Book Reviews

Johnson, a former editor of the En glish weekly, The New Statesman, thinks not. But in his opinion it will take a reaffirmation of moral abso lutes, including an additional ((new and secular" Ten Commandments, to rescue the modern take-off (which began in seventeenth-century Brit ain) from the conni vings of the groups which, for shorthand pur poses, he calls the Fascist Left. Mr. Johnson begins his book by doing his own Gibbon. But his ver188 sion of the famous ((decline and fall" of Rome is more subtle than the earlier attempts at explanation. It was not the decline of Roman law that signaled the end of the empire, it was an over-proliferation of laws. The earlier Roman rule, he says, was not free in that it accepted the principle of ((one man, one vote." It was ((free in the more fundamental sense as understood by Thomas Hobbes, when he wrote: (The free dom of the subject is the absence of laws.'" This is equivalent to saying that laws should be few, clear and simple.

When the laws are clear and the distinctions between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God are understood by everybody, energy is free to flow. The early Roman Republic was committed to a liberal economic process presided over by a ((night-watchman state." The political power was exercised by elite minorities who saw no reason to interfere with freedom of moveENEMIES OF SOCIETY 189 ment and of trade or with an accom panying freedom of communication, speech, occupation and religion. Citizen or Slave The flaw in all this is that if you weren't a Roman citizen, you could be a slave. This was an inheritance from the Greek world. The more that territory changed hands as the legions marched and counter marched, the more people were Hplunged ... into the servile caul dron." Dynamism was lost. With plenty of muscle power provided by the slaves, no need was perceived for technological experiment. When an inventor devised a new way of drag ging marble to the Capitol, the Em peror Vespasian paid the man off but refused to make use of the idea.

The poor, said Vespasian, must be allowed to earn a pittance. The Romans developed a taste for small-scale but expensive luxury goods from the East. Exports could pay for the luxuries up to a point. But once the provinces had learned to make pottery and textiles and grow their own grain and grapes, the balance of trade swung heavily in favor of the East. Gold taken by the Romans from conquered peoples flowed to India, the ~~sink of the metals." It did not come back recycling had not been discovered. So inflation accompanied the rise of the Caesars. The laws proliferated in the vain attempt to contain the inflation. Taxation destroyed the middle classes. Under Diocletian there were only the upper classes, the honestiores, and the lower group, the humiliores, or (teveryone else." Diocletian promulgated universal price-fixing ~~under penalty of death." It was unworkable. With populations falling and the cities deserted, the barbarians from out side the empire soon had an obvi ously superior culture.

The Dark Ages The Dark Ages were based on feudalism, but the feudal serf was not quite a slave. He sold part of his time to his lord for protection, which implied a contract. Northern Europe climbed out of darkness by its technological inventiveness. The collar-type harness and the selective breeding of larger horses enabled it to develop long-distance land trans port. The iron stirrup came under the Carolingians, enabling the ar mored knight to manage himself and his horse as a unit. The heavy iron plow changed the whole land scape as new fields were brought into production. The Romans had never developed the geared water mill, but mills became a com monplace for making hemp, (tfull ing" cloth and running iron works in the years before the thirteenth century. Populations grew, only to fall into the ~~Malthusian trap" with the Black. Death. But the plague 190 THE FREEMAN March raised the price of labor, and the serfs took to the towns. A new class grew up to mediate between the honestiores .and the humiliores.