Page:The wealth of nations, volume 1.djvu/27

 dinates. A similar system was adopted in the case of pasture lands. But as the owners became impoverished and the towns decayed, the latifundia were divided up into small portions, which were distributed among the cultivators. These received for their labor only a sixth or even a ninth part of the year's produce. Then many of these were united together into colonies, and paid a total fixed sum every year to the owners. They were not slaves, nor yet were they free, and were the direct forerunners of the villeins or serfs of the Middle Ages.

Trade and industry were never the special characteristics of the conquering Romans; it was in usury and tax-gathering that their talents chiefly lay so far as concerns matters economic. What had already been acquired from trade rapidly broke up under the pressure of taxation; what remained existed chiefly in the eastern part of the Empire.

"Universal impoverishment, retrogression in the matter of communication, of manufactures, of art, decline of population, decay of towns, the degeneration of agriculture into more primitive forms—such was the final result of the Roman world-empire." The feudal system, which arose on the ruins of the Roman world, was, in many respects, a return to the early forms of tribal and gentile life in which so-called primitive or natural communism prevailed, and which had been the stage of social evolution obtaining among the Germanic peoples previous to their migrations.

From all this it will be seen that the conditions of life in the Middle Ages were such as to render economic science an impossibility, even had the intellectual development of the time permitted it. Nicole Oresme, bishop of Lisieux, was