While the cities decorated themselves with magnificent monuments, the empire was menaced with finding itself in want of bread and soldiers! It certainly defended itself against this danger with desperate vigor.

It introduced serfdom. It tried to chain the peasants to the soil. It decreed the heredity occupations. Aggravated by one

of the most egregious intellectual errors that history records, the crisis became inevitable. The agriculture of the empire was mortally wounded, and with it the empire itself. The Orient and the Occident split apart, and, abandoned to itself, the Occident fell.

The greatest of the works of Rome, the empire it founded in Europe, covers to-day with its tremendous ruin the vast territory that bordered the Rhine and the Danube. It is a ruin of monuments destroyed, of peoples re-barbarized, of lost arts, forgotten languages, scattered laws, of roads, villages, cities blotted from the face of the earthdevoured by the primeval wilderness that slowly and tenaciously bourgeoned anew over the gigantic bones of Rome, in that cemetery of a civilization!

"That, however, surely is not happening and will not happen to contemporary civilization," the reader will say at this point. "Although one cannot deny that there is a certain analogy between the story of the first two centuries of the empire and that of modern times, the analogy stops at this point. A catastrophe like that of the Roman Empire the world will not look upon again; or at least no man will see it who has the privilege of living to-day!"

Granted. But we are more fortunate than our Roman ancestors, because modern civilization is stronger and better able to withstand all the evils that beset it; not because the germs of the disease that destroyed the Roman world do not exist in it also. Many symptoms prove this to us. Among them I mention one, the gravest and

most noticeable, the best known and most felt by every one, even though few have yet seen in it an analogy and a resemblance to the great historical disaster that befell the Roman Empire-the increased cost of living.

From one end to the other of Europe and America, this is the universal lament of men and women who must live in cities. Rents, bread, milk, meat, vegetables, eggs, clothes, everything costs more. Persons no older than thirty or forty years recall having seen a sort of fabled period, a mythical age of gold, when things cost

almost nothing compared with pres

ent prices. Governments are besieged with requests, threats, prayers, to provide for the case, but they do not know how.

Where should reform begin? What is the cause of this strange phenomenon? One blames the taxes, another the protection system, another accuses the merchants and the speculators. Really, at first, the phenomenon seems inexplicable.

In no epoch was there ever such haste to be rich as in ours; and none ever disposed of means so many and so powerful to produce wealth. Men are

never before seen. Why then, on the contrary, do men everywhere complain-and the most in the richest countries—of this intolerable expensiveness! To what end, and how, do moderns work, if dearness instead of plenty rewards their daily fatigues?

This high cost of living is a phenomenon more serious and complex than is believed by those who complain of it, and is not the fault of governments or of merchants.

It is a real repetition of history, and to probe it to the bottom, the lesson of the Roman Empire can be especially useful.

The first grave symptom, and one felt by every one, is that very excess of urbanism which was the ruin of ancient Rome. Modern costliness is born from the overdevelopment of cities, from the too rapid growth of the needs and luxuries of the multitudes that live in them. Too many men and too much capital are there agglomerated to add to industries and citizens' extravagance, private and public, to actualize all the marvels that fertile modern genius, pushed on by the competition of modern progress, goes on continually inventing.

The country, instead, has been too much abandoned in the last half century, and agriculture too much neglected, exactly what began to happen in the Roman Empire at the commencement of the second century.

The natural consequence of this disproportion is easy to understand. The cities enlarge, industries grow in number and size; luxuries and the wants of the many crowded together there multiply. But the productiveness of the land does not keep pace with all this. On that account, many of the fruits of the earth diminish in proportion to the increased demand for them, and the things that serve to clothe and nourishcotton, flax, hemp, wool, cereals, meat, vegetables are almost all rendered dearer than manufactured articles. Therefore, the larger the cities, the more do high prices torment them.

In no country is this condition more apparent and more interesting than in the United States. What nation of the globe might more easily be borne along by the marvelous abundance of its resources! It lacks neither territory to cultivate, nor the necessary capital, accumulating annually in measureless quantity, nor yet the

hands, which Europe provides already adult.

Moreover, in no country of Europe are the wails over costliness so loud and so common as in the United States. Why? Because in America the disproportion between the progress of the fields and that of the cities, between that of industries and that of agriculture, is still greater than in Europe, where populations live habituated for centuries to country life. Consequently, high prices are greater and more troublesome there, precisely because there greater wealth exists.

However that may be, it may be said that even if this costliness from which we suffer is the clearest sign of the excess of citymaking, from which our civilization suffers, the trouble is not very severe, and is far from assuming the gravity and extreme dangerousness that it manifested in the Roman Empire. In this respect, also, we might be considered fortunate; to us this exaggerated urbanism causes only a certain material inconvenience, felt by the middle and popular classes of the cities, while in the Roman Empire it brought about an historic catastrophe. All that is doubtless true, but exactly on that account ought the lesson, with which the story of the fall of the Roman Empire is replete, to be thought upon.

In that day also, excessive urbanism was for long the cause-just as is happening in Europe and America now-of a tolerable material inconvenience among the classes more numerous and poorer that lived in the cities.

In the first and second centuries—that is, in the two most prosperous and glorious centuries of the empire-many inscriptions record gifts from wealthy men or provision made by cities to offset the high cost of living. Of Rome we need not speak, so well known is the fact. From the moment when it became the metropolis of a vast empire, the expensiveness of its means of living became a permanent fact; and it had to provide the famous supplies of free grain (frumentationes) that in the last two centuries of the republic and during the whole of the empire, were one of the weightiest cares of the state. Mistress of amplest posses

sions, Rome was for ages sure of being obeyed in the most distant provinces by the people whom her sword had subdued. She was never sure of getting her bread for each day in the year.

In the Roman Empire also, for a long time the overgrowth of cities made itself uncomfortably, but not intolerably felt by their inhabitants in the increased cost of living. How was it that it gradually became the cause of a frightful social dissolution? Because, instead of leaving its cities to their own struggle with the torment, the Roman Empire tried to abolish the evil artificially; and the more it tried, the graver became the situation.

The crisis for the cities began in the third century. The country lessened too much in population and the agricultural production was reduced to a minimum. In the cities, labor failed, food was dearer, and the

"bread line" grew ominously long. If the state had left this crisis to work itself out naturally, little by little, perhaps, the equilibrium would have been reestablished of itself. A part of the city proletariat, unable to live in crowded cities, seeing themselves there condemned to a kind of chronic famine or slow inanition, would have gone back to work in the country. When the country depopulates itself too much, there is but one remedy for the evil-that life in the cities becomes unbearable to a part of the citizens.

But the Roman state could not let the evil take its own natural course. The big cities, beginning with Rome, had too much influence over the government. Throughout the empire, the city, beautiful and wealthy, had become the model of civilization, and gradually the state was persuaded to do for all its cities what from the com