transportation of coal and the price and sale of coal, respectively. The legal status of the combination is examined in the eighth and final chapter. An admirable bibliography is appended, and the pages of the volume are interspersed with illustrative maps and charts. The suit of the government against the anthracite combination under the Sherman Act made available many facts in relation thereto probably not otherwise obtainable. As a result, the author was enabled to make his study a most thorough one. It seems therefore the more regrettable that in so scientific and exhaustive an examination there does not appear, so far as the reviewer can discover, any reference to the combination or alleged combination of 1871. Virtue's admirable study made no reference to it and Professor Jones seems to have followed Professor Virtue. The details of this combination are important, first, because the combination of 1871, if combination there was, seems to have been an attempt to suppress the independent coal operators; second, because it resulted in a quo warranto proceeding by the Attorney-General of Pennsylvania against certain companies for combining to raise the price of coal. It is possible that the reviewer may be in error, but so far as his information extends this is the first court proceeding in the United States brought against a combination by either a state or the federal government. It is true that this part of the history of the anthracite combination which is omitted by the author constitutes perhaps the most insignificant and least important portion of it. Yet in so able and complete a study the omission seems an unfortunate one. The experiments with special land taxes of the western Canadian provinces is the subject of an able essay by Archibald Stalker, entitled Taxation of Land Values in Western Canada (Montreal, Printed for McGill University, 1914; 56 pp.). After a brief survey of the history of the movement and an analysis of the present situation in each province, Mr. Stalker presents statistics which, he concludes, "do not maintain the statement that under the so-called 'Single-tax,' population and the value of buildings increase at a greater ratio than do land values." He considers the western system merely a device "developed to meet conditions peculiar to those rapidly growing cities where land speculation was hindering consolidation and central development." Super-Tax (London, Gee and Company, Ltd., 1915; 99 pp.) is a little manual, written by R. A. Wenham, an English accountant, dealing with the additional income tax imposed upon large incomes. This tax was first introduced in 1910 but the act was seriously amended in Full directions are furnished for "filling up" the official form in accordance with the provisions of the new act. 1914. POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY TH ROME'S FALL RECONSIDERED HE great Roman writers with whom we are familiar seem to have been quite conscious of Rome's progressive disintegration. The testimony of the eyewitnesses of the process is of course of the utmost importance. Let us hear to what fundamental factors they themselves attributed the decline of their commonwealth. I Probably no handy quotation has pursued us through our school years with such perseverance as Pliny's "Latifundia perdidere Italiam, jam vero et provincias." The elder Pliny was not merely a man of great learning, but a much traveled statesman of large and varied experience. Is it not interesting that he is not presenting us with a catalogue of factors that were leading Rome to its destruction? On the contrary, without any apology he is crisply pointing to one predominating factor, which he names. The large estates, the latifundia, were ruining Rome as well as its provinces. More rhetorical in form, but similar in its meaning, is the arraignment of the vast latifundia and their owners in Seneca's letters. Seneca himself was one of the richest land owners of Rome, but as a statesman he gave warning, in public, of what the wealthy landowners did not care to hear in private. Seneca asks: "How far will you extend the bounds of your possessions? A large tract of land, sufficient heretofore for a whole nation, is scarce wide enough for a single lord."3 In fact, Cicero had already reported the statement of the tribune Philippus that the entire commonwealth could not muster two thousand property owners.' The concentration of landed property must have been amazing. The latifundia, according to one view, therefore, were the cause of ruin; but there was a more popular version of the decline, namely, corruptio, the corruption of morals, the corruption brought by wealth, the corruption brought by poverty, the all-pervading moral corruption of Rome. Livy invites us to follow first the gradual sinking of the national character, later on the more rapid tempo of its downward course until the days are reached when "we cannot bear our diseases nor their remedies." And what great Roman of that period did not complain of corruption? Read Tiberius's famous letter to the Senate, which Tacitus has transmitted to us. The Senate complained of luxury and corruption and called on the emperor for action and Tiberius answered: 2 That these abuses are the subject of discussion at every table and the topic of conversation in all private circles, I know quite well. And yet, let a law be made with proper sanctions, and the very men who call for a reform will be the first to make objections. The public peace, they will say, is disturbed; illustrious families are in danger of ruin. . . . ... 