13 



lurking place in its tangled growths. Only here and there, 

 where a squalid peasant has fixed his hovel, can a sign of hu- 

 man habitation be seen. Not the Campagna alone in Italy, 

 and not Italy alone of the ancient states, exhibits the ravages 

 of the despoiling husbandman. The Etrurian coast, Cahibria, 

 Asia Minor, the islands and continent of Gieece, bear constant 

 testimony to the desoLating power that exists in a vicious agri- 

 culture. With the extension of Roman sway and the inad- 

 equacy of Homan 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 Ro- 

 man 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 en- 

 croachments 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 accumulating, of the few hugely rich, and of the 

 multitude poor, dependent and corrupt, till Caesar 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 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 



