4 CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. 



cient Persians, and of the Crusaders and the Tartars in later ages, 

 ■could, without an organized commissariat, secure adequate sup- 

 plies in long marches through territories which, in our times, 

 would scarcely afford forage for a single regiment. 



It appears, then, that the fairest and fruitfulest provinces of 

 the Roman Empire, precisely that portion of terrestrial surface, 

 in short, wliich, about the commencement of the Christian era, 

 was endowed with the greatest superiority of soil, climate and po- 

 sition, which had been carried to the highest pitch of physical 

 improvement, and wliich thus combined the natural and artificial 

 ■conditions best fitting it for the habitation and enjoyment of a 

 dense and highly refined and cultivated population, are now com- 

 pletely exhausted of their fertihty, or so diminished in produc- 

 tiveness, as, with the exception of a few favored oases that have 

 escaped the general ruin, to be no longer capable of affording sus- 

 tenance to civilized man. K to this realm of desolation we add 

 the now wasted and solitary soils of Persia and the remoter East 

 that once fed their millions with milk and honey, we shall see 

 that a territory larger than all Europe, the abundance of which 

 sustained in bygone centuries a population scarcely inferior to 

 that of the whole Christian world at the present day, has been 

 entirely withdrawn from human use, or, at best, is thinly inhab- 

 ited by tribes too few in numbers, too poor in superfluous prod- 

 ucts, and too little advanced in culture and the social arts, to con- 

 tribute anything to the general moral or material interests of the 

 great commonwealth 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 nei- 

 ther resist nor guide, and partly also to the direct violence of hos- 

 tile 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 in- 

 1 cidental consequence of war and of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny 

 and misrule. Next to ignorance of these laws, the primitive 

 source, the causa causa/ru7n, of the acts and neglects which have 

 blasted with sterility and physical decrepitude the noblest half of 

 the empire of the Caesars, is, first, the brutal and exhaiisting des- 



