the grain growers of the distant provinces of
the empire to supplant the cultivators of its heart by the unrestricted
admission of foreign corn, before the invasion of the northern nations
commenced. In fact, however, the evil was done before they appeared on
the passes of the Alps; it was the weakness thus brought on the central
provinces which rendered them unable to contend with enemies whom they
had often, in former times, repelled and subdued. A few quotations from
historians of authority, will at once establish this important
proposition.

"_Since the age of Tiberius_," says Gibbon, "the decay of agriculture
had been felt in Italy; and it was a just subject of complaint, that the
laws of the Roman people depended on the accidents of the winds and the
waves. In the division and decline of the empire, _the tributary
harvests of Egypt and Africa_ were withdrawn; the numbers of the
inhabitants continually diminished with the means of subsistence; and
the country was exhausted by the irretrievable losses of war, pestilence
and famine. Pope Gelasius was a subject of Odoacer, and he affirms, with
strong exaggeration, that in Emilia, Tuscany, and the adjacent
provinces, the human species was almost extirpated."[21] Again the same
accurate author observes in another place--"Under the emperors the
agriculture of the Roman provinces was _insensibly ruined_; and the
government was obliged to make a merit of remitting tributes which
_their subjects were utterly unable to pay_. Within sixty years of the
death of Constantine, and on the evidence of an actual survey, an
exemption was granted in favour of three hundred and thirty thousand
English acres of desert and uncultivated land _in the fertile and happy
Campania_, which amounted to an eighth of the whole province. As the
footsteps of the barbarians had not yet been seen in Italy, the cause of
_this amazing desolation, which is recorded in the laws_,[22] can be
ascribed only to the administration of the Roman emperors."[23]

The two things which, beyond all question, occasioned this extraordinary
decline of domestic agriculture in Italy before the invasion of the
barbarians commenced, were the weight of _direct taxation_, and the
_decreasing value of agricultural produce_, owing to the constant
importation of grain from Egypt and Lybia, where, owing to the cheapness
of labour and the fertility of the soil in those remote provinces, so
burdensome did the first become, that Gi