In order to feed, amuse, and clothe crowded city-populations; to carry through the construction of the magnificent monuments whose ruins we still admire; to provide work for the industries and arts of the cities,—agriculture was, little by little, ground down by ever-increasing burdens. The position of the peasant, in the solitude of the depopulated countryside, became ever more sad and gloomy, just as the cities became fairer, bigger, fuller of amusement and festivals. The impulse towards the cities increased, and one day the Empire awoke to find that its cities were swarming with beggars, idlers, vagabonds, masons, plasterers, sculptors, painters, dancers, actors, singers—in short, the whole tribe of the artisans of pleasure and of luxury. But in the fields, which were expected to feed all these men who had crowded into the cities to work or to idle, there was a dearth of peasants to cultivate the land. Also, with the disappearance of the rural population, the problem of recruiting the army, which drew its soldiers then, as always, from the country, became increasingly serious. While the cities tricked themselves out with magnificent monuments, the Empire was threatened with a dearth of bread and of soldiers. It must be owned that the Empire struggled against this menace with desperate vigour. It introduced the villeinage of the soil. It tried to bind the peasants to the land. It established heredity of trade or calling. But the effort was fruitless. Aggravated by one of the most tremendous intellectual blunders in the annals of history, the crisis became insoluble. The agriculture of the Empire, and with it the Empire itself, received its death-blow. The East and the West split apart, and, left to itself, the West went to pieces. The greatest of the works of Rome, the Empire founded by her in Europe, including the immense territory bounded by the Rhine and the Danube, lay a vast ruin: a ruin of shattered monuments, of peoples relapsed into barbarism, of perished arts, of forgotten tongues, of laws thrown to the four winds, of roads, villages, cities razed from the face of the earth, swallowed up in the primeval forest which slowly and tenaciously thrust out its tentacles, in that cemetery of a past civilisation, and entwined the giant bones of Rome! But the reader will say: “But that is not happening, and never will happen, to contemporary civilisation. Even if it cannot be denied that there is a certain analogy between the history of the first two centuries of the Empire and that of modern times, the analogy stops short at this point. The world will never witness another catastrophe like that of the Roman Empire; or at any rate, nobody now alive will witness it.”