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ANCIENT ROME

THOUGHT

IT COULD DO WITHOUT FARMERS, TOO

By Carroll Cox

The following passage is from a 1914 booklet called Ancient Rome and Modern America, by the late Guglielmo Ferrero, an eminent Italian historian and sociologist:

"The disease which killed the Roman Empire was, in fact, excessive urbanization.... Everywhere fresh lands were brought under cultivation, methods of agriculture were perfected, minerals were searched for, new industries and new branches of commerce were opened up. Prosperity and luxury increased in every nation.... And in every class, even the poorest, was acquired a taste for the luxuries of civilization.

"An epoch of rapid increase of wealth, of lucky enterprises, of frequent, close and varied commercial and intellectual intercourse between the most distant people began.....

"In the first and second centuries every rich family spent part of its possessions on the embellishment of the cities. They built palaces, villas, theatres, temples, baths and aqueducts. They distributed grain, oil, amusements and money. They endowed public services and assumed the roles of pious founders.

"The empire covered itself with cities, great and small, rivaling each other in splendor and wealth; and into these cities at the expense of depopulating the countryside where no one was willing to live, it attracted the peasantry, the village artisans and the yeomanry. In these cities schools were opened in which the youth of the middle class were taught eloquence and philosophy and trained for government posts and liberal professions.....

"Little by little, the expenditures of the urban civilization, the cities and their increasing luxuries, outdistanced the fertility of the countryside, and from that moment the latter began to be depopulated and sterilized by the cities. With each succeeding generation the impulse toward the cities became stronger. The numbers and requirements of urban populations increased. The state and wealthy classes were inundated with requests and threats to adorn and enrich ever more the cities....

"In order to feed, clothe and amuse crowded city populations; to carry through the construction of magnificent monuments, to provide work for the industries and the arts of the cities... agriculture was little by little ground down by ever-increasing burdens. The position of the peasant in the solitude of the depopulated countryside became ever more sad and gloomy, just as the cities became fairer, bigger, fuller of amusements and festivals.... One day the Empire awoke to find its cities were swarming with beggars, idlers, vagabonds and singers. But in the fields, which were expected to feed all these men who had crowded into the cities to work or idle, there was a dearth of peasants to cultivate the land.....

"The agriculture of the Empire, and with it the Empire itself, received its death blow....."

One third of the remaining American farmers are over the age of 65. Fewer than ten percent are under the age of 35. Makes you think, doesn't it..... of the Decline and Fall?

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