ators and merchants of Africa to
deluge the Italian harbours with corn at a far cheaper rate than it
could be raised in Italy itself, where labour bore a much higher price,
in consequence of money being more plentiful in the centre than the
extremities of the empire. Thus the market of its towns was lost to the
Italian cultivators, and gained to those of Egypt and Lybia, where a
vertical sun, or the floods of the Nile, almost superseded the expense
of cultivation. Pasturage became the only way in which land could be
managed to advantage in the Italian fields; because live animals and
dairy produce do not admit of being transported from a distance by sea,
with a profit to the importer, and the sunburnt shores of Africa yielded
no herbage for their support. Agriculture disappeared in Italy, and with
it the free and robust arms which conducted it; pasturage succeeded, and
yielded large rentals to the great proprietors, into whose hands, on the
ruin of the little freeholders by foreign importation, the land had
fallen. But pasturage could not nourish a bold peasantry to defend the
state; it could only produce the riches which might attract its enemies.
Hence the constant complaint, that Italy had ceased to be able to
furnish soldiers to the legionary armies; hence the entrusting the
defence of the frontier to mercenary barbarians, and the ruin of the
empire.

In modern times the same ruinous system has been continued, and hence
the continued desolation of the Campagna, so pregnant with weakness and
evil to the Roman states. The people never forgot the distribution of
grain by government in the time of the emperors; the Papal authorities
never had strength sufficient to withstand the menacing cry for cheap
bread. Anxious to keep the peace in Rome, and depending little on the
barons of the country, the ecclesiastical government saw no resource but
to import grain themselves from any countries where they could get it
cheapest, and sell it at a fixed price to the people. This price, down
to 1763, was just the price at which _it could be imported with a fair
profit_; as is proved by the fact, that down to that period the _Casa
Annonaria_ sustained no loss. But it was lower than the rate at which it
could be raised even in the fertile plains of the Campagna, where labour
was dearer and taxes heavier than in Egypt and the Ukraine, from whence
the grain was imported by government; and consequently cultivation could
not be carried o