, and
checking of inferior functionaries. The system of great farms has been
carried to perfection in their hands. But, with all these advantages,
they cannot in the Agro Romano, _once so populous, still so fertile,
raise grain to a profit_. The labourers cost more than they are worth,
more than their produce is worth; while on a soil not richer, and under
the same climate and government, in the marches of Ancona, agriculture
maintains two hundred souls the square mile, in comfort and
opulence."[39]

What, then, is the explanation which is to be given of this
extraordinary impossibility of raising grain with a profit in the Roman
Campagna; while in a similar climate, and under greater physical
disadvantages, it is in the neighbouring plains of Pisa, and the
Campagna Felice of Naples, the most profitable of all species of
cultivation, and therefore universally resorted to? The answer is
obvious--It is the cry for cheap bread in Rome, the fatal bequest of the
strength of the Imperial, to the weakness of the Papal government, which
is the cause. It is the necessity under which the ecclesiastical
government felt itself, of yielding every thing to _the clamour for a
constant supply of cheap bread for the people of the town_ which has
done the whole. It is the ceaseless importation of foreign grain into
the Tiber by government, to provide cheap food for the people, which has
reduced the Campagna to a wilderness, and rendered Rome in modern, not
less than Tadmor in ancient times, a city in the desert.

It has been already noticed, that in the middle of the fifteenth century
Sextus IV. issued a decree, ordaining the proprietors of lands in the
Campana to lay down a third of their estates yearly in tillage. But the
Papal government, not resting on the proprietors of the soil, but
mainly, in so far as temporal power went, on the populace of Rome, was
under the necessity of making at the same time extraordinary efforts to
obtain supplies of foreign grain. A free trade in grain was permitted to
the Tiber, or rather the government purchased foreign grain wherever
they could find it cheapest, as the emperors had from a similar
apprehension done in ancient times, and retailed it at a moderate price
to the people. They became themselves the great corn-merchant. This
system, of course, prevented the cultivation of the Campagna, and
rendered the decree of Sextus IV. nugatory; for no human laws can make
men continue a course of labour a