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THE LAND STRUGGLE OF ROME.

AMONG all the causes that contributed to the downfall of the great Roman Empire the spread of large estates and consequent destruction of the peasant-proprietors in Italy stands first and foremost. The course of events may be expressed roughly thus:-Rome gained her Empire and conquered the world by means of great armies of small proprietors. But many of these left their holdings never to return. Their bones whitened on the plains of Spain, Africa, or Asia, while the great capitalists who followed in their track and were enriched by their conquests returned to buy up their deserted holdings. Or if they survived, and came back to Italy after twelve or twenty years' foreign service, they would often find that a strong neighbour had seized their homesteads perhaps on the plea of debt incurred in the absence of the bread-winner-and driven their helpless wives and children into the towns. For such wrongs there was no redress; possession then, as now, was nine points of the law. Or, lastly, even if they found their holdings untouched, the long years of military life had incapacitated them for the peaceful drudgery of agriculture, and they quickly gravitated towards the towns, where there were street broils and gladiatorial shows to suit their acquired tastes. Thus slowly but surely between the years 200 B.C. and 133 B.C.* the small estates with free labour gave place to large estates with slave labour. The towns, on the other hand, became crowded to repletion with evicted peasants and returned soldiers. A great cry rose up from these despairing thousands for the necessities of existence. Deprived of the rural industries and with no town industries to take the place--for in ancient societies the slaves monopolised the functions of the modern artisans-a great mass of humanity stood face to face with almost certain starvation. To avert

this the true friends of the people-the democrats-strained every nerve to put them on the land again and thus to restore to them their lost independence and selfreliance. Tiberius Gracchus was most

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conspicuous among these far-sighted legislators.

It is impossible to understand the significance of Gracchus' attempt for land reformers of all ages without a sketch of the Roman land system as it existed previously. Such a sketch may throw some light upon the land problems of modern society, and perhaps help us to decide. whether the aid of law can be called in to save us also from a moral degeneration similar to that which resulted in Rome from the absorption of the land in the hands of a few.

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In the first place, from the very earliest beginnings of the Roman community, the land was theoretically the possession of the State alone, and held by individuals merely temporarily and on sufferance. But the mistake was that State-ownership was not combined with Statetaxation, and the land consequently slipped by force of custom and prescription out of the hands of an owner who never enforced his rights. For all land, whether cultivated, waste, pasture, was granted to individuals without the exaction of any payment of rent in return. The only difference made was that cultivated land was allotted in small portions, usually to the poorer classes,— whence "allotment" was always then as now, the poor man's hope-while waste land was granted for the asking to anyone who would cultivate it, and as much as he would cultivate. Lastly, grazing land was granted to cattle farmers in far larger quantities than cultivated. Any legal limitations were easily got over then, as now, by influence or money. The rich often mistook cultivated land for waste land, and did not find out the mistake until they were comfortably settled on it, and it was too late to move. The limit

of five hundred cattle on pasture land was more honoured in the breach than the observance. But the most important limit of all-and that round which the Roman land struggle centred-was that imposed by the Licinian law of 366 B.C. According to this law, no allottee was allowed to possess more than five hundred acres of land. Thus the land of Italy might be alienated from the orignal

holders, but was forbidden to accumulate. But the combination of alienability with non-accumulation can only be effected by the imposition of a state-rent, if it can be effected at all. A state-rent makes a large uncultivated estate an unprofitable if not a ruinous concern, and thus makes la petite culture a necessity. In the absence of this state-rent at Rome, the only alternative would have been a strict enforcement of the law in spite of natural tendencies. But during the great wars in which she conquered the world, Rome-like England during the Napoleonic wars-paid the penalty for her victories in being governed at home by a government of nobles. So far was such a government from desiring to enforce the legal limit, that they openly winked at its non-observance, and when Rome emerged in 133 B.C. from a long period of storm into a period of peace, it was to find that, while the poor had been fighting the battles of their country abroad, the rich had been quietly robbing them at home in their absence. Great estates all over Italy defied the laws of the land.

