gained by the new order of things
in commodiousness and magnificence, its political supremacy was,
as we have already said, lost to it irrecoverably through
that very change. The idea that the Roman state should coincide
with the city of Rome had indeed in the course of time become
more and more unnatural and preposterous; but the maxim had been
so intimately blended with the essence of the Roman republic,
that it could not perish before the republic itself. It was only
in the new state of Caesar that it was, with the exception perhaps
of some legal fictions, completely set aside, and the community
of the capital was placed legally on a level with all other
municipalities; indeed Caesar--here as everywhere endeavouring not merely
to regulate the thing, but also to call it officially by the right name--
issued his Italian municipal ordinance, beyond doubt purposely,
at once for the capital and for the other urban communities. We may add
that Rome, just because it was incapable of a living communal character
as a capital, was even essentially inferior to the other municipalities
of the imperial period. The republican Rome was a den of robbers,
but it was at the same time the state; the Rome of the monarchy,
although it began to embellish itself with all the glories
of the three continents and to glitter in gold and marble,
was yet nothing in the state but a royal residence in connection
with a poor-house, or in other words a necessary evil.

Italy
Italian Agriculture

While in the capital the only object aimed at was to get rid
of palpable evils by police ordinances on the greatest scale,
it was a far more difficult task to remedy the deep disorganization
of Italian economics. Its radical misfortunes were those which
we previously noticed in detail--the disappearance of the agricultural,
and the unnatural increase of the mercantile, population--
with which an endless train of other evils was associated.
The reader will not fail to remember what was the state
of Italian agriculture. In spite of the most earnest attempts
to check the annihilation of the small holdings, farm-husbandry
was scarcely any longer the predominant species of economy
during this epoch in any region of Italy proper, with the exception
perhaps of the valleys of the Apennines and Abruzzi. As to
the management of estates, no material difference is perceptible
between the Catonian system formerly set forth(50) and that
described to us by Var