The severe taxation of the emperors is justly stated by Gibbon and Sismondi, as well as Michelet, as a principal cause of the decline of Italian agriculture:  but very little consideration is required to show, that this cause is inadequate to explain this ruin of cultivation in the Italian plains, when it continued to flourish and maintain the chief cities of the empire with food, in Egypt and Lybia.  Heavy as it was, and oppressive as it ultimately became, it was equal; it was the same every where; it might, therefore, satisfactorily explain the general decline of rural industry through the empire, and doubtless had a large share in contributing to its downfall; but it cannot explain the particular ruin of it, in the central provinces of this vast dominion, while it continued, down to the very last moment, to flourish in its remote dependencies.

But the taxation of the empire, when coupled with the free importation of grain from these distant dependencies, does afford a most satisfactory, and, in truth, the true explanation of the ruin of Italian and Grecian cultivation.  It was a fixed principle of Roman taxation, that the duties allotted on a particular district should remain fixed, how much lower the inhabitants or industry of the province might decline.  When, therefore, by the constant importation of Egyptian and African grain, raised at half the cost at which they could produce it, the Italian cultivators were deprived of a remunerating return, and the taxes exacted from each district underwent no diminution, it is not surprising that the small farmers and proprietors were ruined; that they took refuge in the industry and crowds of cities, and that the race of freemen disappeared from the country.  A similar process is now going on in the Turkish provinces.  But without undervaluing—­on the contrary, attaching full weight to this circumstance—­nothing can be clearer than that it was the ruinous competition of foreign grain, raised cheaper than they could produce it, which rendered the same taxation crushing on the Italian farmers, which was borne with comparative facility in the remoter provinces, where land was more fertile, and labour less expensive.  An example, a fortiori, applied to the British empire, where the free traders wish us to admit a free importation of grain from Poland and the Ukraine, where not only is labour cheap but taxation trifling, into the British islands, where not only is labour dear but taxation is five times more burdensome.

And for a decisive proof that it was the superior advantages which Egypt and Lybia enjoyed in the production of grain, and not any other causes, which occasioned the ruin of Italian agriculture, and with it the fall of the Roman empire, we have only to look to the condition of the Italian fields in the last stages of the government of the Caesars.  Already, in the time of the elder Pliny, it had become a subject of complaint that the