitting the earth 
for the production of more generous growths. Every loaf was 
eaten in the sweat of the brow. All must be earned by toil. 
But toil was nowhere else rewarded by so generous wages; for 
nowhere would a given amount of intelligent labor produce so 
abundant, and, at the same time,so varied returns of the good 
things of material existence. 
