MASTER NEGA TIVE NO. 91-80105 MICROFILMED 1991 COLUMBIA UNIVERSTTY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of ihe "Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project Funded by the NATIONAL ENT)oiV\\IENT FOR THI . _^ »-.^>.. ,^. .". »„ „ -I, < * 7_ _ i Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Libraiy COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United Stales Code - concerns tlic making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material... Columbia Universit}^ Library reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would m\-o!\-c ^-lOialior ;^^^the copyright law. AUTHOR: BLUNi 5 HERBERT WILLIAM TITLE: CAUSES OF THE DECLINE OF THE m m m FLA CE OXFORD D A T E : 1887 Restrictions on Use: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT BIBUOCT? A PHICJVfTrROFORM TARGET Master Negative # Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record •;•■ I 874.08 |B628 Blunt, Herbert William. Oxford. B. I Blr^„t,4'IiST''"' '^- '^'■'°' - 43 p. 21 J'". iL ?«Tr"''^' -R^P"bHc, B. c. 265-30. prize essay. I. Title. II. Title : Arnold Title from Peabody Inst, ) A 13-1444 Baltimore. Printed by t. C. TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA ' FILM SIZE: 2^ r^ m or^r^TT^^r^ IMAGE PLACFMENf-TAl^-IB HB ^^^^^^^^^ RATIO:___JZ DATE FTrMED:_^__-_2_$r^ INITIALS 0^ R - --^SEARCH PUBUrATTDMS. INC ^Nnnry^^^f^Fk';^-^ T"T r » # ' E Association for information and Image Management 1 1 00 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1 1 00 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter 1 2 3 II iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii Inches 4 iiiili TTT 1 5 4 ii 8 1.0 I.I 1.25 9 10 II 12 13 14 15 mm iiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiili 1 4.5 tSA 143 171 Gii&u 2.8 12 3.6 1.4 TTT I I I I 4 2.5 2.2 2.0 1.8 1.6 I I T ''^'■|''^''[''M''[''''| I MflNUFfiCTURED TO flllM STflNDRRDS BY APPLIED IMAGE, INC. THE CAUSES OF THE T DECLINE OF THE ROMAN COMMONWEALTH Zbc Hvnolt) prise Bssa? for 1887 BY HFRBERT W. BLUNT, B.A. LATE SCHOLAR OF ORIEL COLLEGE MOLE RUIT SUA B. H. BLACKWELL, 50 & 51 BROAD STREET LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHAU., & CO. 1887 / THE CAUSES OF THE Columbia ©ntbt«ftj> mt^tCitpotJfetogork UBRARY m t DECLINE OF THE ROMAN COMMONWEALTH Zbc arnoI& prise iBssa^ fov IS87 BY HERBERT W. BLUNT, B.A. LATE SCHOLAR OK ORIKL COLLEGE MOLE RUIT SUA B. H. BLACKWraL, 50 & 51 BROAD STREET LONDOxN: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO. 1887 THE CAUSES OF THE DECLINE OF THE ROMAN COMMONWEALTH. n ;'l^ (IG \^ The fall or decline of a body politic, as it has often been pointed out, is solely the result of its own defects ; and violence, to be truly successful, must be only the outward expression of internal mis- chief Save under this condition, victory in reality rests with the vanquished even in their hour of defeat,— with the Gallo-Roman, for example, in France, and in Norman England with the Saxon. Though the statement is doubtless a commonplace, the fact is of the highest importance ; and specially so where, as in the case of Republican Rome, the proximate cause of downfall is a genius such as that of Gaius Julius, supplemented by the only less original talent of Octavian, and where accordingly causes of revolution less personal, and therefore more radical, are only too easily over- looked. We are too apt to forget that that imperialism in which republican ideas found their euthanasia was not in any true sense the destroyer, and that Pharsalus, Thapsus and Munda, Philippi and Actium were in fact battles fought over a dead Commonwealth. We stand in need of the reminder that the history of the decline of the elder Rome is a study in pathology. But in thus limiting the inquiry we have really accomplished very little. ' Death from natural causes' is a large verdict which can never satisfy science. The autopsy, too, of a political organism is a process which has no perfect parallel in the details of the dissecting-room. Diagnosis indeed is easy ; for the symptoms of governmental paralysis, and of the derangement of economic and social functions, are in general but too obvious in discontent, lawlessness, and destructive agitation. But the problems which rise next in order are far more complex than in the case of the individual. The reasons for this are plain. Subjects for demonstration are rare and seldom presented in their entirety. Experimentation is impossible, and the inductions made from necessarily incomplete historical records are of very uncertain application to any particular case. Causes are never simple and hardly ever merely composite. And finally, reciprocal causation often makes the discovery of separate efficients impossible, and confines investigation to very special com- binations. In truth the data are neither fully adequate nor indepen- A 2 • dent Such