irst, provinces are not foreigners; colonies are not enemies. An exotic
corn-trade could not for Rome do the two great injuries which assuredly
it would do for England; it could not transfer the machinery of opulence
to a hostile and rival state; it could not invest a jealous competitor
with power suddenly to cut off supplies that had grown into a necessity,
and thus to create in one month a famine or an insurrection. Egypt had
neither the power nor any prospect of the power to act as an independent
state towards Rome; the transfer to Egypt of the Roman agriculture,
supposing it to have been greater than it really was, could have
operated but like a transfer from Norfolk to Yorkshire.

Secondly, as respected Italy, the foreign grain _did not enter the same
markets as the native_. Either one or the other would have lost its
advantage, and the natural bounty which it enjoyed from circumstances,
by doing so. Consequently the evils of an artificial scale, where grain
raised under one set of circumstances fixes or modifies the price for
grain raised under a different set of circumstances, were unknown in the
Italian markets. But these evils by a special machinery, viz., the
machinery of good and bad seasons, are aggravated for a modern state
intensely, whenever she depends too much upon alien stores; and
specifically they are aggravated by the fact that both grains _enter the
same market_, so that the one by too high a price is encouraged
unreasonably, the other by the same price (too low for opposite
circumstances) is depressed ruinously as regards coming years; whence in
the end two sets of disturbances--one set frequently from the _present_
seasons, and a second set from the way in which these are made to act
upon the _future_ markets.

Thirdly, the Roman corn-trade did not of necessity affect her military
service injuriously, and for this reason, that rural economy did not of
necessity languish because agriculture languished locally; some other
culture, as of vineyards, _oliveta_, orchards, pastures, replaced the
declining culture of grain; if ploughmen were fewer, other labourers
were more. It is forgotten, besides, that the decline of Italian
agriculture, never more than local, was exceedingly gradual; for two
hundred and fifty years before the Christian era Italy never _had_
depended exclusively upon herself. Sardinia and Sicily, at her own
doors, were her granaries; consequently the change never _had_ been that
abru