CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY - . 
5 
tion and enjoyment of a dense and highly refined and cultivated 
population, is now completely exhausted of its fertility, or so 
diminished in productiveness, as, with the exception of a few 
favored oases that have escaped the general ruin, to be no 
longer capable of affording sustenance to civilized man. If 
to this realm of desolation we add the now wasted and soli¬ 
tary soils of Persia and the remoter East, that once fed their 
millions with milk and honey, we shall see that a territory 
larger than all Europe, the abundance of which sustained in 
bygone centuries a population scarcely inferior to that of the 
whole Christian world at the present day, has been entirely 
withdrawn from human use, or, at best, is tliinly inhabited by 
tribes too few in numbers, too poor in superfluous products, 
and too little advanced in culture and the social arts, to con¬ 
tribute anything to the general moral or material interests of 
the great commonwealth of man. 
Causes of this Decay. 
The decay of these once flourishing countries is partly due, 
no doubt, to that class of geological causes, whose action we 
can neither resist nor guide, and partly also to the direct vio¬ 
lence of hostile human force ; but it is, in a far greater propor¬ 
tion, either the result of man’s ignorant disregard of the laws 
of nature, or an incidental consequence of war, and of civil and 
ecclesiastical tyranny and misrule. Next to ignorance of these 
laws, the primitive source, the causa causarum , of the acts and 
neglects which have blasted with sterility and physical decrepi¬ 
tude the noblest half of the empire of the Ctesars, is, first, the 
brutal and exhausting despotism which Rome herself exercised 
over her conquered kingdoms, and even over her Italian terri¬ 
tory ; then, the host of temporal and spiritual tyrannies which 
she left as her dying curse to all her wide dominion, and 
which, in some form of violence or of fraud, still brood over 
almost every soil subdued by the Roman legions.* Man can- 
* In the Middle Ages, feudalism, and a nominal Christianity whose 
corruptions had converted the most beneficent of religions into the most 