drawbacks, which show in some sort the limitations of any political subject, are very apparent in the case of Repubhcan Tnd yet the analogy of vital organisation is most pertinent and most helpful It directs our attention to the more essential pomts ; hints at congenital defects of constitution, at imperfect adaptation to a chan-incr environment, at the results of strain and of excess, at irregu- larities of diet and assimilation— in fine, at any and every error in the nature or the nurture of the Roman state which can possibly have proved fatal. , . ^ , Followincr then the lead of physical analogies, we propose to ask whether there was any fatal imperfection in the nature of the Common- wealth which must have infallibly led to its decline, and we shall endeavour to show that ils constitution was all but irretrievably de- fective and cure hardly conceivable. We shall proceed to inquire Avhether the environment and history of the Republic -her external circumstances-were not of a kind to precipitate rather than to arrest disease, and whether things pohiical and social and, above all, facts economic, did not accentuate the decadence; while, finally we shall attempt to make it manifest that there was no power in the Common- wealth able and willing to regenerate it ard to save it, that its death was a necessary condition of its resurrection in a modified and chansred form. , , . ^, We would not raise the question whether the empire was the youth or the old age of Rome. We would leave as it stands the controversy as to the possibility of an earthly immortality for nations . We would wish, however, to demonstrate that the Roman constitution was in its essential nature wholly unworkable ; that remedies were at the first not applied and from an early date even inapplicable ; that Rome's extended suzerainty, howsoever acquired, hastened, though it did not originate, her decline; while econonaic causes co-operated with constitutional, if they co-operated only. Primarily the cause of downfall was the normal development of the Roman Constitution. The Roman Constitution is of course not to be described in its leni-th and breadth and height, within the narrow limits of this essay. But its main defects are not hard to define. It was not a rigid con- stitution, still less a flexible one ; and, with the faults of both, it pos- sessed the advantages of neither. It P'-^S^^^^^i^V l^^H TnXress necessarily in the direction of utter incompetence. It failed to progress, but its stereotvpincr was always of a fi^lse tendency. Its liberalism was inefficient or harmful, even when sincere. Its conservatism was traught with perhaps even greater danger. It is the standing monument m history of logical inconsistency, unredeemed by practical efficiency. These allegations we shall proceed to make good. ' As long, says Mommsen, ' as there was a Roman community, in spite of changes ot form, its settled principles were :— that the magistrate had absolute 1 On one solution of which depend Lucan's primary causes of Rome's decline : Invida fatorum series stimmisque negatiun Stare diu. Phars. I. 70. i. In se ma^na ruttnt. Id. I, Si, ^ i command; that the council of elders was the highest authority in the state ; and that every exceptional resolution required the sanction of the sovereign, or, in other words, of the community of the people '.' The constitution was, as Sallust puts it, impermm legitimuin ^ a contra- diction in terms, a congeries of anomalies. How then did the Republic for nearly 500 years preserve her con- stitution ? Simply by shelving it. The magistrate was autocratic, but hedged in with such restrictions that he in general ignored his great position and was content to act as a vestry-clerk. The senate had wo potestas, but, through the magistracy, secured m\ic\i potefiiia. And the sovereign-people, — really sovereign in Rome, on the Austinian theory or any other— being incapable and moreover good-natured, shut its eyes and ignored speculative politics. Every factor in the" government enjoyed either more or less than its constitutional rights, never those rights themselves. No factor in the state renounced its rights ; conservatism barred the way. No factor performed its duties ; liberalism obstructed. And the natural consequence was that when a time of strain came, there came also an era of factious legislation, which upset all things constitutional, save and except the pernicious customs and charters on which the three orders based their incompatible rights. The machinery broke down like the constitutional systems of Poland and of the Holy Roman Empire. The constitution proved to be ' con- stituted anarchy ' ; its elements were all so absolute as to be out of relation one to another ; and abstract freedom from limitations is con- crete amorphism. To borrow a metaphor, the branches of the tree were severed, and, when in complete