Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/142

132 character, 'the small farmers,' the 'hardy dwellers on the flanks of the Apennines,' who were gone.

"The period of the Antonines was a period of sterility and barrenness. The human harvest was bad." Augustus offered bounties on marriage until 'Celibacy became the most comfortable and most expensive condition of life.' "Marriage," says Metellus, "is a duty which, however painful, every citizen ought manfully to discharge."

"The mainspring of the Roman army," says Hodgkin, "for centuries had been the patient strength and courage, capacity for enduring hardships, instinctive submission to military discipline of the population which lined the ranges of the Apennines."

Berry states that an "effect of the wars was that the ranks of the small farmers were decimated, while the number of slaves who did not serve in the army multiplied." Thus 'Vir gave place to Homo,' real men to mere human beings.

With the failure of men grew the strength of the mob, and of the emperor, its exponent. "The little finger of Constantine was stronger than the loins of Augustus." At the end "the barbarians settled and peopled the Roman Empire rather than conquered it." "The Roman world would not have yielded to the barbaric were it not decidedly inferior in force." Through the weakness of men, the Emperor assumed divine right. Dr. Zumpt says, "Government having assumed godhead, took at the same time the appurtenances of it. Officials multiplied. Subjects lost their rights. Abject fear paralyzed the people, and those that ruled were intoxicated with insolence and cruelty."

"The Emperor," says Professor Seeley, "possessed in the army an overwhelming force over which citizens had no influence, which was totally deaf to reason or eloquence, which had no patriotism, because it had no country, which had no humanity, because it had no domestic ties." "There runs through Roman literature a brigand's and a barbarian's contempt for honest industry." "The worst government is that which is most worshipped as divine."

So runs the word of the historian. The elements are not hard to find. Extinction of manly blood; extinction of freedom of thought and action; increase of wealth gained by plunder; loss of national existence.

XXXII. So fell Greece and Rome, Carthage and Egypt, the Arabs and the Moors, because, their warriors dying, the nation bred real men no more. The man of the strong arm and the quick eye gave place to the slave, the pariah, the man with the hoe, whose lot changes not with the change of dynasties.

XXXIII. Other nations of Europe may furnish illustrations in greater or less degree. Germany guards her men, and reduces the waste of war to a minimum. She is 'military, but not warlike,' and this