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We see, too, the secret power and also the secret political wisdom of Christianity in another instance. Those public largesses of grain, which, in old Rome, commenced upon principles of ambition and of factious encouragement to partisans, in the new Rome of Constantinople were propagated for ages under the novel motive of Christian charity to paupers. This practice has been condemned by the whole chorus of historians who fancy that from this cause the domestic agriculture languished, and that a bounty was given upon pauperism. But these are reveries of literary men. That particular section of rural industry which languished in Italy, did so by a reaction from rent in the severe modern sense. The grain imported from Sardinia, from Africa the province, and from Egypt, was grown upon soils less costly, because with equal cost more productive. The effect upon Italy from bringing back any considerable portion of this provincial corn-growth[3] to her domestic districts would have been suddenly to develop rent upon a large series of evils, and to load the provincial grain as well as the home-grown–the cheap provincial as well as the dear home-grown–with the whole difference of these new costs. Neither is the policy of the case at all analogous to our own at the moment. In three circumstances it differs essentially:

First, provinces are not foreigners; colonies are not enemies. An exotic corn-trade could not for Rome do the two great injuries which assuredly it would do for England; it could not transfer the machinery of opulence to a hostile and rival state; it could not invest a jealous competitor with power suddenly to cut off supplies that had grown into a necessity, and thus to create in one month a famine or an insurrection. Egypt had neither the power nor any prospect of the power to act as an independent state towards Rome; the transfer to Egypt of the Roman agriculture, supposing it to have been greater than it really was, could have operated but like a transfer from Norfolk to Yorkshire.

Secondly, as respected Italy, the foreign grain did not enter the same markets as the native. Either one or the other would have lost its advantage, and the natural bounty which it enjoyed from circumstances, by doing so. Consequently the evils of an artificial scale, where grain raised under one set of circumstances fixes or modifies the price for grain raised under a different set of circumstances, were unknown in the Italian markets. But these evils by a special machinery, viz., the machinery of good and bad seasons, are aggravated for a modern state intensely, whenever she depends too much upon alien stores; and specifically they are aggravated by the fact that both grains enter the same market, so that the one by too high a price is encouraged unreasonably, the other by the same price (too low for opposite circumstances) is depressed ruinously as regards coming years; whence in the end two sets of disturbances–one set frequently from the present seasons, and a second set from the way in which these are made to act upon the future markets.

Thirdly, the Roman corn-trade did not of necessity affect her military service injuriously, and for this reason, that rural economy did not of necessity languish because agriculture languished locally; some other culture, as of vineyards, oliveta, orchards, pastures, replaced the declining culture of grain; if ploughmen were fewer, other labourers were more. It is forgotten, besides, that the decline of Italian agriculture, never more than local, was exceedingly gradual; for two hundred and fifty years before the Christian era Italy never had depended exclusively upon herself. Sardinia and Sicily, at her own doors, were her granaries; consequently the change never had been that abrupt change which modern writers imagine.

But let us indulge in the luxury of confirming what we have said by the light of contrast. Suppose the circumstances changed, suppose them reversed, and then all those evil consequence sought to take effect which in the case of Rome we have denied. Now, it happened that they were reversed; not, indeed, for Rome, who had been herself ruined as metropolis of the West before the effects of a foreign corn-dependence could unfold themselves, but for her daughter and rival in the East. Early in the seventh century, near to the very crisis of the Hegira (which dates from the Christian year 622), Constantinople, Eastern Rome, suddenly became acquainted with the panic of famine. In one hour perhaps this change fell upon the imperial city, and, but for the imperial granaries, not the panic of famine, but famine itself, would have surprised the imperial city; for the suddenness of the calamity would have allowed no means of searching out or raising up a relief to it. At that time the greatest man who ever occupied the chair of the Eastern Caesars, viz., Heraclius,[4] was at the head of affairs. But the perplexity was such that no man could face it. On the one hand Constantine, the founder of this junior Rome, had settled upon the houses of the city a claim for a weekly dimensum of grain. Upon this they relied; so that doubly the Government stood pledged–first, for the importation of corn that should be sufficient; secondly, for its distribution upon terms as near to those of Constantine as possible. But, on the other hand, Persia (the one great stationary enemy of the empire) had in the year 618 suddenly overrun Egypt; grain became deficient on the banks of the Nile–had it even been plentiful, to so detested an enemy it would have been denied–and thus, without a month’s warning, the supply, which had not failed since the inauguration of the city in 330, ceased in one week. The people of this mighty city were pressed by the heaviest of afflictions. The emperor, under false expectations, was tempted into making engagements which he could not keep; the Government, at a period which otherwise and for many years to come was one of awful crisis, became partially insolvent; the shepherd was dishonoured, the flocks were ruined; and had that Persian armament which about ten years later laid siege to Constantinople then stood at her gates, the Cross would have been trampled on by the fire-worshipping idolater, and the barbarous Avar would have desolated the walls of the glorified Caesar who first saw Christ marching in the van of Roman armies. Such an iliad of woes would have expanded itself seriatim, and by a long procession, from the one original mischief of depending for daily bread upon those who might suddenly become enemies or tools of enemies. England! read in the distress of that great Caesar,[5] who may with propriety be called the earliest (as he was the most prosperous) of Crusaders, read in the internal struggle of his heart–too conscious that dishonour had settled upon his purple–read in the degradations which he traversed as some fiery furnace (yet not unsinged), the inevitable curses which await nations who sacrifice, for a momentary convenience of bread, sacrifice for a loaf, the charter of their supremacy! This is literally to fulfil the Scriptural case of selling a birthright for a mess of pottage.