(6) Prof. Ferrero's fallacy is capped by his proposition that "the economic crisis from which Italy has been suffering during the last twenty years is due to the increased cost of living occasioned by the introduction, from 1848 onwards, of the industrial civilisation of England and France into an old agricultural society." The confusion here defies analysis. Suffice it to say that the high cost of living in modern Italy is due to tariffs and high taxation. Sugar is dear there not because Italians consume it luxuriously--they do not and cannot--but because a particularly unintelligent policy of Protection causes them to pay for beetroot sugar produced in a country ill-suited to the growth of beetroot. Living costs more in Germany, France, and the United States than in Britain, not because those countries have only recently become "luxurious," but because they heavily tax imports. Costs of living in Rome certainly rose as Romans raised their standards of consumption; but their importation of corn from conquered provinces kept food prices lower than they would have been otherwise; and Italian agriculture was largely abandoned in favour of easier ways of making money. Prof. Ferrero supplies a partial confutation of his economic theory by his own account (i, 311) of how, in the time of Pompey, "once more the precious metals were _cheap and abundant_" after a time of scarcity, and the decadent slave system of agriculture was superseded by new forms of production. (See above, p. 79, _note_.) But abundant bullion means high prices for produce, which the Professor has declared to be a cause of depression! As to the new production, the process certainly cannot have taken place with the rapidity which his description suggests. "The hideous slave-shelters or compounds [_ergastula_], with their gangs of forced labourers, vanished from the scene, together with the huge desolate tracts of pasture where they had spent their days [?], to be replaced by vineyards, olive-groves, and orchards, now planted in all parts of the peninsula, ... estates on which the new slave immigrants contentedly cultivated the vine or the olive, or bred animals for the stable or transport, under the direction of a Greek or Oriental bailiff; ... pleasant cottages of landlords, who farmed their own holdings with the help of a few slaves." All this cannot have happened in the time of Pompey. But in any case, inasmuch as bullion was rife, prices in general must have been high, yet without "depression"; and the new demand for wine and olives, in the terms of the case, made their cultivation remunerative. But "huge pastures" cannot have been "replaced" by vineyards and olive-groves; and Italian agriculture did not in imperial times become again the thing it had been.