st as well.
Political writers, social philosophers, practical statesmen, fall in
with the prevailing disposition of _the most influential classes_; they
deceive themselves into the belief that they are original, and
promulgating important truths, when they are merely yielding to the
pressure of the strongest, or at least the most noisy, class at the
moment in society. The Reform Bill gave _three-fifths_ of the British
representation to the members for boroughs. From that moment the
eventual adoption of legislative measures favourable to the interests of
capital, and agreeable to the wishes of the inhabitants of towns, how
destructive soever to those of the country, was as certain as the daily
distribution of Egyptian grain to the inhabitants of Rome, Antioch, and
Constantinople was, when the mob of these cities became, from their
formidable numbers, an object of dread to the Roman government.

The only answer which the partisans of free trade in grain have ever
attempted to these considerations is, that the ruin of the agriculture
in the central provinces of the Roman empire was owing, not to the
importation of foreign corn as a mercantile commodity, but to its
_distribution gratuitously_ to the poorer citizens of Rome,
Constantinople, and some of the larger cities in the empire. They
_admit_, in its fullest extent, the decay of domestic agriculture, and
consequent ruin of the state, but allege it was owing to this gratuitous
distribution, which was in fact a poor-law, and not to the free trade in
grain.[70] But a very little consideration must be sufficient to show
that this is an elusory distinction; and that it was the unrestricted
admission of foreign wheat by purchase, which in reality, coupled with
the contraction of the currency, destroyed the dominion of the legions.

1. In the first place, the number who received these gratuitous
distributions was, as already shown, _so small_, when compared to the
whole body of the grain-consuming population, that they could not
materially have affected the market for agricultural produce in Italy.
Not more than 150,000 persons received rations in Rome daily, and
perhaps as many in the other cities of Italy. What was this in a
peninsula containing at that period sixteen or eighteen millions of
souls, and with 2,300,000 in its capital alone?[71] It is evident that
the gratuitous distributions of grain, taking those at their greatest
extent, could not have embraced a fiftieth p