ROMAN OPPRESSION. 
7 
unprofitable forest growth, or fall into that of a dry and bar¬ 
ren wilderness. 
Rome imposed on the products of agricultural labor in the 
rural districts taxes which the sale of the entire harvest would 
scarcely discharge; she drained them of their population by 
military conscription; she impoverished the peasantry by 
forced and unpaid labor on public works; she hampered 
industry and internal commerce by absurd restrictions and 
unwise regulations. Hence, large tracts of land were left 
uncultivated, or altogether deserted, and exposed to all the 
destructive forces which act with such energy on the surface 
of the earth when it is deprived of those protections by which 
nature originally guarded it, and for which, in well-ordered 
husbandry, human ingenuity has contrived more or less effi¬ 
cient substitutes.* Similar abuses have tended to perpetuate 
and extend these evils in later ages, and it is but recently that, 
even in the most populous parts of Europe, public attention 
sowing, and harvesting, and therefore deserve some small share of the 
bread they have grown.” “These are his own words,” adds Courier; 
“ he is speaking of the fortunate peasants, of those who had work and 
bread, and they were then the few.”— Petition d la Gharnbre des Deputes 
pour les Villageois que Von empeche de danser. 
Arthur Young, who travelled in France from 1787 to 1789, gives, in 
the twenty-first chapter of his Travels, a frightful account of the burdens 
of the rural population even at that late period. Besides the regular 
governmental taxes, and a multitude of heavy fines imposed for trifling 
oftences, he enumerates about thirty seignorial rights, the very origin and 
nature of some of which are now unknown, while those of some others, 
claimed and enforced by ecclesiastical as well as by temporal lords, are as 
repulsive to humanity and morality, as the worst abuses ever practised by 
heathen despotism. Most of these, indeed, had been commuted for money 
payments, and were levied on the peasantry as pecuniary imposts for the 
benefit of prelates and lay lords, who, by virtue of their nobility, were 
exempt from taxation. Who can wonder at the hostility of the French 
plebeian classes toward the aristocracy in the days of the Revolution? 
* The temporary depopulation of an exhausted soil may be, in some 
cases, a physical, though, like fallows in agriculture, a dear-bought advan¬ 
tage. Under favorable circumstances, the withdrawal of man and his 
flocks allows the earth to clothe itself again with forests, and in a few 
generations to recover its ancient productiveness. In the Middle Ages, 
