down the political barrier that previously cut off these convenient
means of penetration, the rivers; it suppressed the wars between
the Gallic tribes, the privileges, the tyrannies, the tolls, the
monopolies; it saved the enormous resources that were previously
wasted in these constant drains; it put again the hoe, the spade, the
tools of the artisan, into hands that had before been wielding the
sword; and finally, it consolidated (and this was perhaps the most
important effect) the jurisdiction of property. When Caesar invaded
Gaul, the great landowners still cultivated cereals and textile plants
but little; they put the greater part of their fortune into cattle,
exactly because in that regime of continual war and revolution lands
easily kept changing proprietors. Furthermore, the more frequent
contact with Rome acquainted the Gauls with Roman agriculture and its
abler methods, with Latin life and its studied order.

By the combination of all these causes, population and production
increased rapidly. The gain in population was so considerable that
the ancients themselves noticed it. Strabo (Bk. 4, ch. i, Sec.2) observes
that the Gallic women are fecund mothers and excellent nurses. With
the population, wealth increased on all sides, in agriculture as in
industry and in trade.

The new and more stable jurisdiction of the landed proprietary
generated another most important effect; it promoted rapidly the
cultivation of cereals and textile plants, of wheat and flax. "All
Gaul produces much wheat," says Strabo, and we read his notice without
surprise, because we know that France is, even to-day, the region of
Europe most fertile in cereals. There is no reason to suppose that it
must have been barren of them twenty centuries ago. Other documentary
evidence, particularly inscriptions, confirms Strabo, informing us
that, especially in the second century, Rome bought the customary
grain to feed the metropolis not only in Egypt, but also in Gaul.
In short, Gaul seems to have been the sole region of Europe fertile
enough to be able to export grain, to have been for Rome a kind of
Canada or Middle West of the time, set not beyond oceans but beyond
the Alps.

The cultivation of flax, to the ancient world what cotton is to-day,
progressed rapidly in Gaul along with that of wheat, so that Gaul was
early able to rival Egypt also in this respect. That Gaul and Egypt
should have so much in common at the same time, was something so