d an important branch of
revenue even to the better class of citizens. These distributions were
entirely different from the public ones at Rome, which were established
as a gratification by the state to the poor citizens who had no other
means of livelihood. The tribute of grain from Egypt was appropriated to
supply Constantinople, and that of Africa was left for the consumption
of Rome. This was the tie which bound the capital to the emperors, and
the cause of the toleration shown to its factions. They both felt they
had a common interest in supporting the despotic power by which the
provinces were drained of money to support the expenditure of the court,
and supply provisions for the people."[54]

Although, however, these public distributions of grain in the chief
towns of the empire had some effect in checking the cultivation of corn
in Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor, by depriving its cultivators of their
best market, yet _the private importation of grain_ from these great
corn countries must have been a far more serious and general evil.
Gibbon states the number who received rations at Constantinople daily in
the time of Constantine at 80,000, and in Rome in the time of Tiberius
it was 180,000. Supposing the other great towns were fed in the same
proportion, perhaps a million of persons in the Roman world were
nourished at the expense of the state on Egyptian or African grain. But
a million of persons consume annually a million of quarters of grain;
not a sixtieth part of the annual consumption of the British empire at
this time, and probably not a two-hundredth part required by the
120,000,000 souls who composed the Roman empire in the days of the
Antonines. But though the state paupers were thus but a small fraction
of the whole consumers of foreign grain, yet the _general importation
was immense_, and became erelong so great as to constitute the entire
source from which the population of Italy, as well as Constantinople and
the adjacent provinces of Romelia, Macedonia, and Greece, were fed. It
was this _general importation_, not the gratuitous distributions, which
ruined Italian agriculture; for it alone was on a scale commensurate
with the population of the Italian peninsula, and could alone account
for its general ruin. Tacitus expressly says, it was the _preference_
given to African agriculture, not the gratuitous distributions, which
destroyed Italian cultivation. "At, Hercule, olim ex Italia legionibus
longin