disjunction from their common Hfe, had only rottenness before them. The main theory of Roman government was false. A vestry where the chairman decides absolutely, and where the members of the vestry have absolute authority, and, moreover, are appointed by some method which is neither nomination by the chairman nor election by the rate- payers, nor anything which will in any way bring them into harmony with chairman or parish, represents with some fidelity this republican system. But this is not all ; there are the ratepayers to be reckoned with, who also have an absolute voice in the policy of the board. They elect the chairman, but they elect him on the nomination of his pre- decessor, who may refuse or accept candidates apparently at his own sweet will. Further, there is not one chairman only, but at least two ; each with a power, more or less under control of custom and tradition it is true, but still absolute. And finally the negative of any chairman is more powerful than the affirmative of a colleague. There is no mutual responsibility, and no common action, and accordingly there is no policy in the stricter sense. And, alas ! no higher power from without can come down upon the vestry and compel it to reform itself, for this paradoxical board rules the whole known world. * Hist. Rom. Eng. Trans., Popular Edition^ i. cap. 5. vol. I. p. 86. ^ Sail. Cat. 6. That all this is no mere extravagance may be easily shown from the facts. Take, for example, the procedure of legislation. Apart from the curiate assembly, which, except as an instrument of obstruc- tion to measures not purely legislative, was, before Rome attained her highest prosperity, a mere formal survival, there were three powers to be reckoned with — magistrate, senate and people ; the last in its centuries, or in its tribes according to certain traditional regulations apparently based on the nature of the bills in question ^ Legislation proper was in its substance vested conjointly in the senate (or rather in the magistrate in council) and in the people. How then did each factor in government bear its part in legislation ? In practice, though not in theory, every bill was first submitted to the senate. A bill could only be introduced by a magistrate, for the senate was a council of advice merely, and could not originate. But suppose it submitted ; it was discussed, of right, by the princeps senatus and the principal magistrates, and, of privilege, by such other senators as the presiding magistrate thought fit to call on for an opinion, and so to distinguish from the pedan'i or silent members. Amendments might be directly proposed by the speakers, and irrelevant views on general politics ventilated. The bill itself might be dropped by its proposer, or he might constitute any of the sententiae offered a sub- stantive motion. If the meeting were not adjourned by the approach of night, and the motion escaped the veto of the tribunes of the commons or the arbitrary discretion of the president, it might proceed to a division formal or informal, and if adopted by discessio or otherwise, it attained, if stopped, the extra-legal position of a senatus auctoritas '^, or, if not stopped by hilercessio, became something analogous to a Greek Trpo^ouXfu/Mo, a senatus consultum which, if it concerned matters of mere temporary administration, was law, provided that a magistrate would and could enforce it ^ If, however, the bill dealt with constitutional and not administrative questions, it was referred to the people. It was ' promulgated ' — exposed for a legal trinundinum to public criticism, and then referred to the comitia where it was introduced by a magistrate. If the comitial meeting was not prevented by the spectio* of some higher magistrate who volunteered de caelo servare and so by a religious fraud postponed the assembly sine die — and dies comitiales were few and far between — if possible a vote was taken. If possible : for the auspices might be unfavourable, the weather report ominous, some one might fall with epilepsy, or a preceding ^ The distinction o{ populi comitia tributa and plebis comitia tributa would appear untenable — (a) because the authority of a late jurist has no weight as against the inference from contemporary silence; {b) because Festus s. v. populi scitum may be held as a positive authority against the distinction ; {c) because the use of populi scitum by writers under the empire (e. g. by Tac. Ann. III. 58) seems its normal one. ■'' Cf. Cic. ad Fam. I. 2, a motion vetoed by C. Cato tamen est perscripta, ' E. g. the restriction on liberae legationes, passed Cicerone cos^y though only a Senatus consultum^ was fully binding. * Bibulus' spcctio against Caesar and Sestius' proposal to carry on a permanent spectio are notorious. i '^■4 concio might be prolonged till sunset, or a fraud might be perpetrated like that which