y, and rendering the public burdens
overwhelming, by changing the value of money. The operation of these
causes can now be distinctly traced by us, because we feel them working
among ourselves: their existence has not hitherto been suspected, or
their effects traced by philosophers, because no state in modern Europe
but our own, in recent times, had come within the sphere of their
influence. And to see what these causes really were, it is only
necessary to recall, in a few propositions, to the reader's mind, the
general result of the foregoing deduction:--

I. During the Republic, and till the commencement of the empire,
agriculture was in the most flourishing state in Italy; and it was in
its sturdy, free cultivators, that the legions were recruited which
conquered the world.

II. _From the time of Tiberius_, cultivation declined in the Italian and
Grecian plains, and continued to do so to the fall of the empire.
Pasturage came to supersede agriculture; population disappeared in the
fields; the race of free cultivators, the strength of the legions, were
ruined; the flocks and herds were tended only by slaves; the small
proprietors became bankrupt, or fled the country; and the whole land in
the European provinces of the empire fell into the hands of a limited
number of territorial magnates, who resided at Rome or Constantinople,
and mainly upheld, by their profuse expenditure, the prosperity of those
capitals of the empire.

III. In the midst of the general decline of rural industry in all the
provinces to the north of the Mediterranean, the wealth and prosperity
of the great cities remained undecayed. The small provincial towns were
in great part ruined; but the great cities, especially such as were on
the sea-coast, continued flourishing, and received in their ample bounds
all the refluent population from the country. Rural industry languished
and expired, but commerce was undecayed; the fortunes of the great
capitalists were daily accumulating; and in no period in the history of
mankind, were urban incomes so great as in the city of Rome, on the eve
of its capture by the Goths.

IV. While this was the state of matters to the north of the
Mediterranean, that is, in the heart of the empire, the remoter
agricultural provinces of Spain, Sicily, Lybia, and Egypt, were in the
very highest state of prosperity; they fed all the great cities of the
Roman world by their immense exportations of grain, and yet enough
remain