"Its acquisitive nature works rapidly in the sleep of the law.It is ready, at the word, to absorb every thing.Witness the famous equivocation about the ox-hide which, when cut up into thongs, was large enough to enclose the site of Carthage....
The legend has reappeared several times since Dido....Such is the love of man for the land.Limited by tombs, measured by the members of the human body, by the thumb, the foot, and the arm, it harmonizes, as far as possible, with the very proportions of man.Nor is be satisfied yet: he calls Heaven to witness that it is his; he tries to or his land, to give it the form of heaven....In his titanic intoxication, he describes property in the very terms which he employs in describing the Almighty--_fundus_ _optimus maximus_....He shall make it his couch, and they shall be separated no more,--{GREEK, ` nf gh g g."}--Michelet:Origin of French Law.
The immediate and secondary cause of the decline of the Romans was, then, the internal dissensions between the two orders of the republic,--the patricians and the plebeians,--dissensions which gave rise to civil wars, proscriptions, and loss of liberty, and finally led to the empire; but the primary and mediate cause of their decline was the establishment by Numa of the institution of property.
I end with an extract from a work which I have quoted several times already, and which has recently received a prize from the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences:--"The concentration of property," says M.Laboulaye, "while causing extreme poverty, forced the emperors to feed and amuse the people, that they might forget their misery._Panem et circenses:_ that was the Roman law in regard to the poor; a dire and perhaps a necessary evil wherever a landed aristocracy exists.
"To feed these hungry mouths, grain was brought from Africa and the provinces, and distributed gratuitously among the needy.In the time of Caesar, three hundred and twenty thousand people were thus fed.Augustus saw that such a measure led directly to the destruction of husbandry; but to abolish these distributions was to put a weapon within the reach of the first aspirant for power.
The emperor shrank at the thought.
"While grain was gratuitous, agriculture was impossible.Tillage gave way to pasturage, another cause of depopulation, even among slaves.
"Finally, luxury, carried further and further every day, covered the soil of Italy with elegant villas, which occupied whole cantons.Gardens and groves replaced the fields, and the free population fled to the towns.Husbandry disappeared almost entirely, and with husbandry the husbandman.Africa furnished the wheat, and Greece the wine.Tiberius complained bitterly of this evil, which placed the lives of the Roman people at the mercy of the winds and waves: that was his anxiety.One day later, and three hundred thousand starving men walked the streets of Rome: that was a revolution.
"This decline of Italy and the provinces did not stop.After the reign of Nero, depopulation commenced in towns as noted as Antium and Tarentum.Under the reign of Pertinax, there was so much desert land that the emperor abandoned it, even that which belonged to the treasury, to whoever would cultivate it, besides exempting the farmers from taxation for a period of ten years.
Senators were compelled to invest one-third of their fortunes in real estate in Italy; but this measure served only to increase the evil which they wished to cure.To force the rich to possess in Italy was to increase the large estates which had ruined the country.And must I say, finally, that Aurelian wished to send the captives into the desert lands of Etruria, and that Valentinian was forced to settle the Alamanni on the fertile banks of the Po?"If the reader, in running through this book, should complain of meeting with nothing but quotations from other works, extracts from journals and public lectures, comments upon laws, and interpretations of them, I would remind him that the very object of this memoir is to establish the conformity of my opinion concerning property with that universally held; that, far from aiming at a paradox, it has been my main study to follow the advice of the world; and, finally, that my sole pretension is to clearly formulate the general belief.I cannot repeat it too often,--and I confess it with pride,--I teach absolutely nothing that is new; and I should regard the doctrine which I advocate as radically erroneous, if a single witness should testify against it.
Let us now trace the revolutions in property among the Barbarians.