Such was the state of affairs when Tiberius Gracchus flung himself into the breach. He was the Gladstone of Rome. Like Gladstone, he appointed a Commission, but for a far more drastic purpose. He could not revise rents, for there were none to revise. The Roman lords had no tenants; they had only slaves beneath them, for eviction was far more simple than sub-letting, and grazing far more profitable than wheat growing. On the contrary, Tiberius imposed a rent payable to the State, and so far anticipated Mr. Henry George. But by far his most revolutionary, though, strictly speaking, entirely legal proposal, was that the old limit of five hundred acres should be once more enforced, with the sole modification of an addition of two hundred and fifty for each son if there were not more than two. All land in private possession above this limit was to be confiscated by the Commission without any compensation to the owners, and the land thus reverting to the State was to be distributed anew to poor leaseholders in small allotments, which were to be inalienable. Thus Tiberius Gracchus, by imposing these two checks-inalienability and a state-rent-hoped to re-establish the Italian peasantry in permanent possession of the soil. In point of fact,

seventy thousand allotments were made by the Commission, who sat for about four years and were then paralysed by a political ruse worthy of modern Toryism. There were always two consuls annually appointed at Rome as supreme ministers of the State. On to one of these the duties of the Commission were laid, and the Commission itself abolished, "in order" (we may imagine the ministerial statement to have run) "to give the Honourable Commissioners a beneficial rest after four years of arduous toil." Now, by a very curious coincidence, it was discovered that the presence of this same consul was indispensably required in Illyria. This little manoeuvre brought the execution of Tiberius' Land Act to an abrupt conclusion. It was as if a Tory Government had vested the execution of Mr. Gladstone's Land Act in the Irish Secretary and then sent that gentleman on a mission to France. Such things could happen without attracting notice before the invention of the penny Press. Tiberius Gracchus himself had been murdered three years before by the party of law and order in the streets of the capital, and as most of his fellow reformers had fallen at the same time there was a lull in the business of land reform at Rome. Never again, in fact, were the proceedings of the Commission seriously resumed, and never again were precisely similar measures undertaken with precisely similar objects, although the annals of the last century before Christ are covered with land reforms.

It is interesting to see how Tiberius Gracchus' legislation was repealed. First the provision against alienation, next the small land tax, and lastly the limitation to five hundred acres, all went by the board. The seventy thousand new allottees, owing to their inexperience of agriculture and the attractions of the town, gradually left the soil to be accumulated anew by the now victorious lords.

This tendency was accelerated by the action of the false friends of the people, the demagogues, who neutralised all the good effects of Tiberius Gracchus' legislation by bringing in great poor laws, more pernicious than even those which existed in England before the abolition of the Corn Laws. The first of these was introduced in 121 B.C. by Caius Gracchus -the brother of Tiberius-and many

others were introduced afterwards by Livius Drusus, Saturninus, and Clodius. In fact, it became the chief "plank" in the platform of the city demagogues, who thus pandered to the idleness of a great city proletariat. These laws enacted that every citizen should have an inherent right to receive corn at a nominal price, or sometimes even gratis, from the State. Just as the Tory landlords profited most by our English poor laws,-which enabled the poor to live artificially at the expense of the middle classes under a grinding and otherwise impossible regime of high rents and low wages,--just so the great Tory Roman landlords profited by the poor laws of the Roman demagogues, which stayed the hand of the land reformer and threw a pernicious veil over the injustice of the rich and strong by a superficial remedy for the evils which it produced. All such laws are an opiate given by the rich to the poor to still their complaints, while they increase their real misery and degradation.

Wherever workhouses

exist side by side with palaces, the economic conditions are at fault, and the distribution of the produce of labour has been tampered with by selfish legislators. For such remedies do but "skin and film the ulcerous place." The real need is to stop the evil at its source by securing remuneration, not for the idleness, but for the labour of the people.

In Rome these pernicious laws had the double effect of increasing the attractions of city as against country life, and of destroying the corn trade of the Italian farmers. It was as if the English government had at once given the final blow to our corn-growing and depopulated our rural districts by setting up great granaries in London, where corn or bread should be had for the asking. The provinces of Rome-such as Sicily and Sardinia-were exhausted of corn in order to pauperise the Roman citizens for the benefit of the great landlords, while the broad lands of Italy were converted into sheep-walks or great parks, worked by gangs of wretched slaves, whose underground dungeons took the place of the small cottages which had formerly dotted the beautiful plains of Italy.

