If the farmer is borrowing to meet the exigencies of a so-called bad year, his distress is temporary, and he is likely to square himself during the next good year; but if his distress is due to the progressive deterioration of his farm, he will be unable to extricate himself. Such indebtedness is hopeless. The increasing weight of accumulated interest on the loan and the decreasing productivity of the land seal the fate of the landowner. He certainly is not in an economic position to increase his land-holdings to a point where the larger product might supply his wants. Because he does not have enough land, what little he has will be taken from him and be given to him that has both land and economic capacity. In this way a farmer will be driven off the land and the holdings of some one else increased. That is the process of concentration of landed property. If this process should appear as a general phenomenon, as it did in Rome as well as in Greece, it is a factor of momentous social significance.
The entire history of Rome is but a series of illustrations of this story.
From page 217, or 18 of 44, in Rome's Fall Reconsidered
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I was illustrating that story the other day in The Angst of Rome.
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