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 wonder that Constantine should have transported this wretched practice, this panem et circenses indulgence, to his favourite city, and perhaps we cannot censure him very severely for doing so. He was only following an imperial tradition, and it would be too much to expect that he should have foreseen its pernicious and degrading consequences. Unhappily, the city population became in great part a set of mere pleasure-loving loungers, without serious thought, without sense of duty, or much care for the future. This, indeed, was a bad beginning. Gibbon notes one significant fact, which marks with fatal clearness the utter decay of all manly qualities. So unable were the emperor's degenerate subjects to endure the military profession, that they would cut off the fingers of their right hand rather than be pressed into the service of their country. The empire had to fight its battles with Goths and Germans—good soldiers indeed, but as dangerous for the Romans wholly to rely on as the Sepoys would be to us. Almost everything, under such circumstances, depended on the emperor's personal character, and if he were weak or vicious, the entire fabric of which he was the head was in imminent jeopardy. At the same time, the greatest of men could do nothing more than arrest for a time the decline of the Roman world.

There was thus but little promise of a really noble future for the Eastern empire. Its first beginnings were fraught with evil, and it must have soon perished ingloriously, had it not still retained some of those lessons of order and of freedom which Rome had taught the world.