Within less than a generation later came the vast socialist decree of Diocletian, regulating all prices and wages throughout the empire. A maximum value was fixed for every kind of food—grain, wine, oil, meat, fish, vegetables and fruit. Hence such food would never be produced where the natural conditions prevented a profit within this maximum price; nor would it be transported beyond the distance within which the maximum yielded a profit. Whole districts must have been cut off from different kinds of supply by such legislation. Meanwhile the wages of labourers, of artizans, and of professions were all equally regulated, so that the best men could never have their superior ability rewarded. The prices of skins and leather, of all clothing, and of jewellery were likewise defined. The consequence must have been that the losses in bad years of supply, owing to weather and other circumstances, must have fallen wholly on the producer, who might be ruined by the whole brunt of the loss, instead of being partly compensated by a rise in prices which taxed the whole body of users. No wonder that after such a law the whole empire plunged ever deeper into poverty and confusion. The coinage depreciated even more rapidly than before; and the economic distress of such a fixed system with a falling currency must have been overwhelming. Such were the results of one of the great socialistic attempts to remedy the course of events by artificial legislation. We thus see how by the establishment of unionism, the feeding of paupers, the devolution of the empire, and the legislation on prices and wages, the socialistic policy brought to naught the greatest social organism that had yet appeared in the world. CHAPTER IV. REVOLUTION OR EVOLUTION? Those persons who are unaccustomed to consider the great effects which flow from a continuous action of small causes, are too liable to suppose that a large result can only be obtained by a violent and immediate action. They suppose that only some mighty impulse can change the face of affairs; they pray that the mountains be rent, and look to the earthquake and the tempest, not thinking that it is the still small voice that really directs. They forget that it is the humble earthworms that plough the land, and the invisible bacteria that destroy nations and alter the face of politics. Ignoring the far-reaching after-effects of action, men are led to over-do all the changes which they attempt to carry out by direct and immediate means. This is like a child who asks to have its hand cut off because its finger aches.