The new and more stable jurisdiction of the landed proprietary generated another most important effect; it promoted rapidly the cultivation of cereals and textile plants, of wheat and flax.  “All Gaul produces much wheat,” says Strabo, and we read his notice without surprise, because we know that France is, even to-day, the region of Europe most fertile in cereals.  There is no reason to suppose that it must have been barren of them twenty centuries ago.  Other documentary evidence, particularly inscriptions, confirms Strabo, informing us that, especially in the second century, Rome bought the customary grain to feed the metropolis not only in Egypt, but also in Gaul.  In short, Gaul seems to have been the sole region of Europe fertile enough to be able to export grain, to have been for Rome a kind of Canada or Middle West of the time, set not beyond oceans but beyond the Alps.

The cultivation of flax, to the ancient world what cotton is to-day, progressed rapidly in Gaul along with that of wheat, so that Gaul was early able to rival Egypt also in this respect.  That Gaul and Egypt should have so much in common at the same time, was something so interesting and seemed so strange that Pliny himself wrote: 

Flax is sowed only in sandy places and after a single ploughing.  Perhaps Egypt may be pardoned for sowing it, because with it she buys the merchandise of India and Arabia.  But, look you!—­even Gaul is famous for this plant.  What matters it, if huge mountains shut away the sea; if on the ocean side it has for confines what is called emptiness?  Notwithstanding that, Gaul cultivates flax like Egypt:  the Cadurci, the Caleti, the Ruteni, the Biturigi, the Morini, who are considered tribes of the ends of the earth ... but what am I saying?  All Gaul makes sails,—­till the enemies beyond the Rhine imitate them, and the linen is more beautiful to the eyes than are their women.

These descriptions show Gaul to be one of the new countries, like the Argentine Republic or the United States, in which the land has still almost its natural pristine fecundity and brings forth a marvellous abundance of plants that clothe and nourish man.  We know that in Gaul under the Empire there were immense fortunes in land in face of which the fortunes of wealthy Italian proprietors shrink like the fortunes of Europe when compared with the great ranch fortunes of the Argentine Republic or the United States.  Twenty years ago they began to excavate in France the ruins of the great Gallo-Roman villas:  these are constructed on the plan of the Italian villa, decorated in the same way, but are much larger, more sumptuous, more sightly; one feels in them the pride of a new people which has adopted the Latin civilisation, but has infused into that, derived from the wealth of their land, a spirit of grandeur and of luxury that poorer and older Latins did not know, exactly as to-day the Americans infuse a spirit of greater magnitude and boldness into so many things that they take from timid, old Europe.  Perhaps there was also in this Gallic luxury, as in the American, a bit of ostentation, intended to humiliate the masters remaining poorer and more modest.