saved Rabirius in 63 B.C. However, these dangers tided over, the populus, which had no representation, and, except in condones dominated by an unenfranchised mob and dependent on a magistrate's will \ no discussion, might vote, tributim and not viritim^ its simple Uti rogas or Antiquo, and still the bill was not safe. For here too, before the results of the voting were declared, the interposition of a tribune sufficed not merely to suspend but to stop the motion. In fact the whole system was one of negation, and with such legislative machinery constitutional reform was naturally im- possible. Not only had the old order a prescriptive and presumptive superiority; by its very weight it blocked reform-schemes. And uniformly Roman government worked on the block system. Practically no doubt the senate could and did find a magistrate willing to make the relationes it desired, and to select for divisions such of its sententiae as were acceptable to the majority. It could further find magistrates to enforce its consulta, i.e. to make them law; for the magistrates were annual, and, even if not senatorian at heart, a magistrate knew that his future, when his year of office closed, was largely dependent on his harmonious co-operation with the senate. But, given a magistrate hostile to the senate, he could paralyse the supreme council throughout his political career. His edicts e.g. as praetor ran as law, when Senatus consulta which he refused to enforce did not run. His veto as tribune or his collegal intercession - stopped their action completely. Positively he could perhaps do little, for he had colleagues who might be won; but one negative countervailed many affirmatives. If others were absolute, so was he. The col- lective responsibility of a cabinet was as yet unevolved, and the magistracy was anything but unitary. The system was in fact, as Niebuhr notes, not unlike that of Prussia before the rise of Harden- berg and Stein ; and as the latter resulted in Auerstadt and Jena, so did the former in Pharsalus and Actium. For the senate, de facto supreme in legislation, was exposed to the negative of any tribune, a weapon secure, save in the face of national danger, to any party or any adventurer— an incongruity which might have wrecked a system stronger than the Roman. The evolution indeed of the tribunate of the commons from the right of individual redress, and from the personal inviolability of the leges sacratae was a natural one and on the lines of general con- stitutional progress. If, too, plebeian consuls as leaders of opposition might exercise a constitutional veto,^ why not extend this power ? but once granted the tribunal power was looked upon as the Palladium of the people and could never be recalled. Accordingly, in the interests of order as against liberty, crime and * Cf. Cic. ad Att. IV. i. 6, habui concionem ; omnes magistratus . . . dederunt. * Collegal intercession wasy however, extremely rare. Spectio, Obnuntiatio and purchased tribunal intercessions took its place. Yet, cf. the case of the coss. of 51 B.C., and for praetorian intercession cf. Cic. in Verr. I. 46. ' Cf Mommsen, Hist. Rom. 11. cap. 2, vol. I. p. 386. murder, bribery and treachery were employed, and the Gracchi and many after them, hke some before them, perished in order to keep the state-machinery from deadlock. They fell martyrs not so much in the cause of great ideals as to the exigencies of government. For the rest, the union of senate and magistracy during Rome's struggles for hegemony in Latium, and for existence first and then empire against Carthage, enabled the government to go on. The political faine'ance of the people, in its changing senses, during the great wars of Rome, the financial supervision exercised by the senate, and the impossibility of carrying on prolonged foreign wars without an organised bureau for foreign affairs, such as was the senate, humbled the fuglemen of the political sovereign, and they in many cases took the pay of the nobility and did the senate yeoman's service \ The marked incapacity, too, of the popular favourites — of C. Flaminius at the Thrasymene lake and of INI. Varro at Cannae — helped to make the senate de facto a strong oligarchy. It was the. old houses, the Fabii and the Scipiones, that made Rome's prosperity. It was that Flaminius who had ignored the senate and appealed directly to the tribes in 232 b. c, who failed ignominiously against the foe over whom the aristocratic victors of Metaurus and Zama pre- vailed. And the precedent accordingly of Flaminius' home-policy was not followed till the days of Ti. Graccb''°. The fact however remains, that it was always open for your I i. Gracchus or other sociMist agitator to follow in a track along which the Lex Hortensia gave a right of way. No reform was carried, for none seemed necessary, when the de facto sovereign could rule