D. 305, when the
Emperor Diocletian abdicated; and there it was that Adams broke
down on the steps of Ara Coeli, his path blocked by the
scandalous failure of civilization at the moment it had achieved
complete success. In the year 305 the empire had solved the
problems of Europe more completely than they have ever been
solved since. The Pax Romana, the Civil Law, and Free Trade
should, in four hundred years, have put Europe far in advance of
the point reached by modern society in the four hundred years
since 1500, when conditions were less simple.
The efforts to explain, or explain away, this scandal had been
incessant, but none suited Adams unless it were the economic
theory of adverse exchanges and exhaustion of minerals; but
nations are not ruined beyond a certain point by adverse
exchanges, and Rome had by no means exhausted her resources. On
the contrary, the empire developed resources and energies quite
astounding. No other four hundred years of history before A.D.
1800 knew anything like it; and although some of these
developments, like the Civil Law, the roads, aqueducts, and
harbors, were rather economies than force, yet in northwestern
Europe alone the empire had developed three energies -- France,
England, and Germany -- competent to master the world. The
trouble seemed rather to be that the empire developed too much
energy, and too fast.
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