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Our means of transport are now so easily and rapidly set
in action and maintained, that it would need a war with some great
sea-power to convince us that London or Glasgow might, under certain
untoward circumstances, be starved; and as our attention has never
been drawn to the details of food-supply, we do not readily see why
there should have been any such difficulty at Rome as to call for the
intervention of the State. Perhaps the best way to realise the problem
is to reflect that every adult inhabitant needed about four and a half
pecks of corn per month, or some three pounds a day; so that if the
population of Rome be taken at half a million in Cicero's time, a
million and a half pounds would be demanded as the daily consumption
of the people.[55] I have already said that in the last three
centuries B.C. there was a universal tendency to leave the country for
the towns; and we now know that many other cities besides Rome
not only felt the same difficulty, but actually used the same
remedy--State importation of cheap corn.


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