So writes Cyprian to Demetrianus:

You have said that all these things are caused by us, and that to us ought to be attributed the misfortunes wherewith the world is now shaken and distressed, because your gods are not worshipped by us. And in this behalf, since you are ignorant of divine knowledge, and a stranger to the truth, you must in the first place know this, that the world has now grown old, and does not abide in that strength in which it formerly stood; nor has it that vigor and force which it formerly possessed. This, even were we silent, and if we alleged no proofs from the sacred Scriptures and from the divine declarations, the world itself is now announcing, and bearing witness to its decline by the testimony of its failing estate.1

That much we have perhaps heard before, but here is a new note: "Although the vine should fail and the olive deceive and the field, parched, with grass drying with drought, should wither, what is this to Christians?" 2

Perhaps even more expressive is somewhere in Lactantius this sentence: "There will be a dreadful and detestable time in which no one would choose to live. In fine, such will be the condition of things that lamentations will follow the living and congratulations the dead."

Quite adequate illustrations to this text you may find in the pictures of misery and desolation in Salvian's "De gubernatione Dei." Is not in such conditions to be found the material basis for celibacy, asceticism, monasticism? And were not the same conditions after all responsible for Roman childlessness, though quite unaccompanied by mortification of the flesh? It may be difficult for us to understand an atmosphere of social and political doom. Let us go back then to another people, to another city, that were about to be destroyed by Rome. Jesus was carrying the cross, followed by lamenting men and women:

But Jesus turning unto them said: Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and your children. For behold, the

1 Cyprianus, to Demetrianus, iii.

2 Ibid., xx.

days are coming, in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the breasts that never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.'

Here, however, we are touching upon a subject which should be treated by itself.

It is claimed that there is but one understanding; the misunderstandings are legion. To guard against misunderstandings is impossible. Yet I know that many a charitable reader will sympathetically suggest that while the exhaustion of Roman soil was an important factor I can hardly mean to insist that it was the sole factor responsible for Roman decline and fall. For it is not credible that so rich and so complex a texture of life should depend upon one single and solitary factor.

Such would not be my assertion, nor is it my attempt. have not undertaken to explain the complex fabric of Roman life; we are dealing here with the relatively simple problem of its disintegration. All that this study shows is that the progressive exhaustion of the soil was quite sufficient to doom Rome, as lack of oxygen in the air would doom the strongest living being. His moral or immoral character, his strength or his weakness, his genius or his mental defects, would not affect the circumstances of his death: he would have lived had he had oxygen; he died because he had none. But it must be remembered that while the presence of oxygen does not explain his life, the absence of it is sufficient to explain his death.

There is one other misunderstanding which I should like to guard against. So far as argumentation is concerned, this essay might be considered a continuation to the study published some time ago, dealing with the medieval village community. reader will find there this statement:

The

Go to the ruins of ancient and rich civilizations in Asia Minor, Northern Africa or elsewhere. Look at the unpeopled valleys, at the dead

'Luke 23, 28-30.

'Simkhovitch; "Hay and History." POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, vol. xxviii, pp. 385-403, September, 1913.

and buried cities, and you can decipher there the promise and the prophecy that the law of soil exhaustion held in store for all of us. It is but the story of an abandoned farm on a gigantic scale. Depleted of humus by constant cropping, land could no longer reward labor and support life; so the people abandoned it. Deserted, it became a desert; the light soil was washed by the rain and blown around by shifting winds.1

I should hate to be responsible for a new fetish, an interpretation of historical life through exhaustion of soil. It is silly.

First of all deeply and gratefully is it felt that life with all its pain and its glory can be lived; word or brush may aspire its all too inadequate expression, but never will the scholar methodically and mechanically figure it out and interpret it.

But it is a mistake to think that social science is dealing with life. It is not. It deals with the background of life. It deals with common things, with what lives had in common, common conditions of existence, common purposes that these conditions suggest. They can and must be scientifically explained and determined, if social science is to be taken seriously. Scientific determination is accurate determination. What forces that circumscribe and govern our life must we unquestionably accept? Obviously, the physical forces. Under certain conditions we are born, we live and die. The limits of our mortal existence we cannot transgress. Nor can we change the heavenly course of suns and planets; we do not govern the seasons of the year; they regulate our life.

Within the laws of nature our lives begin and end. They limit and compass our existence. But the laws of nature without our active participation do neither feed nor clothe us. This active participation we call our work, our labor. Social labor varies in its productivity. At all times this productivity had and has its limits. These limits of the productivity of our labor become, for society, physical conditions of existence. Within these limits our entire social life must move. These limits life must accept as mandatory and implacable; to them it must adjust itself.

1 Simkhovitch, op. cit., p. 400.

The history of the productivity of our labor is the foundation. of a scientific economic history, and the backbone of any and all history. Every law, every statute, every institution has obviously some purpose. But how are we to understand the purposes of the past if we know not the conditions which those purposes were to meet? The accurate knowledge of the productivity of our labor can explain to us why things were as they were, why they became what they are and what one may expect from the future.

In this study, however, which is not concerned with the details of Rome's life, one single, major and strikingly variable productivity factor suffices to solve the problem. That factor-the exhaustion of Roman soil and the devastation of Roman provinces-sheds enough light for us to behold the dread outlines of its doom.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

VLADIMIR G. SIMKHOVITCH.

CAPITAL AND MONOPOLY

T was pointed out in a previous article that conditions of monopoly and competition in industry are supplementary,

IT

rather than antagonistic forces.' A condition of monopoly naturally engenders competition, while a condition of competition naturally develops monopoly. The question to be examined in this article is whether competition in one stage of the productive process tends to produce monopoly in another stage. For our purposes, the stages of production may be classified as those engaged in by the producers of raw material, the manufacturers, the transporters, the wholesale jobbers, the retailers, and the consumers.3 In the struggle for advantage between these various interests, the transporters have been fairly completely eliminated through the increased power of the Interstate Commerce Commission, although some years ago they were an active factor; and the consumers have never possessed ability for organization sufficient to make their power felt. In general, then, the competitive struggle today is between those engaged in the other four stages.

It is important to emphasize the fact that industry is not homogeneous in its nature. Different industries show wide variations in the relative importance of fixed capital, the standardization of the product, the elasticity of the demand, the number and comparative financial resources of competitors.

1 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, vol. xxx, p. 578.

'Monopoly may be defined as the erection of a barrier between oneself and the extreme rigors of competition. These barriers are of many kinds and varying strength, enabling the so-called monopolist to charge prices more or less independently of competition. Monopoly, then, in this conception, is not an absolute condition, but a relative one, affecting all industrial life to a greater or less degree, and attracting attention and criticism only when very obvious. The legal aspect, whether the monopoly is brought about by means of a pool, trust, holding corporation, verbal agreement, or business ethics, is disregarded, since from the economic point of view the result of each of these is the same.

'The labor stage and the capital stage are both connected with all the enumerated stages, and form a separate problem.