The Evolution of States. J. M. Robertson
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_f8e3139b-d7f0-53ec-b05e-0f6f342fab89">[214] As early as 340 B.C. the land round Rome was counted unhealthy, so that veterans were loth to settle on it;[215] but population went back instead of forward. It is thus true that the malaria of the Campagna and other districts was an ancient trouble;[216] but it was the perpetual march of conquest, for ever sending forth to more attractive soils the stocks who might have re-peopled and recovered it, that made that and so much more of Italy fixedly pestilential down to modern times. Thus the paralysis of Italian production by conquest was a twofold process, direct and indirect.
In ancient as in later times, doubtless, attempts were made to bring back to human habitation the stricken deserts that stained Italy like a leprosy. Thus Cæsar sought early to repeople Campania from the idle populace of Rome.[217] But to maintain steady cultivation in unhealthy regions there was needed an immune stock, and that was reproducible only by the old way of savage, self-preserving persistence on the part of hardy and primitive rustics working their own land. The new imported stocks, slave or free, wilted away before the scourge of fever; and the "principle of population," weakened in the spring, failed to surmount the resistance of Nature. Under the early Empire the labour needed for the culture of the Campagna had to be brought in annually from distant districts; and when the invading Goths in the fifth century devastated the whole area there was no energy left to recover it.
[The theories once current as to ancient knowledge of prophylactics in the shape of perfumes and the habitual use of woollen clothing may be dismissed as fanciful. The rational conclusion is that the early races developed a relative immunity, which was possessed neither by the eastern stocks imported in the period of conquest nor by the later invading Teutons. It is noteworthy, however, that at all times the dwellers in the tainted areas learned something of the necessary hygiene. See Dureau de la Malle, as cited. His investigation is interesting as showing how, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, long before Pasteur, biology had reached the perception that fevers come of an organic infection. It was doubtless such knowledge that led the Romans to burn their dead.]
There remains the question, What is the precise economic statement of the final collapse? It is easy to figure that in terms of (a) increasing barbarian enterprise, stimulated by the personal experience of the many barbarians who served the Empire, and of (b) increasing moral weakness on the part of the whole administrative system. And doubtless this change in the balance of military energy was decisive. When utter weaklings sat by heredity in the imperial chair, at best contemptuously tolerated by their alien officers, the end was necessarily near. The most incurable disease of empire was just empire; ages of parasitism had made the Roman ruling class incapable of energetic action; and the autocracy had long withheld from citizens the use of arms. But the long subsistence of the Eastern Empire as contrasted with the Western proves that not only had the barbarians an easier task against Italy in terms of its easiness of invasion, but the defence was there relatively weaker in terms of lack of resources. This lack has been wholly or partly explained by quite a number of writers[218] as a result of a failure in the whole supply of the precious metals—a proposition which may be understood of either a falling-off in the yield of the mines or a general withdrawal of bullion from the Empire. It is difficult to see how either explanation can stand. There was already an immense amount of bullion in the Empire, and a general withdrawal could take place only by way of export to the barbarian east in return for commodities.[219] But the eastern provinces of the Empire were still in themselves abundantly productive, and after the fall of Rome they continued to exhibit industrial solvency. No doubt the plunder of Rome by Alaric (409–10) greatly crippled the west, and the loss of Gaul and Spain was worse; but while the Empire retained Africa it had a source of real revenue. The beginning of the end, or rather the virtual end, came with the conquest of the African province by the Vandals (430–40). In 455 came the sack of Rome by the Vandals, whereafter there remains only a shadow of the Roman Empire, till Odoaker, dismissing Augustulus, makes himself king of Italy.
As for the falling-off in the yield of the Spanish mines, to which some writers seem to attribute the whole collapse, it could only mean that the Roman Government at length realised what had been as true before and has been as true since, that all gold-mining, save in the case of the richest and easiest mines, separately considered, or of groups of mines which have been acquired at less cost than went to find and open them, is carried on at a loss as against the standing competition of the great mass of precious metal above-ground at any moment, the output of unknown barbarian toil and infinite slave labour, begun long before the age of written history.[220] When it was reluctantly realised that the cost of working either the gold or the silver mines was greater to the State than their product,[221] they would be abandoned; though under a free government private speculators would have been found ready to risk more money in reopening them immediately. As a matter of fact, the Spanish mines were actually worked by the Saracens in the Middle Ages, and have been since. The Romans had made the natural blunder of greed in taking all gold and silver mines into the hands of the State,[222] where speculative private enterprise would have gone on working them at a loss, and so adding—vainly enough—to the total bullion in circulation, on which the State could levy its taxes. Even as it was, when they were losing nothing, but rather checking loss, by abandoning the mines, a falling-off in revenue from one source could have been made good by taxation if the fiscal system had remained unimpaired, and if the former income of Italy had not been affected by other causes than a stoppage of mining output.
If the mere cessation of public gold-mining were the cause of a general weakening of the imperial power, and by consequence the cause of the collapse in Italy, it ought equally to have affected the Eastern Empire, which we know to have possessed a normal sufficiency of bullion all through the Dark and Middle Ages, though it had no mines left.[223] The fact is that, when Valentinian and Valens divided the Empire between them, the former chose the western half because he shared the delusion that the Spanish mines were a greater source of real wealth than the fruitful provinces of the east. Those could always procure the bullion they required, because they had produce to exchange for it. Gold mines even of average fertility could have availed no more; and if Italy had remained agriculturally productive she could have sustained herself without any mines.
Dr. Cunningham, in his study of the economic conditions of the declining Empire, appears to lay undue stress on the factor of scarcity of bullion, and does not duly recognise the difference of progression between the case of Italy and that of the east. "The Roman Empire," he writes (p. 187, note), lacked both treasure and capital, "and it perished." When? The eastern seat of the Empire survived the western by a thousand years. "It seems highly improbable," he argues again (p. 185), "that the drain of silver to the east, which continued during the Middle Ages, was suspended at any period of the history of the Empire." But such a drain (which means a depletion) cannot go on for twelve hundred years; and it was certainly not a drain of silver to the east that ruined the Byzantine Empire. Finlay's dictum (i, 52) that the debasement of the currency between Caracalla and Gallienus "annihilated a great part of the trading capital in the Roman Empire and rendered it impossible to carry on commercial transactions, not only with foreign countries but even with distant provinces," is another erroneous theorem.
It seems clear that the Italian collapse occurred as it did because, after the fall of the three great possessions, Gaul, Spain, and Africa, there was left only the central State, made impotent by long parasitism to meet the growing barbarian pressure. Italy in the transition period can have yielded very little revenue, though Rome had for the barbarians plenty of hoarded plunder; and the country had long ceased to yield good troops. Gaul itself had been monstrously taxed; and it must