quietly. Men forgot to give the senate a voice which could make itself heard, a power of self-movement. It was not an a^x'? -f 29 necessarily imperfect, and she could not give the essential of new life a free population. Her victories, substantial or petty, gave her pnsoners m plenty, and she utilised them to carry out the Cartha- gmian scheme. She could not maintain a peasantry in Italy much less m Sicily and provinces more remote. And the result 'was a slavery which was worse than death to the slave, and which broucrht a nemesis with it. From the time of the battle of Zama, transmarine corn, produced by slave-labour and at small cost except in human lite, was extensively imported by the Roman government. It was in many cases grown by Roman monopolists, not under provincial re- strictions ; and the cost of transportation was cheaper than from middle Italy. The development of the Padane valley as the granary ot Rome was for ever rendered impracticable. The government sold to the proletariat at under cost price, or left the corn, never paid ,Dut received as a tithe in kind, to the lessees of the tithe, who could still undersell even the capitalistic home-grower. The market was at the same time lessened, for the armies were supplied by the corn-payments of subjects, and so was the metropolis. Small farm- ing, on possessiones too small for pasturage, was not to be dreamed ot. ^ l|rom Sicily, ' the chosen land of the plantation svstem,' the capitalistic slave-farming invaded Italy. Latifundia with summer and winter pastures became the economic order in Italy Italy was depopulated, and a competitive sauve qui pent ruled with no hope for the vanquished; neque ullus procedenits finis esL nisi cum in alterum diviiem incident. The rise too of that competitive struggle, which is always the reducho ad ahsurdum of a bourgeois political economy, was assisted by further considerations. The blood-tax of prolonged war was only paid by the more than decimation of the staple recruiting classes, and the burden now fell also on the Italian * allies.' The farmer in social territory— or in Roman where he still existed— was required for foreign service, and competition, always futile, was made doubly hopeless by a compulsory absenteeism. His acres were swallowed up by capitalism, and the agrestia per longinquos saltus et ferocia serviha which roused the Roman spirit in Ti. Gracchus, and were the standing problem of the disorganised Republic and of the Western empire, succeeded. And actual legislation did its work also. Flaminius, a true dema- gogue, introduced or instigated, during the course of the Second runic War, the law known as the Claudian, prohibiting senators from commerce or trade of any kind'^ and forbidding a senator to undertake state contracts^ {redemptiones). The senator who was wealthy became, accordingly, a capitalistic grazier, with sheep-farms as extensive as those of Southern Australia in a country so straitened as Ita y. 1 he ; knight,' i. e. the eques or non-senatorian capitalist, harried the provinces, as tax-gatherer, banker, or usurer, and where he obtained magisterial sanction or connivance, wrung money from ' Tac. Ann. iv. 27. . . lj^ ^^j ^^ ^ Dio. Iv. 10. 30 the unfortunate subjects. The senator revelled in the profits of his latifundia, and scarcely felt the evil of depopulation and of a slave-system which was the growing danger of the state. But Pliny was right when, reading the riddle which the senate had failed to answer, and interpreting the antecedents in the full light of the con- sequents, he declared that latifundia perdidere Jtaliam, They were, however, but one cause in the destruction, and only found full scope under the empire when the metayer-tenancy of the colonatus was applied in partial solution of the problem. Rome had in republican days no semi-emancipation of shepherds TiXi^fossores to offer, for the rural slaves were not sufficiently denationalised to make such an alleviation of their lot safe. She emancipated citv-slaves, however, and increased the proletariat by the accession of liberti, of an anti- Roman culture, to their ranks. She imposed a tax on emancipations because they were not safe, but she found them necessary, and she accordingly added to the declassis descendants of the old yeomanry, and to the sophisticated petty tradesmen, and the disaffected artisans of the city, freedmen without patriotism for Rome, and without interest in the government. The freedmen reinforced the already growing rabble, and joined in the empty party-cries of their patrons or of the tribunes. They forced on the development of that spirit which demanded ' bread and the games ' as the price of order, and which transformed Vielkinderei into pauperism. The proletariat be- came an element of disturbance which defied police and was only to be quieted by arms. The demand for a military tyranny was