Again, even the law of Gracchus was made into a precedent by the governing oligarchy for adding to the evils of the State. For whenever a great general

returned from a victorious campaign he took advantage of the principle of State tenure to bring in a Bill for confiscating great tracts of land and distributing them to his soldiers. In this respect Sulla, Pompey, and Augustus acted all alike. Julius Cæsar was an honourable exception. In Italy the land passed quickly through the hands of those clumsy artificial agriculturists into those of great speculators, who were always on the alert. The soldiers themselves either swelled the town population or passed from peasants to robbers, and called for fresh armies to suppress them.

Julius Cæsar was the only land reformer at once genuine and successful in the period that intervened between the death of Gracchus and the fall of the Roman empire. He allotted a large tract of land, in fact, the whole of Campania, but made no attempt to prevent the alienation of the allotments. The consequence was that they were quickly reabsorbed, and it even seems doubtful whether the whole scheme was carried out.

After this attempt (in 59 B.C.) all land reform ceased, and the old pernicious causes-slave labour, cheap corn, and idle capital-were left to produce the old effects of a degraded town populace, an incapable and luxurious aristocracy, and a deserted Italy. Strabo, the historian, says that a traveller might go through Italy for miles upon miles without seeing a cottage.

The plain fact is that by this time (at the end of the first century) the forces in the direction of evil were too great for any individual to withstand. The poor laws, for instance, were abolished by Sulla, but street riots in Rome quickly produced the repeal of his abolition. Human affairs are such that evils which are curable if taken at the right moment, often become incurable when that moment is past. No human power could persuade the Romans to do without poor laws. And yet their existence rendered all land reform impossible. For, as long as corn was supplied almost gratis at Rome, the holdings of Italy were not only unable to pay any rent, like 500,000 holdings (according to Professor Caird) in Ireland at the present moment, but could not even supply the non-rented tenant with the necessities of existence.

Under these circumstances it was in

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writers of the period mirror the real course of events by their perpetual laments over the extinction of small and the growth of large estates. Virgil puts into graceful verse the lament of an evicted peasant, which might come from the lips of an Irish tenant. Cicero cries that the great landlords care more for red mullets than for the safety of the State. But the loss of the yeomen class was more than a mere sentimental loss to Rome. By means of them Rome had conquered the world, and now the question arose, could she keep the world without them? Augustus found it impossible to enlist soldiers from among the corrupt townsmen. "Give me back my legions," he cried, when he heard of the loss of 20,000 soldiers in Germany. Henceforth Rome had to depend on hirelings for the defence of her Empire. In the social struggle the idle and unproductive classes had won the day-the drones had killed the bees or converted them to the gospel of dronery. But these idle classes were now in their turn threatened by tribes of Northern barbarians not yet corrupted by an unhealthy banishment. from the soil into the great cities. For several centuries the Romans were able to hold these barbarians at arms' length by means of great armies of faithful mercenaries. But at last the barrier broke down, and the general corruption invaded even these disciplined hirelings. The Rhine was crossed by the Vandals and the Goths, and in the fifth century after Christ the Roman lords were robbed in turn of their stolen estates by the avenging peoples of the North. Vengeance was slow but sure.

Thus the decline of Rome goes side by side with the decline of her land system. When the Roman people lost their hold on the soil, they lost their hold on all the qualities-energy, perseverance, and discipline-which brought them to greatness. When the masses of the people were "cribbed, cabined, and confined" in the towns by the "landgrabbing" of the capitalists, they quickly lost all their sinew and muscle. people that conquered Pyrrhus and Hannibal ended by running away from

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an army of slaves under Spartacus. So profoundly dependent is even such a virtue as courage on economic conditions.

This sketch of the Roman land struggle speaks for itself. It proves-if there were any need of the proof-that the rich and powerful will not only take advantage of the letter of the law to deprive the poor and the weak of their rights, but will also violate the law both in letter and spirit if it stands in the way of their desires. For the Roman lords monopolised the land of Italy in defiance of the law of their country just as readily as the English lords take advantage of every letter of that law--and break it, if need be, to secure a like monopoly. This comparison brings out with startling. clearness the fact that the landlord class obey the laws only when such obedience is to their own interest.

E. Harold Spender.

MR. GLADSTONE ON THE CHANNEL TUNNEL."Sir Edward Watkin is one of those men who are wicked enough to desire that a tunnel should be constructed under the Channel to France. (Laughter.) Gentlemen, what is truly painful to me is that I am compelled to confess before you, and I do it publicly, that I am one of those men who are wicked enough to agree with him. (Laughter.) But there will be no difficulty upon that subject. Public opinion will settle that matter. (Hear, hear.) We believe that it will dispose of part of that luxury of terror, that indulgence in the production of panic, which unquestionably has become the most powerful agent of late years in the management of national concerns-I am afraid chiefly in retarding benefit. But while we look upon it with patience we know it will go by after awhile."

