192 WORLD-POWER AND EVOLUTION 



The Roman was sober and self-restrained in all his habits and 

 simple in all his ideas and customs. He had a deep and loving 

 knowledge of the small world in which he lived, and a quiet and 

 imperturbable intensity of purpose. He was honest, loyal, per- 

 severing, and displayed that curious absence of excitability so 

 characteristic of a man who has no vices, who does not waste his 

 strength in self-indulgence, and has but a limited stock of 

 knowledge." 



The basis of this sturdy, simple life of the early Romans was 

 intensive agriculture. We are told that in the days of the Roman 

 Republic seven jugera, or about four and a half acres of land, 

 sufficed to support an average family. Agriculture was so inten- 

 sive that farms of this small size, supplemented presumably by 

 pasture land, supported a contented and self-respecting popula- 

 tion. As SImkhovItch puts it: "The farming of the Romans on 

 seven-jugera farms was like the farming of the Chinese and 

 Japanese, very intensive, their small grain fields being planted in 

 rows, hoed, and weeded and carefully manured with excrements 

 and ashes and dung. The experience of China and Japan has 

 shown that on very small land-plots such intensive agriculture 

 can maintain Itself indefinitely without any recourse to scientific 

 repletion of the soil by mineral fertilizers." 



So much for the period from 450 to 250 B. C. That period 

 ended in a great decline in rainfall and stormlness, as appears in 

 Figure 24. Up to 250 B. C. the climate still appears to have been 

 highly favorable. Then by 220 or 210 it had apparently fallen 

 to about the present level. For a hundred years nearly the same 

 conditions prevailed, and not for a century and a half did the 

 climate return to a condition as favorable as in 240 B. C. Even 

 then it by no means rivalled the two preceding centuries. Theo- 

 retically such a change of climate should produce at least three 

 kinds of results. First, we should look for a decline in health, 

 energy, and moral fiber. Second, economic difficulties would be 



