The Evolution of States. J. M. Robertson

The Evolution of States - J. M. Robertson


Скачать книгу
href="#ulink_7c65dce6-733d-53d0-a1f7-b9e01640734d">[201] Italy produced little beyond olives and wine and cattle,[202] and ordinary wares for home consumption. Industrially considered, the society of the whole peninsula was thus finally a mere shell, doing its exchanges mainly in virtue of the annual income it extorted from provincial labour, and growing more and more worthless in point of character as its vital basis grew more and more strictly factitious. It would be accurate to say of the Empire, as represented by part of Italy and the capital, that it was a vast economic simulacrum. The paternal policy of the emperors,[203] good and bad, wrought to pretty much the same kind of result as the egoism of the upper classes had done; and though their popular measures must have exasperated the Senate, that body had in general to tolerate their well-meaning deeds as it did their crimes.[204]

      We need not consider curiously whether things would or will happen in exactly this way: the actual presumption is that before coal is exhausted the whole social structure will be modified; and it is conceivable that the idle class may have been eliminated. But we are supposing a less progressive evolution for illustration's sake. Suffice it that such a development would be in a measure economically analogous to what took place in ancient Rome. If the upper-class population of such a hypothetical future in England, instead of receiving only dividends from foreign stocks and pensions from the revenue of India, were able to extort an absolute tribute from India and other dominions, the parallel would be so much the closer. What held together the Roman Empire so long was, on the one hand, the developed military and juridical organisation with its maintaining revenue, and on the other hand the absence of any competent antagonist. Could a Mithridates or an Alexander have arisen during the reign of one of the worse emperors, he might more easily have overrun the Roman world than Rome did Carthage. As it was, all the civilised parts of the Empire shared its political anæmia; and indeed the comparative comfort of the Roman peace, with all its burden of taxation, was in many of the provinces a sufficient though precarious ground for not returning to the old life of chronic warfare, at least for men who had lost the spirit of reasoned political self-assertion.


Скачать книгу