carried to the highest pitch of physical improvement, and which thus
combined the natural and artificial conditions best fitting it for the
habitation and enjoyment of a dense and highly refined and cultivated
population, are now completely exhausted of their fertility, or so
diminished in productiveness, as, with the exception of a few favored
oases that have escaped the general ruin, to be no longer capable of
affording sustenance to civilized man. If to this realm of desolation we
add the now wasted and solitary soils of Persia and the remoter East
that once fed their millions with milk and honey, we shall see that a
territory larger than all Europe, the abundance of which sustained in
bygone centuries a population scarcely inferior to that of the whole
Christian world at the present day, has been entirely withdrawn from
human use, or, at best, is thinly inhabited by tribes too few in
numbers, too poor in superfluous products, and too little advanced in
culture and the social arts, to contribute anything to the general moral
or material interests of the great commonwealth of man.



Causes of this Decay.

The decay of these once flourishing countries is partly due, no doubt,
to that class of geological causes whose action we can neither resist
nor guide, and partly also to the direct violence of hostile human
force; but it is, in a far greater proportion, either the result of
man's ignorant disregard of the laws of nature, or an incidental
consequence of war and of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny and misrule.
Next to ignorance of these laws, the primitive source, the causa
causarum, of the acts and neglects which have blasted with sterility and
physical decrepitude the noblest half of the empire of the Caesars, is,