LATIN TAGS AND MODERN PROBLEMS.
MANY generations of Englishmen have been brought up to accept as a profound truth the statement made by Pliny the Elder that big farms or big landed estates destroyed Italy—latifundia perdidere Italiarn. This famous Latin tag has created the impression that the strength of Rome was destroyed by the separation of her citizens from the soil. Indeed, it is probable that a good many people— with the pleasant way which we all have of mixing up centuries with one another if they are sufficiently remote—assume that the big farms of which Pliny speaks led to the destruction of the Roman Empire, although Pliny wrote nearly four centuries before the Empire was destroyed. In any case, there is a widespread belief in this country, based upon Pliny's famous tag, that, owing to the free importation of corn from Sicily and the outlying provinces of the Roman Empire, the old type of yeoman who had won the battles of the Republic, was driven from the soil and the land was left to be inadequately cultivated by slave labour. We are warned to-day, as our fathers and our grandfathers were also warned, to take note of these facts, and to beware lest the same fate should befall our country. It will therefore come as a surprise to most educated Englishmen to find so competent a scholar as Mr. H. Stuart Jones in the Edinburgh Review boldly Challenging Pliny's statement and the whole theory that has been based upon it.
Briefly, Mr. Jones holds that the statement of Pliny was little more than an expression of the common desire to praise the past. The laud.ator temporis acti has been vocal in every age. To quote Mr. Stuart Jones : " The historians of the Empire, fascinated by the mirage of the fast-fading glories of the Republic, repeated the old complaints of the plantation system, estates as large as kingdoms," districts once populous, now only redeemed from solitude by slaves,' and so forth." Yet Pliny himself, as Mr. Stuart Jones points out, in other of his writings speaks with enthusiasm of the agricultural prosperity of Italy. Mr. Jones doubly challenges Pliny's statement. He says, in the first place, that it is untrue that Italy was in any sense permanently ruined, as Pliny's phrase implies ; and secondly, that it is untrue that the small-holder was dispossessed to the extent imagined. The principal agricultural unit in Italy was the jundus, the equivalent of the modern Italian podere, generally estimated at about one hundred and fifty acres in the case of olive cultivation and about sixty acres for vineyards. It was upon the fundus, regarded as a manageable unit, that tillage was in general based, and wealthy Romans preferred to purchase a number of such fundi scattered about the peninsula rather than to acquire large tracts of territory. One great advantage they gained was the convenience of possessing rest-houses on the main routes of travel. Incidentally it is interesting to note that then, as now, the problem of the time-expired soldier had an influence on the distribution of land. For example, Domitius, an ancestor of Nero, promised to furnish to time-expired soldiers, out of his own estates, allotments of about three acres apiece. This practice of providing veteran soldiers with allotments led to the creation of colonies of small-holders throughout the greater part of Italy, and records of these holdings, dating from the end of the first century A.D., have in some cases survived. Other evidence of the distribution of landed property is still obtainable from various sources, including the records of the " building of a private aqueduct near Viterbo which in the course of a mile and a quarter passed through eleven fundi owned by seven proprietors." From the various sources of information available Mr. Stuart Jones draws the conclusion that " the distribution of land ownership in Trajan's time was as uneven as it is in England to-day."
On this last point it is worth while to note that the distri- bution of landed property in England is much wider than is generally imagined. The total number of landowners, large and small, in England and Wales, including urban owners, probably exceeds two millions. In the same way, the number of existing small-holdings that have come into existence without the aid of the legislator is much larger than most people suspect. According to the Returns of the Board of Agriculture quoted by Miss Jebb in her book on small-holdings (John Murray, 1907), the number of agricultural holdings between one and fifty acres was in 1904 three hundred and forty-three thousand out of a total of five hundred and twelve thousand; the area covered by the larger holdings was about fifteen times greater than that covered by the small ones.
In the early days of the Roman Empire one of the most interesting developments was the establishment of what Signor Ferrero calls a body of middle-class proprietors, who spent part of their time in the towns, leaving the whole of the manual work of the estates to their slaves, and apparently devoting their attention to the business side of farming. It was largely to these men that was due the development of such industries as the exportation of olive-oil from Italy, and generally the promotion of intensive agriculture, so that, in Signor Ferrero's phrase, the Italian countryside, which had been wasted by civil war, " began to blossom once more with its old prosperity "—a phrase which hardly accords with Pliny's talk of ruin.
Mr. Stuart Jones is not content in the article from which we are here quoting to challenge Pliny's tag so far as it related to Italy. He further points out that what Pliny really said was that the latifundia not only ruined Italy, but also the provinces—jam vero et provincias. Here we get into an alto- gether different field. The Romans in conquering their over- seas Empire acquired a dominion with no Republican or tell-governing traditions, and they maintained—almost of necessity—the forms of government to which the conquered peoples had been accustomed. In all the provinces there was established a centralized bureaucratic -government, and, as Mr. Jones remarks, " bureaucracy is the sworn foe of indi- vidual exploitation, whether of land or capital." In some of the provinces, however, and especially m North Africa, big landed estates were created. Pliny goes so far as to say that six landlords owned one half of Roman Africa. He adds that the six landlords were executed and their estates confis- cated by Nero. That seems to have been a frequent incident in Roman provincial administration. Roman capitalists acquired big estates, and on some convenient excuse their property was subsequently taken from them and added to" Caesar's estate." These vast Crown properties, as we should call them to-day, were managed by the provincial bureaucracy, and except where the local bureaucrat was restrained by a strong hand and a far-seeing head in Rome, the people were ground down and deprived of their liberty : " The extraction of revenue from the soil became the chief, indeed the only, end of the official class."
This is a danger which is perhaps more imminent to-day than many people have yet noticed. Side by side with the political agitation for creating small-holdings at the expense of the State there is another political agitation for placing s larger share of the burdens of the State upon the shoulders of the landowner or land-occupier. We are first to spend public money in putting men on the land, and then we are to tax them off it again. This was almost exactly the sequence of events in the provinces of the Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries A.D., more than two hundred years after Pliny wrote. Mr. Stuart Jones describes how wise Emperors had granted immunity from taxation to cultivators who would plant land with olives and other fruit-trees, and how the pertinacious bureaucrat subsequently contrived to evade the clear meaning of the Imperial grant and squeeze more and more revenue out of the unfortunate cultivator :- "Here we touch the weak spot in the provincial land-settlements of the Empire. However liberal tho principles professed by such administrators as Julius Alexander or by emperors like Hadrian, the progress of bureaucracy down the slippery slope of compulsion could not be permanently arrested. . . . Above all things it became necessary to secure the maintenance of the revenue by the attachment of the cultivator to the soil by the bonds of law. It is now recognized thek however complex the causes which transformed the free cultivators of the second and even the third centuries into the semi-servile coloni el the fourth, one of the principal factors in this special phase of tin general movement from Contract to Status which marked the decline of the Empire was the stereotyping in the bureaucratic interest of the conditions of tenure on the ' estates of Caesar.' Officialdom is all for the Stationary State ; and nowhere does its establishment seem easier than in an agricultural community where freedom of movement cm be largely restricted by administrative measures."
When the Socialists, aided by thoughtless politicians in a hurry, have succeeded in establishing universal State control over English agriculture, there will be little liberty left for the agriculturist and little hope of progress for the nation, whether the holdings be large or small.
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