Someone will say: “However that may be, if this scarcity which we are experiencing is the most obvious symptom of the excessive urbanisation from which our civilisation is suffering, the suffering cannot be a very serious matter; it must be far from assuming the grave and dangerous aspect which it bore in the time of the Roman Empire. So in this respect also we can consider ourselves lucky; this excessive urbanisation does not cause us more than a certain material uneasiness, which is felt by the middle and lower classes in the cities. In the Roman Empire, on the other hand, it produced a historical catastrophe.” All that is true, without a doubt, but precisely on this account ought the lesson, with which the history of the fall of the Roman Empire is pregnant, to be read and pondered. In the Roman Empire, too, for a long time, just as now in Europe and America, this excessive urbanisation only occasioned a by-no-means intolerable material uneasiness to the most numerous and poorest classes of town-dweller. In the first and second centuries,—that is to say, in the two most prosperous and splendid centuries of the Empire,—numerous inscriptions remind us of gifts made by rich citizens or precautions taken by the cities to meet the scarcity of victuals which pressed hard upon the poorer classes. It is scarcely necessary to mention Rome in this connection, so notorious is the fact. From the day when it became the metropolis of a vast Empire, the scarcity of victuals became a permanent feature of the city; and the State had to furnish the city with the famous _frumentationes_, which were, in the last two centuries of the Republic and throughout the Empire, one of Rome’s most serious preoccupations. Mistress of a mighty Empire, Rome was for centuries sure of being obeyed in the most distant provinces by the people that her sword had conquered; but there was never a day in the year when she was sure of keeping the wolf from the door!