10 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



the inadequacy of Roman farms to supply the demand for food, 

 the fertile lands of Sicily, Sardinia and the Mediterranean coasts 

 of Africa, became tributary to the granaries that fed the Roman 

 populace, and the inevitable curse of spoliation smote them too 

 with sterility. 



And to-day, while the historian recounts the stages through 

 which Rome passed, from a social condition in which a sturdy 

 yeomanry were largely owners and tillers of the soil, and the 

 strength of the state in war and peace, one in which a Cincin- 

 natus could pass from his plough and four-acre farm to the 

 dictatorship, charged to see that the republic should receive no 

 detriment, and from the dictatorship back to the modest farm 

 wearing the crown of gold, after he had vanquished the foe 

 and saved his country, — and then comes down to the time 

 when the Gracchi strove unto death, but in vain, to recruit by 

 a distribution of the public domain the diminishing farmer-class, 

 and rescue them and their salutary power from the encroach- 

 ments of an aristocracy of capitalists and patricians, — and so still 

 further on to the period of over-grown estates tilled by slaves, of 

 a yeomanry impoverished, of pauperism massed and accumulat- 

 ing, of the few hugely rich, and of the multitude poor, depend- 

 ent and corrupt, till Cgesar comes, and Caligula, and the invading 

 Vandal, with the manners, morals, and events of their respective 

 times, down to the doomed and irretrievable fall, — while tlie 

 the historian recites this melancholy story of a risen and fallen 

 empire, the man of modern science reads, date by date, the 

 parallel record of the waning fertility of an unrequited soil, 

 traces the tendency of deteriorating lands to become aggregated 

 in large estates, to yield themselves exclusively to servile labor, 

 to degrade the farmer, to swell the proletarian mob, to induce 

 the necessity of an outlet for population, and of gaining new 

 resources of food by war and conquest, — and so weaves an argu- 

 ment that startles if it does not persuade us, that the various 

 chapters of this tale of glory and decline, are illustrations of the 

 jiatural laws of agriculture and a warning for all time. To his 

 mind, one Licbig liad been worth an hecatomb of Gracchi to save 

 tlie Roman state. 



To no people should the warnings of science, pointing to the 

 ruins of the past, come with more power to impress with serious 

 alarm than to our own. For there is no people upon the face of 



