If the shores of Hindostan were within three or four days’ sail of the Tiber, this result would long ago have taken place.  Let Polish and Russian grain be admitted without a protecting duty into the British harbours, as Lybian and Egyptian were into those of Italy, and we shall soon see the race of cultivators disappear from the fields of England as they did from those of old Rome, and the words of Tacitus will, by a mere change of proper names, become a picture of our condition; three hundred thousand acres will soon be reduced to a state of nature in Kent and Norfolk, as they were in the Campania Felix.  “Nec nunc infecunditate laboramur, Podoliam potius et Scythiam exercemus, navibusque et casibus vita populi Anglici permissa est.”

The free traders allege that the decay of agriculture in the central provinces of the Roman empire, to which, by the concurring testimony of all historians, the ruin of the dominion of the Caesars was chiefly owing, is to be ascribed, not to the free importation of grain from Egypt, Podolia, and Lybia, but to the tyranny of the emperors, the gratuitous distribution of grain to the Roman populace, and the dreadful evils of domestic slavery.  A very slight consideration, however, must be sufficient to show that these causes, how powerful soever in producing general evils over the empire, could not have been instrumental in occasioning those peculiar and separate causes of depression, which so early began to check, and at length totally destroyed, the agriculture of its central provinces.

The tyranny of the Caesars, the oppression of the Proconsuls, the avarice of the Patricians, were general evils, affecting alike every part of the empire; or rather they were felt with more severity in the remote provinces than the districts nearer home, in consequence of the superior opportunities of escape which distance from the central government afforded to iniquity, and the lesser chance of success which the insurrection of a remote province held forth to the “wild revenge” of rebellion.  Muscovite oppression, accordingly, is more severely felt at Odessa or Taganrog than St Petersburg; and British rule is far from being restrained by the same considerations of justice on the banks of the Ganges or the Indus, as on those of the Thames.  The gratuitous distribution of grain by the emperors to the populace of Rome, could never have occasioned the ruin of the Italian cultivators.  Supposing that the two or three hundred thousand lazy and turbulent plebeians, who were nourished by the bounty or fed by the terrors of the Caesars, were the most useless, worthless, and dangerous set of men that ever existed, (which they probably were,) that circumstance could never have uprooted the race of cultivators from the plains of Lombardy, Umbria, or the Campania Felix.  The greatest possible good to a nation, according to the free trader, is cheap grain, and never more so than when it is purchased or imported