328 THE FUTURE OE OUR AGRICULTURE. 



being repaid, " with usury," but not at any time. Those 

 deposits take a long time maturing ; and to abandon the 

 holding before they have matured is likely to mean leaving 

 them unrepaid. 



With aims and objects going so far apart, it is not sur- 

 prising that our rather halting and timid measure, designed 

 to be worked with an apparatus which results have shown 

 to be not particularly well suited to the task, should have 

 produced only very moderate results. We show the sense 

 of our disappointment experienced by deciding to take 

 advantage of the war to gain results from our land, enUsting 

 discharged soldiers for the work of " repeopling the land " 

 and carrying on small agriculture, towards the achievement 

 of which two objects our canvassing among the civil popu- 

 lation has effected so very little. One could wish that there 

 were a more assured prospect of such proposed policy 

 succeeding. However, ever since the Emperor Probus set 

 his legionaries to work tilling the soil — with rather melan- 

 choly consequence to himself — examples have been against 

 such sanguine presumption. Soldiers do not generally take 

 kindly to farming or exhibit particular proficiency in it. 

 The whole Roman history of military settlement is a history 

 of failures. The soldiers' colonies founded by Sylla in 

 Preneste lost all their population within twenty years. The 

 land which Caesar assigned to his victorious warriors in 

 Campania soon became deserted. The military colonies 

 founded by Augustus fared no better. And the " three 

 jugera " lots allotted to soldiers about Falerno were readily 

 swallowed up into latifundia, their original allottees turning 

 their backs upon them. The Emperor Constantine was no 

 more fortunate in his mihtary colonisation. The soldiers' 

 settlement at Cremona, founded in 222 before Christ, with 

 6,000 veterans and their families as settlers, had to be 

 wholly resettled in 190, every one of the original settlers 

 having disappeared. Soldiers' settlements present them- 

 selves as a charming picture to the imagination. But 

 somehow Mars will not take enduringly to Ceres. There 

 is insuperable incompatibility of temperament. Roman 

 legionaries, so it was found, and so Professor Salvioh particu- 



