from foreign growers.  If this be true, the importation of the harvests of Egypt and Africa into the Italian harbours, either by the voluntary purchase of the Roman emperors, or the forced tribute in grain which they exacted from those provinces, must have been the greatest possible benefit to the Italian people.  How then, if there be no mischief in such foreign importations, is it possible to ascribe the ruin of Italian cultivation, and with it of the Roman empire, to these forced contributions?  If the free traders have recourse to such an argument, they concede the very point in dispute, and admit that the introduction of foreign grain is injurious, and may in the end prove fatal, to the agriculture and existence of a state.

Slavery, though a great evil, will as little explain the peculiar and extraordinary decline of Italian and Grecian cultivation in the later stages of the Roman empire.  The greater part of the labour of the ancient world, as every one knows, was conducted by means of slaves.  They were slaves who held the plough, and tilled the land, and tended the flocks, equally in Lybia, in Campania, in Egypt, as in Umbria.  Nay, the number of freemen, at least in the days of the Roman Republic, and the earlier periods of the empire, was incomparably greater in Italy and Greece, the abode of celebrated, powerful, and immortal republics, than in Lybia and Egypt, which from the earliest times had been subject to the despotic sway of satraps, kings, and tyrants.  So numerous were the free citizens of Rome in the early days of the empire, that, by the census of Claudius, we are told by Gibbon they amounted to 6,945,000 men,[15] the greater proportion of whom, of course, were residents in Italy, the seat of government, and the centre of wealth, power, and enjoyment.  While so great was the multitude of free citizens which the Republic bequeathed to the empire, resident and exercising unfettered industry in Italy, the cultivators of Africa and Egypt were all serfs and slaves, toiling, like the West Indian negroes, beneath the lash of a master.  How, then, did it happen that the labour of the Italian freeman was disused, and at length extinguished, while that of the African and Egyptian slaves continued to furnish grain for Italy down to the very latest period of the empire?  We are told that the labour of freemen is cheaper than that of slaves; and the free traders will probably not dispute that proposition.  It could not, therefore, have been the slavery of antiquity which ruined Italian agriculture, carried on, in part at least, by freemen; since African agriculture, the fruits entirely of slavery, continued to flourish down to the very last days of the Roman world.

    [15] GIBBON, chap. i. 68.