THE following quotation from the life of Bishop Fraser, by Tom Hughes, shows that thirty years ago the same evils existed, of which we now complain. Can anything be so sickening, the bishop writes, "as the system of appointments to offices of the highest trust in both departments, in spite of past warnings, which is at this very moment going on? There is just appointed to the command-in-chief in Ireland, Lord Seaton, who in the next paragraph we are informed, is in his eightieth year. They have just sent out, to command a division in the Crimea, Lord Rokeby, who is as deaf as a post. The seals of the War Office are being offered to Lord Panmure, but it is doubtful if his health will allow him to accept of them. Sir James Graham is also to give the nation the benefit of as much of his valuable time and services as gout will allow. Now here are four men to put into four of the most important administrative posts at such a crisis as this; a valetudinarian at the War Office, a gouty cripple (his naturally petulant temper probably aggravated by disease) at the Admiralty; a deaf man to lead a division, and an octogenarian to stir again into activity the dormant military enthusiasm of Ireland,

IRISH

THE Times, the Spectator, and the Saturday

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Review have at last worried the Government into proclaiming the National League. It matters very little. The powers of the National League-"broad-based upon the people's will"-cannot be destroyed by any fiat of a "five o'clock tea Cromwell" like Mr. Balfour. The proclamation will only result in the glorification of those who defy it, just as the "suspects" of 1881 became the heroes of 1882. Through jail to Westminster" is the history of many an Irish Member of Parliament. Indeed, if the executive resolves to imprison every Irishman who refuses to relinquish the right of political combination without a struggle, we shall then think shame of our fellow citizens across the channel if the present prisons are sufficient to contain those who will have to be sent to them. The next thing will be for the Government to introduce a vote in the Irish Estimates for the building of new Irish jails. Why not erect a Bastille in Dublin straight away? But let the Government remember how the last Bastille fared at the hands of the people. For so will fare their attempt, however made, to destroy the National League in Ireland.

A BLOW of this kind at the democracy of our sister isle is a blow by implication at the democracy in England. The weapons which our aristocracy have sharpened for use against them they will use in turn against us. There is already a tendency-shown in little things such as the case of Miss Cass or of the Socialist Pole-towards executive despotism in England. For such methods are infectious. When an autocratic Secretary for Ireland and a democratic Home Secretary sit in the same Cabinet, they are apt to forget the difference between the forms of government prevailing in their respective departments, and the Home Secretary is tempted to ape that insolent contempt of the people's will which is the recognised principle of his colleagues. A democracy cannot live a double life, be democratic in England and autocratic in Ireland. One principle will invade and suppress the other, The

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THIS difference in our executive methods, and this plain issue before the nation, can only be properly emphasised by Englishmen going over to Ireland and helping the Irish in their political warfare. If the Irish are imprisoned and the English go scot-free for identical actions, then the difference in our treatment of Englishmen and Irishmen will be as clear as daylight, and the people's sense of justice cannot fail to be roused. If, on the other hand, both Englishmen and Irishmen are imprisoned, then the people will realise that a man is locked up for saying in Ireland what he might say in England with impunity, and that fact when fully realised will open the eyes of many. If, lastly, both Irish and English are allowed to go untouched, then our object will have been attained without more ado, and the democratic principle will have prevailed over the autocratic.

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THE Irish Land Bill has been rendered nugatory by the refusal of the Liberal Unionists to press on the Government the all-important question of arrears. The peculiar and especial malady of the Irish peasantry at present is that they are hampered with the arrears of a rent which has been pronounced unjust by the Cowper Commission, and which they cannot pay. With the usual folly of Governments, this is just the one point which the present Ministry refuse to touch. And what is their excuse? Why, that you must not draw a distinction between debts due to landlords and debts due to other creditors. This is their "fundamental principle." One feels inclined to say with Sir William Harcourt,

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your fundamental principle is all nonsense." For is not this distinction precisely the meaning of their clauses for the revision of judicial rents? Have they introduced any clauses for the revision of shopkeepers' claims in the future, as they have with landlords'? No. Then here

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