be- coming effective, for in Rome as in the provinces the needs of the time ' necessitated the appointment of governors whose position was absolutely incompatible . . . with the Roman constitution ^' A virtual dictatorship was perforce conceded to the great general of the day, and not all proconsuls would refrain, like Scipio Aemilianus, from turning their arms against the government itself. The senate was fortunate in being saved, once and again, by this the greater of the Scipiones, and by Sulla ; but the autocracy of Aemilianus, with his taceani quihus Italia noverca, and his sound judgment of Ti. Gracchus, was the last opportunity for the arrest of 'the decline before it became downfall. But the riches of the eqm'fes, just after an exhausting war, require some explanation, and it would seem to be this. The enormous gold agio of the Hannibalic wars ^ which was a species of national bankruptcy, was not also repudiation, and the redempHones of enor- mous nominal sums undertaken by those who had money were liquidated in full at the close of the war. The monopolists of the gold-supply doubled, trebled and multiplied beyond belief their whole fortunes, in the unprecedented tightness of the monev-market. Those fortunes they invested, when the war was over, in 'the advancing of taxes to the state. They farmed the taxes and turned over their inoney again and again, and not always too honestly. And they V Mommsen, iii. cap. 1 1, vol. II. p. 337. > PUny, H. N. xxxiii. 13. ^ < J 31 became a rival order to the senate and, though always 'ballasting the restlessness of discontent with the salutary inertia of . . . self- interest,' their ideal was a police under the influence of a moneyed aristocracy, rather than a strong oligarchy. When C. Gracchus bicipitem civitatem fecit^ , and boasted that he had brought in an apple of discord ^ he was only making explicit an implicit rivalry which must have resulted in disunion and struggle. By the judiciary laws the ordo equester sat in judgment on those who were the only check on the extreme operation of the joint-stock company principle of imperial administration. C. Gracchus wittingly hastened the end, as by his lex /rume?ilarm he hastened the evolution of the rioters of the reign of terror, as by his military law he dissolved the only natural principle which could maintain the citizen-army united, and as by his proposed Italian franchise he would have swamped the comilia beyond salvation. That he was * a political incendiary with a con- suming passion for vengeance^' is probably true, for all these measures traversed the family-policy of agrarian reform. That ' he wished ... to introduce ... a Tyrannis, that is ... a monarchy . . . of the Napoleonic absolute type— in the form of ... an unlimited tribuneship for life ' is almost certainly false, for he must have seen that any proconsul could have crushed him in a week, or at most a month. C. Gracchus is only important to us as renderino- the political government disunited, and exposing its weakness, when'' only concentration and apparent strength could save it ; as showing, or at least attempting to show, the impotence of democracy ' in a Common- wealth which had outgrown collective assemblies and had no know- ledge of parliamentary government ' ; as proving the impossibility in a ' popular ' magistrate of carrying the state by a lour de force ; in opening a way for economic evils to have free course, by pauperising the proletariat and withal exhausting the treasury, and paying a premium to idleness ; in fine, by making explicit each and all of "the evils, economic and political, which were at bottom responsible for the state's decadence. C. Gracchus, according to this reading of his character, is at first a socialist; at last a nihilist. He may have honestly believed that the only solution of the problem of wealth and want was a chaos which should in the fulness of time give way to a new cosmos. But he was the Bakunin of Rome. The digression is not unimportant, for C. Gracchus was, in a sort, the projection of all the fatal tendencies of the decline, and their embodiment in a personal influence. The proletariat was ready to hand, and he made that underselling of the Italian farmer customary which had been exceptional. He confirmed the demoralisation of the city and the wasting of Italy. The senate was on the verge of de- struction, and he lent it a hand for the leap into the abyss. The army was declining and he destroyed it, leaving the stage clear for the work of Marius. Discontent, and that ' cheap courage which * Varro. « Cic. Leg. iii. 9. 20. * V. Mommsen, iv. cap. 3, vol. III. pp. 119-120. 