CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. fi 
Rome imposed on the products of agricultural labor in the 
rural districts taxes which the sale of the entire harvest would 
scarcely discharge; she drained them of their population by 
military conscription; she impoverished the peasantry by 
forced and unpaid labor on public works; she hampered 
industry and both foreign and internal commerce by absurd 
restrictions and unwise regulations.* Hence, large tracts of 
land were left uncultivated, or altogether deserted, and exposed 
to all the destructive forces which act with such energy on the 
surface of the earth when it is deprived of those protections by 
which nature originally guarded it, and for which, in well- 
ordered husbandry, human ingennity has contrived more or less 
efficient substitutes.t Similar abuses have tended to perpetuate 
and extend these evils in later ages, and it is but recently that, 
even in the most populous parts of Europe, public attention 
ination he had discovered upwards of three hundred distinct rights of the 
feudatory over the person or the property of his vassal. See Htat Economique 
et Sociai de la France, Paris, 1870, p. 389. Most of these, indeed, had been 
commuted for money payments, and were levied on the peasantry as pecuniary 
imposts for the benefit of prelates and lay lords, who, by virtue of their nobil- 
ity, were exempt from taxation. The collection of the taxes was enforced with 
unrelenting severity. On one occasion, in the reign of Louis XIV., the troops 
sent out against the recreant peasants made more than 3,000 prisoners, of whom 
409 were condemned to the galleys for life, and a number so large that the 
government did not dare to disclose it, were hung on trees or broken on the 
wheel.—_MornAvU DE Jonnis, “tat Economique et Social de la France, p. 420. 
Who can wonder at the hostility of the French plebeian classes towards the 
aristocracy in the days of the Revolution ? 
* Commerce, in common with all gainful occupations except agriculture, was 
despised by the Romans, and the exercise of it was forbidden to the higher 
ranks. Cicero, however, admits that though retail trade, which could only 
prosper by lying and knavery, was contemptible, yet wholesale commerce was 
not altogether to be condemned, and might even be laudable, provided the 
merchant retired early from trade and invested his gains in farm lands.—De 
Officits, lib. i., 42. 
+ The temporary depopulation of an exhausted soil may be, in some cases, 
a physical, though, like fallows in agriculture, a dear-bought advantage. 
Under favorable circumstances, the withdrawal of man and his flocks allows 
the earth to clothe itself again with forests, and in a few generations to 
recover its ancient productiveness. In the Middle Ages, worn-out fields were 
