CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. 5 
human use, or, at best, is thinly inhabited by tribes too few in 
numbers, too poor in superfluous products, and too little ad- 
vanced in culture and the social arts, to contribute anything to 
the general moral or material interests of the great common- 
wealth of man. 
Causes of this Decay. 
The decay of these once flourishing countries is partly due, 
no doubt, to that class of geological causes whose action we can 
neither resist nor guide, and partly also to the direct violence 
of hostile human force; but it is, in a far greater proportion, 
either the result of man’s ignorant disregard of the laws of 
nature, or an incidental consequence of war and of civil and 
ecclesiastical tyranny and misrule. Next to ignorance of these 
laws, the primitive source, the causa causarum, of the acts and 
neglects which have blasted with sterility and physical decrepi- 
tude the noblest half of the empire of the Ceesars, is, first, the bru- 
tal and exhausting despotism which Rome herself exercised over 
her conquered kingdoms, and even over her Italian territory ; 
then, the host of temporal and spiritual tyrannies which she 
left as her dying curse to all her wide dominion, and which, in 
some form of violence or of fraud, still brood over almost 
every soil subdued by the Roman legions.* Man cannot 
* In the Middle Ages, feudalism, and a nominal Christianity, whose corrup- 
tions had converted the most beneficent of religions into the most baneful of 
superstitions, perpetuated every abuse of Roman tyranny, and added new 
oppressions and new methods of extortion to those invented by older despot- 
isms. The burdens in question fell most heavily on the provinces that had 
been longest colonized by the Latin race, and these are the portions of Europe 
which have suffered the greatest physical degradation. ‘‘ Feudalism,” says 
Blanqui, ‘‘ was a concentration of scourges. The peasant, stripped of the 
inheritance of his fathers, became the property of inflexible, ignorant, indo- 
lent masters ; he was obliged to travel fifty leagues with their carts whenever 
they required it; he labored for them three days in the week, and surrendered 
to them half the product of his earnings during the other three; without 
their consent he could not change his residence, or marry. And why, indeed, 
should he wish to marry, when he could scarcely save enough to maintain 
