Agriculture has been subjected for some years past in all parts of Europe, and particularly in France, to a crisis so intense and terrible as only to be compared to that which Italy passed through at the time when, by the extinction of piracy in the Mediterranean, the transport of grain from Egypt and Algeria to Rome became possible. The effect of that measure was to ruin the agriculture of the peninsula, and to compel the rural population to exile themselves from their country; but it must be admitted that the result in the end was to benefit all the nations of the Mediterranean coast by enabling them to participate in the advantages of civilisation, which until then had been the appanage of a very small number. This economic revolution, disastrous as it was to the Roman Empire, proved beneficial to humanity.

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