32 risks the goods of others' were rife, and he gave them voice. Ke presided over the baphometic baptism of the coming Terror. In his brother we have a less original reformer, and a less able man. Ti. Gracchus exposed the evil of the plantation system, but the remedy he proposed was one which had been rejected as inadequate. He was no nihilist, but he tried to revive the laid ghost of the con- stitution in an appeal to \\\e plebs, and the obsolete agrarianism of the Licinian rogations by a family-commission for a -y^y avahaa-yio^. In his first movement he was successful, for the senate, if materially right, was formally wrong ; but he spoilt the whole effect of his programme by the deposition of Octavius. He gave a precedent which justified Gabinius in working on the faintheartedness of the tribune Trebellius, and which carried the Gabinian law. He justified, again, the Vatinian plebiscite, and emancipated Pompeius, and gave Caesar Gaul, ws dnoKoiTO Ka\ dXKos om roiavra y€ p€^oi. In his second movement he failed, except in giving temporary relief to the distressed, and in raising for a time the census. Polybius had said that a distribution of land, such as that carried into effect by Agis III of Sparta, and by Ti. Gracchus, was the last evil of ochlo- cracy ; but he had not seen the Gracchi, and he even underestimated the effect. The revival of the Licinian bill against all prescription, in an age when what was wealth in 367 was esteemed poverty, and when peasant-properties had utterly failed, was not only absurd but iniquit- ous. The senators had been forced by the kx Claudia to become landowners in their own despite, and their vested interests should have been valid. It was therefore a flagrant invasion of rights which was moreover utterly ineffectual, and can only be treated as a dangerous panacea offered by a charlatan. This was not the means to use in the solution of the social problem. The evil lay deeper in that proletariat which had been created by the wars, taxation and usury of early days, and had been stereotyped by the legacy of Carthage — an empire ruined by stock-broking, a stock- broking system cursed with empire. The proletariat had been modi- fied by the constant wars and the constant use of the vindicta. It had been demoralised by prices permanently under cost of production. It had been brutalised by the gladiatorial shows which made the lot of the s\d.vQ-/amilia harder. And with this monster Ti. Gracchus tried the spell which had been proved powerless ages before. The first Gracchan reform bill was directly occasioned by the first Sicilian slave- war, and to this perhaps is owing the slight glimmer of understanding which appears in the extension of possessiones by a sort of Jus liberorum. But the slave-system is not hinted at, much less controlled ; and in that and in the city mob, or in their common causes lay the evil. Ti. Gracchus was the socialist of the revolution, as his brother was the nihilist. Though his socialism was not explicit, it appears in the germ. He caused rich and poor to confront one another definitely as in hostile camps. He showed the impotence of the individual who had no property ' to interpret himself to himself He renewed the democratic pretensions of the lower orders, and he directly caused a ) \ i 33 shaking or perplexing of public opinion in its feeling of right. And all this without a positive propaganda. Gains followed and denied the necessity of any such propa^randa burnmg simply for blood-letting to clear the wav for the evolution of the state ab initio. The decline was accomplished, ih^facilis descensus •was changmg mto praeceps ruina, when the leaders of the Roman state were such apostles of anarchy. We have thus far looked on the proletariat as the outcome of the false economy of Rome. Let us now turn to the other side of the medal, and review the ordo equeskr and their chattels in the same li^rht The temporary emergencies of the Hannibalic war had created a cTass such as was evolved under the empire by the permanent gold-shrink- age, and with like tendencies and ambitions, those of a Crassus to wit, or a Didius, But under the empire the question of depopulation became important, not only in reference to the army and to morality, but m respect to national existence ; and the appreciation of human lite prevented the horrors of slavery reaching to their present ex- tent Slaves they must have, for the Roman people would not work tor hire— they were the ' mean whites ' of Virginian civili>ation almost exactly, and bread was dear, flesh and blood cheap. The whip the €rgastulum, and the cross became familiar. The slaves in desperation rose m Sicily in 134 b, c, and again in 104. The gladiator-slaves under Spartacus ravaged Italy, all but unchecked, and Crassus stepped trom the praetor's court to the praetorium to quell revolution. And this in spite of daily emancipations restrained, perhaps wisely, by tax, and in spite of— perhaps in consequence of— daily executions. Italy was ripe for change, wherever the slave could hope for liberty, and the free-man for quiet. The supply