him, of re-colonising in Italy, Corinth, Carthage, Spain, and Gaul. And if Cæsar sought to limit the gifts of bread, he seems to have outgone his predecessors in his provision of the other element in the popular ideal—the circus; his shows being bloodier as well as vaster than those of earlier days.[193] A public thus treated to sport must needs have cheap food as well.
Of this policy, the economic result was to carry still further the depression of Italian agriculture. The corn supplied at low rates or given away by the administration was of course bought or taken in the cheapest markets—those of Sardinia and Sicily, Egypt, Africa, and Gaul—and importation once begun would be carried to the utmost lengths of commercialism. Italian farms, especially those at a distance from the capital,[194] could not compete with the provinces save by still further substituting large slave-tilled farms for small holdings, and grinding still harder the face of the slave. When finally Augustus,[195] definitely establishing the system of lowered prices and doles, subsidised the trade in the produce of conquered Egypt to feed his populace, and thus still further promoted the importation of the cheapest foreign grain, the agriculture of a large part of Italy, and even of parts of some provinces, was practically destroyed.
It has been argued by M'Culloch (Treatises and Essays: History of Commerce, 2nd ed. p. 287, note) that it is impossible that the mere importation of the corn required to feed the populace—say a million quarters or more—could have ruined the agriculture of Italy. This expresses a misconception of what took place. The doles were not universal, and the emperors naturally preferred to limit themselves as far as possible to paying premiums for the importation and cheap sale of corn. (Cp. Suetonius, Claudius, c. 19, and the Digest, iii, 4, 1; xiv, i, 1, 20; xlvii, ix, 3, 8; l, v, 3, etc.) All of the conquered provinces, practically, had to pay a tithe of their produce; and where corn was specially cheap it would be likely to come to Rome in that form. (Cp. Dureau de la Malle, Écon. polit. des Romains, ii, 424 sq.) Many of the patrician families, besides, owned great estates in Africa, and they would receive their revenues in produce. Egyptian, Sardinian, Sicilian, and African corn could thus easily undersell Italian for ordinary consumption. For the rest, the produce of Egypt would be a means of special revenue to the emperor. Cp. M'Culloch's own statement, p. 291.
Prof. Ferrero (Greatness and Decline of Rome, Eng. trans. ii, App. A) has independently (but in agreement with Weber and Salvioli) carried M'Culloch's thesis further, and has opposed the view that the "competition" of Sicilian and African wheat "was the cause of the agricultural depression from which Italy began to suffer in 150 B.C." His own theory is the singular one that the "depression" was caused by "the increased cost of living" arising out of luxurious habits! This untenable and indeed unintelligible conclusion he ostensibly reaches by a series of arguments that are alternately incoherent and rotatory, of propositions some of which are rebutted by himself, and of assumptions that are plainly astray. The dispute may be condensed thus:—
(1) "In antiquity," the Professor begins, "each district consumed its own wheat"; yet he goes on to mention that in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Attica was "obliged to import, even in good seasons, between 12,000,000 and 15,000,000 bushels." This contradiction he appears to think is saved by the addendum that "the amount in question is a very small one, compared with the figures of modern commerce." Naturally it is, Athens being a small State compared with those of to-day. But the contradiction stands unresolved. And it follows that larger towns, not placed in fruitful "districts," would have proportionally larger imports.
(2) "Moreover," writes the Professor, "while the industrial countries of to-day seek so far as possible to check the import of cereals by protective duties, Athens used every expedient of war and diplomacy to render the supply of imported corn both regular and abundant." It is startling to find a professor of history, a sociological historian, unaware that Britain, Belgium, and Holland have no import duties on corn. (The most exclusive State in that matter is Portugal, which, with no pretensions to be an industrial State, prohibits corn imports altogether.)
(3) More plausibly, Prof. Ferrero argues that the policy of Athens proves that "corn was not easily transported for sale beyond the local market." But the efforts of the Athenians "to obtain the mastery of the Black Sea, and especially of the Bosphorus, in order to capture the corn trade for themselves, or to entrust it, on their own conditions, to whom they pleased," proves that the difficulties of transport were mainly those set up by hostile States or pirates, and that—as the Professor admits—the fertile Crimea, with its sparse population, yielded an easy surplus for export.
(4) All this, however, is only partially relevant to the question of the supplies of Rome from Sicily, Sardinia, Africa, and Spain in the second century B.C. Did such supplies come, or did they not? As the Professor admits, they were "vital" to the Roman military policy; and "she had immense granaries at her disposal whenever she required them." But such sources of supply meant a certain large normal production; and this would enter Italy in time of peace. If it was purposely maintained in view of the needs of war-time, so much the more surely would it undersell Italian wheat, raised on a less fruitful soil. In no other way could Sicily and Africa yield either annual tribute to Rome or rents to Roman owners of land in those countries. The first effect of the importation would be to add the pressure of lowered prices to the discouragement already offered to private cultivators by the inducements of loot in war, fleecings in administration of newly conquered countries, commerce, and usury. Of this discouragement the sequel would be the attempt to run by slave labour the large estates in which the old farms were merged. But slave labour is apt to be bad labour, and agriculture could not thereby be restored.
(5) The thesis that agriculture was depressed by high cost of living (= high prices for agricultural products) it is not easy to treat with seriousness. The simple fact is that sea-carriage to Rome from Sicily, Spain, and Africa must have been cheaper than land carriage from most parts of Italy to the capital. As Prof. Ferrero notes, food prices in the valley of the Po were very low—obviously because cost of carriage either to Rome or to the southern seaports deterred export.
(6) Prof. Ferrero's fallacy is capped by his proposition that "the economic crisis from which Italy has been suffering during the last twenty years is due to the increased cost of living occasioned by the introduction, from 1848 onwards, of the industrial civilisation of England and France into an old agricultural society." The confusion here defies analysis. Suffice it to say that the high cost of living in modern Italy is due to tariffs and high taxation. Sugar is dear there not because Italians consume it luxuriously—they do not and cannot—but because a particularly unintelligent policy of Protection causes them to pay for beetroot sugar produced in a country ill-suited to the growth of beetroot. Living costs more in Germany, France, and the United States than in Britain, not because those countries have only recently become "luxurious," but because they heavily tax imports. Costs of living in Rome certainly rose as Romans raised their standards of consumption; but their importation of corn from conquered provinces kept food prices lower than they would have been otherwise; and Italian agriculture was largely abandoned in favour of easier ways of making money.
Prof. Ferrero supplies a partial confutation of his economic theory by his own account (i, 311) of how, in the time of Pompey, "once more the precious metals were cheap and abundant" after a time of scarcity, and the decadent slave system of agriculture was superseded by new forms of production. (See above, p. 79, note.) But abundant bullion means high prices for produce, which the Professor has declared to be a cause of depression! As to the new production, the process certainly cannot have taken place with the rapidity which his description suggests. "The hideous slave-shelters or compounds [ergastula], with their gangs of forced labourers, vanished from the scene, together with the huge desolate tracts of pasture where they had spent their days [?], to be replaced by vineyards, olive-groves, and orchards, now planted in all parts of the peninsula, … estates on which the new slave immigrants contentedly cultivated the vine or the
