, this fixity of impost would have been the greatest of all
blessings. It is the precise boon so frequently and earnestly implored
by our ryots in India, and indeed by the cultivators all over the
East. But when the empire was beset on all sides with enemies--only
the more rapacious and pressing, that the might of the legions had so
long confined them within the comparatively narrow limits of their own
sterile territories--and disasters, frequent and serious, were laying
waste the frontier provinces, it became the most dreadful of all
scourges; because, as the assessment on each district was fixed, and
scarcely ever suffered any abatement, every disaster experienced
increased the burden on the survivors who had escaped it; until they
became bent down under such a weight of taxation, as, coupled with the
small number of freemen on whom it exclusively fell, crushed every
attempt at productive industry. It was the same thing as if all the
farmers on each estate were to be bound to make up, annually, the same
amount of rent to their landlord, no matter how many of them had
become insolvent. We know how long the agriculture of Britain, in a
period of declining prices and frequent disaster, would exist under
such a system.

Add to this the necessary effect which the free circulation of grain
throughout the whole Roman world had in depressing the agriculture of
Italy, Gaul, and Greece. They were unable to withstand the competition
of Egypt, Lybia, and Sicily--the storehouses of the world; where the
benignity of the climate, and the riches of the soil, rewarded seventy
or an hundred fold the labours of the husbandman. Gaul, where the
increase was only seven-fold--Italy, where it seldom exceeded
twelve--Spain, where it was never so high, were crushed in the
struggle. The mistress of the world, as Tacitus bewails, had come to
depend for her subsistence on the floods of the Nile. Unable to
compete with the cheap grain raised in the more favoured regions of
the south, the cultivators of Italy and Gaul gradually retired from
the contest. They devoted their extensive estates to pasturage,
because live cattle or dairy produce could not bear the expense of
being shipped from Africa; and the race of agriculturists, the
strength of the legions, disappeared in the fields, and was lost in
the needy and indolent crowd of urban citizens, in part maintained by
tributes in corn brought from Egypt and Lybia. This augmented the
burdens upon tho