“It was not merely that the disasters of the war had opened the eyes of public men to abuses which had grown up among them; it was not that they hastened to take measures by which such disasters might be prevented from occurring again. Not so much foresight as this was required. The question was at once simpler and more urgently pressing: it was how to prevent the cultivation of the country from falling into a condition of permanent decay.... Not only did it become necessary to inquire of political economy what means there were of increasing the wealth of a whole nation at once, but other reforms, less obviously adapted to the immediate need, were now eagerly carried into effect.”[7]
This passage does not refer to Italy and the Roman government after the great war, but to Prussia after she had succumbed to Napoleon and was forced to rest from sheer exhaustion. This rest, skilfully used by statesmen of genius, meant for Prussia recovery, and the opening of a great era of prosperity. If Rome in like manner could have given rest to a weary Italy, and brought all her practical skill to bear on the work of healing and mending, the next two centuries might have been far happier ones for her and for the world. But it is hard for young nations, as for young men, to realise the need of rest, and all the harder in ancient Italy, where fighting had hardly ceased to be looked on as “the natural industry of a vigorous State.” The Roman Senate was not ripe enough in knowledge of human nature to understand the mischief, moral as well as material, that a long war can cause, especially if the enemy has been in your country harrying and devouring, no one knowing when his turn will come to be ruined. And, indeed, we may doubt whether even if Rome’s leading men had been able to understand the nature of the mischief, they would have had the skill to discover and apply the necessary remedies.
This mischief and its results must be the subject of this chapter, for without getting some idea of it we cannot understand the perils to which civilisation was exposed in the next two hundred years by Roman degeneracy, or the way in which they were eventually overcome. But I must just glance, to start with, at the policy actually pursued by the Senate in the period following the war, which placed Rome in the position of arbiter of the whole Mediterranean world, and mistress of a territory many times as large as Italy.