As subsistence is, in the nature of things, prior to conveniency and luxury, so the rural industries which procure the former must be prior to the urban industries which minister to the latter. The greater part of the capital of every growing society is therefore first directed to agriculture, afterwards to manufactures, and last of all to foreign commerce. But this natural order of things has, in all the modern states of Europe, been in many respects entirely inverted. The foreign commerce of some of their cities has given rise to their finer manufactures, and manufactures and foreign commerce together have given birth to the principal improvements of agriculture. The manners and customs which the nature of their original government introduced, and which remained after that government was greatly altered, necessarily forced them into this unnatural and retrograde order. In the ancient state of Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire, agriculture was greatly discouraged by several causes. The rapine and violence which the barbarians exercised against the ancient inhabitants interrupted the commerce between the towns and the country; the towns were deserted and the country was left uncultivated. The western provinces of Europe sank into the lowest state of poverty, and the land, which was mostly uncultivated, was engrossed by a few great proprietors. These lands might in the natural course of events have been soon divided again, and broken into small parcels by succession or by alienation; but the law of primogeniture hindered their division by succession, and the introduction of entails prevented their being divided by alienation. These hindrances to the division and consequently to the cultivation of the land were due to the fact that land was considered as the means not of subsistence merely, but of power and protection. In those disorderly times, every great landlord was a sort of petty prince.