586 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tural. To create wealth appeared to them sordid ; to take it was 

 admirable, or, as M. Blanqui has put it, the economic policy 

 of the Roman state may be expressed in the following single 

 sentence, " Les remains voulaient avant tout consommer sans 

 produire " * 



The genius of the Roman government was military, not com- 

 mercial. The Romans prohibited commerce to persons of rank 

 and fortune ; and no senator was allowed to own a vessel larger 

 than a boat sufficient to carry his own food (grain) and fruit. 

 They encouraged corn merchants to import provisions from 

 Sicily, Africa, and Spain, because the cultivators of the soil of 

 Italy, mainly slaves, did not produce a sufficient supply of food 

 for the city of Rome. They seem, moreover, never to have had any 

 conception of the impolicy of levying taxes in such a way as to dry 

 up the channels of trade and enterprise ; or of the fact, abundantly 

 substantiated by all experience, that when government takes from 

 its people more than a fair share of the savings of capital and 

 labor, then accumulation will cease and capital be destroyed ; and 

 against social disorders thus engendered Rome was powerless. 

 That the seeds of decay were thus planted in her governmental 

 system, and that the fall of her empire was hence only a question 

 of time and inevitable, is a point that historians seem very gen- 

 erally to have overlooked. 



During the years of the later empire, although its resources 

 and population had greatly decreased, its expenditures enor- 

 mously increased ; and the sequence of this was a system of grind- 

 ing exactions, to which, more than any other one immediate cause, 

 the utter decay and final complete downfall of the empire may be 

 attributed. During the period intervening between the reign of 

 Marcus Aurelius and Diocletian it has been estimated that a ma- 

 jority of the population of the empire, from Persia to Gaul, had 

 died of the plague ; and what the plague had been to the popula- 

 tion, the "fiscus " or financial policy of the government was to 

 industry. Under Constantius, A. D. 337, taxes were imposed on all 

 trades and industries, and such was the comprehension and severity 

 of the law, that Gibbon tells us, that " the honorable merchant, 

 the usurer who derived from the interest of money a silent and 

 ignominious profit, the ingenious manufacturer, the diligent me- 

 chanic, and even the obscure retailer of a sequestered village, and 

 the public prostitutes/' were all alike obliged to admit the offi- 

 cers of the revenue to a participation of their gains. Such, more- 

 over, was the imperfect state of agriculture and of manufacturing 

 processes that the net product of the individual was necessarily 



* See Blanqui. Histoire de 1'Economie Politique en Europe. American translation by 

 Emily J. Leonard. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1880. 



