ia. Agriculture
has caused to arise in those localities a numerous population, which
multiplies with singular rapidity, and for ages has furnished
cultivators not only for the mountains where it has arisen, but bands of
adventurers, who in every age have filled the ranks of the Italian
armies."[30]

But while those examples, to which, did our limits permit, many others
might be added, decisively demonstrate that human industry can
effectually overcome the physical difficulties or dangers of the Roman
Campagna; yet it is clear that some great and overwhelming cause is at
work, which prevents agriculture flourishing, by means of tenants or
_metayers_, in the plains of the Campagna. The plains, it is true, are
in the hands of a few great proprietors, but their tenants are extremely
rich, often more so, Sismondi tells us, than their landlords. What is
it, then, which for so long a period has chained the Campagna to
pasturage, and rendered all attempts to restore it to the plough
abortive? The answer is plain: It is the same cause now which binds it
to pasturage, which did so under the Romans from the time of
Tiberius--_it is more profitable to devote the land to grass than to
raise grain._ And it is so, not because the land will not bear grain
crops, for it would do now even better than it did in the days of the
Etruscans and the Sabines; since so many centuries of intervening
pasturage have added so much to its fertility. It is so, because the
weakness of the Papal government, yielding, like the Imperial in ancient
days, to the cry for cheap bread among the Roman populace, has fed the
people, from time immemorial, with foreign grain, instead of that of its
own territory. The evidence on this subject is as clear and more
detailed in modern, than it was in ancient times; and both throw a broad
and steady light on the final results of that system of policy, which
purchases the present support of the inhabitants of cities, by
sacrificing the only lasting and perennial sources of strength derived
from the industry and population of the country.

During the confusion and disasters consequent on the fall of the Empire,
after the capture of Rome by the Goths, the Campagna remained entirely a
desert; but it continued in the hands of the successors of the great
senatorial families who held it in the last days of the Empire. "The
Agro Romano," says Sismondi, "almost a desert, had been long exposed to
the ravages of the barbarians,