and fitting the earth for the production of more generous growths. Every
loaf was eaten in the sweat of the brow. All must be earned by toil. But
toil was nowhere else rewarded by so generous wages; for nowhere would a
given amount of intelligent labor produce so abundant, and, at the same
time, so varied returns of the good things of material existence.


Physical Decay of the Territory of the Roman Empire.

If we compare the present physical condition of the countries of which I
am speaking, with the descriptions that ancient historians and
geographers have given of their fertility and general capability of
ministering to human uses, we shall find that more than one-half their
whole extent--not excluding the provinces most celebrated for the
profusion and variety of their spontaneous and their cultivated
products, and for the wealth and social advancement of their
inhabitants--is either deserted by civilized man and surrendored to
hopeless desolation, or at least greatly reduced in both productiveness
and population. Vast forests have disappeared from mountain spurs and
ridges; the vegetable earth accumulated beneath the trees by the decay
of leaves and fallen trunks, the soil of the alpine pastures which
skirted and indented the woods, and the mould of the upland fields, are
washed away; meadows, once fertilized by irrigation, are waste and
unproductive because the cisterns and reservoirs that supplied the
ancient canals are broken, or the springs that fed them dried up; rivers
famous in history and song have shrunk to humble brooklets; the willows
that ornamented and protected the banks of the lesser watercourses are
gone, and the rivulets have ceased to exist as perennial currents,
because the little water that finds its way into their old channels is
evaporated by the droughts of summer, or absorbed by the parched earth