chapter of Dion allows us also to affirm that he who first
realised the value of Gaul and opened the eyes of Augustus, was no
great personage of the Roman aristocracy whose names are written in
such lofty characters on the pages of history, whose images are yet
found in marble and bronze among the museums of Europe; no one of
those who ruled the Empire and therefore according to reason and
justice had the responsibility of governing it well: it was, instead,
an obscure freedman, whose ability the masters of the Empire scorned
to exploit except as to-day a peasant uses the forces of his ox,
hardly deigning to look at him and yet deeming all his labour but the
owner's natural right.

So stands the story. The Gallic freedman observed, and understood, and
was forgotten; posterity, instead, has had to wonder over the profound
wisdom of the Roman aristocrat, who understood nothing. Moreover, if
in 14 B.C. Licinius had to make an effort to persuade the surprised
and diffident Augustus that Gaul was a province of great future, it is
clear that Gaul must already have begun to grow rich by itself without
the Roman government's having done anything to promote its progress.

From what hidden sources sprang forth this new wealth of Gaul? All the
documents that we possess authorise us to respond that Gaul--to begin
from the time of Augustus--was able to grow rich quickly, because the
events following the Roman conquest turned and disposed the general
conditions of the Empire in its favour. Gaul then, as France now, was
endowed with several requisites essential to its becoming a nation of
great economic development: a land very fertile; a population dense
for the times, intelligent, wide-awake, active; a climate that, even
though it seemed to Greeks and Romans cold and foggy, was better
suited to intense activity than the warm and sunny climate of the
South; and finally,--a supreme advantage in ancient civilisation,--it
was everywhere intersected, as by a network of canals, by navigable
rivers. In ancient times transport by land was very expensive;
water was the natural and economic vehicle of commerce: therefore
civilisation was able to enter with commerce into the interior of
continents only by way of the rivers, which, as one might say, were to
a certain extent the railroads of the ancient world.

To these advantageous conditions, which, being physical, existed
before the Roman conquest, the conquest added some others: it broke