3 Perhaps the most striking expression of the progressive moral deterioration of the Romans is in Horace's ode "Ad Romanos" 5: "Quid non damnosa dies imminuit? Aetas parentum pejor avis tulit nos nequiores, mox daturos vitiosiorem progeniem "-What does ruinous time not impair? The age of our parents, more degenerate than that of our grandfathers, made us even more worthless and we will give birth to a still more vicious progeny! Cheerful prospect! But why such a "Non esse in civitate duo millia hominum qui rem haberent." Cicero, De Officiis ii, 73. 'Livius, i. 'Tacitus, Ann., iii, 54. *Among the picturesque characterizations of Roman degeneracy Columella deserves a very high place with his "Nam sic juvenum corpora fluxa et resoluta sunt, ut nihil mors mutatura videatur." For so limp and dissolute are bodies of the young men, that death seems to make no change in them! Columella, i, 1. 'Horatius, Odae, iii, 6. note of despair? What is the cause of this moral corruption and degeneracy of which all Roman writers of the period complain? In that very same ode Horace tells us why he takes so desperate a view of things. The great deeds of the Romans were the deeds of a sturdy farmer race, of the "mascula proles rusticorum militium, docta versare glebas Sabellis ligonibus"-and these farmers' sons existed no longer. If they could not maintain themselves on their farms, still worse were the chances for a respectable existence in Rome; there they lost what little they had and became demoralized, dependent paupers.❜ The two complaints, the two Roman explanations of their own decline and disintegration reduce themselves, therefore, to one single explanation. For it is clear that the latifundia and corruption are but different aspects of the same social phenom If the moral disintegration was due to the disappearance of the self-supporting, self-respecting farmer class, and the inordinate wealth and fantastic luxury of the small upper class, the latifundia were but a real-estate expression of the same phenomenon. The place of innumerable small farms was taken by extraordinarily large estates-the latifundia. I do not doubt for a moment that the Romans were quite conscious that the latifundia and corruption were but different aspects of the same phenomenon. Take, for instance, Sallust, who states it very clearly in his so-called epistles to Cæsar : When the people were gradually deprived of their lands, and idleness and want left them without a place to live on, they began to covet other men's property and to regard their liberty and the interests of their country as objects for sale. Thus the people who had been sovereign and who had governed all nations, became gradually degenerate; and instead of maintaining their common dominion brought upon themselves individual servitude.3 We are therefore justified, I believe, in stating that the con 'Horatius, Odae, iii, 6. 'Juvenalis, iii, 21 ff.; Martialis, iv, 5. 'Sallust, i, 5. temporary witnesses of the decline of Rome had but one explanation of its cause; but while some emphasized its moral aspect and others its economic, still others, like Sallust or Pseudo-Sallust, have emphasized the political effect of the economic and moral disintegration of Rome. The small farms disappeared. Why did they disappear? If we go back again to Roman literature to see just how the small farms disappeared and just how their place was taken by single latifundia, we find little material that may be considered as a direct answer to our question. Such little material as we do find seems to suggest violence. Thus we are told in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius how the rich man after he despoiled his poor neighbor's flocks "resolved to dispossess him of his scanty acres and, inventing a fictitious quarrel over the boundaries of their lands, claimed the whole property for himself." * An intimation of similar proceedings is to be found in Sallust's "Jugurthine War": The parents and children of the soldiers, meantime, if they chanced to dwell near a powerful neighbor, were driven from their homes. Thus avarice, leagued with power, disturbed, violated and wasted everything without moderation or restraint, disregarding alike reason and religion and rushing headlong, as it were, to its own destruction.' Similar is the meaning of Horace's famous "Ode on Roman Luxury and Avarice: Quid quod usque proximos Revellis agri terminos et ultra Salis avarus? pellitur paternos In sinu ferens deos Et uxor et vir sordidosque natos.3 These and one or two similar stories are about the only material at hand which bears directly on the wiping-out of 1 Apuleius, Metam., ix, 35. 'Horatius, Od., ii, 18. 'Sallust, Jugurt., xli. 'Quintilian in his Apes Pauperis, xiii, 4; Seneca, Epist., 90. |