of the slave-market was scarcely kept up by the slave-hunts— wars the triumphators styled them -of Rome in the East, Every new slave brought with him an earnest hatred to Rome and to the orders senatorius et equester, the incarna- tion of the hateful system. The demand grew greater and greater; the lot of the chattel harder and harder. Slavery alone would have wrecked Rome, had the slave-owners been a nobler race. But they were essentially immoral. Their gains were sterile-commercial at best never industrial. They did not even fulfil the mission of modern stock-exchange speculators, and equate supply and demand present and iuture ; for supply was furnished without price, and demand was glutted by corn and oil, and shows. They understood finance but they practised it solely for private ends. They turned money over the ^istophorus question, they established their bimetallic contracts on a sound footing, they farmed taxes, and a Verres was their patron and intimate a Rufus their scapegoat. They would starve out the corpo- ration of an indebted township, and bring it to terms. They would take advantage of Roman privilege in their dealings with subject-races, and would expect Roman privilege to be permanent They drew their wealth from the provinces or the country, and they brought it all to Rome. They centralised the commerce of the empire in the hall ot their stock-exchange, and they decentralised the government of the 34 empire in order to scramble for the spoils. They had only self- inierest at heart, and self-interest is proverbially shortsighted. The slaves turned against the old orders in the century of civil war, and were the instruments of the proscription, and though the orders con- tinued, they were decimated, their goods were depreciated, their fortunes sapped. Julius, Octavian, and Tiberius struck a blow at in- direct taxation per publicanos, and the ordo equester as well as the senate were plundered freely. If there was a justification for the Roman revolution, it is to be found especially in this, that it dealt out a richly deserved humiliation and retribution to a blood-guilty capitalism. We have referred often to the change which took place in the army. It was the last step in the internal, the first in the external revolution. The decay of the yeomanry before the Punic Wars was at their close virtual extinction. The armies were then recruited from constantly lower classes. The capite censi, once only summoned for naval or inferior service, were called into the field. In the time of Polybius the classis of from iioo to 4000 asses was called into active warfare, and this despite depreciation and adulteration of the coinage. In the time of C. Gracchus military service is no longer a privilege of the burgess, but a burden to be shared, if possible, with the socii. All this tended to demoralise the army, and to denationalise it, and consequendy, before Numantia, Aemilianus has to create his army : Metellus has to make an army in Numidia. The aristocratic cavalry is a burden rather than a service to the general. He establishes a volunteer bodyguard in the praetoriani. The national army is doomed. But the national army is the uyiiversiis populus of the centuriate comitia, and with the army must fall the populus. And the senate falls with the constitution, only the new power will need an imperium which is valid, and so a new army. The slave-war of 134 B.C., and the disasters against Jugurtha and against the Cimbri prove that the decline has in this direction run its course. Had Viriathus lived, he would have saved Numantia, and severed Spain from the empire, as Sertorius did, for his lifedme. Had Jugurtha been a Masinissa, or still more a Hannibal, Africa would haVe been torn from Roman hands, and Rome herself might have fallen. Rome must have an army or abdicate her sovereignty in the empire, in the nation, even in the city. Marius saves Rome by inventing the instrument of her destruction, the cohortial army. Milites scribere non more majorum neque ex classibus, sed ubi cujusquc cupido erat, capite censos plerosque^. The army is formed by enlist- ment. A soldier's training is made common and professional. A soldier serves and looks to his leader as a despodc chief whom he must obey ; he learns to be orderly, and to submit to discipline ; he sees the intolerable anarchy of Rome ; and he sees the necessity for Marius, or Pompeius, or Caesar, their quick decision and their power at the head of affairs. INIarius made the army, and reaped Metellus' laurels in Numidia. He defeated the Cimbri, and became ^ Sail. ]yxz. 86. \ % ^ W^ virtual dictator. He had no political genius and he failed ; but others would not fail. What matters it whether it were Lucullus, or a Pom- peius, or a Caesar that was successful, a Moreau, a Joubert-Dumouriez, or a Napoleon? Much doubdess to the empire. Nothing to dying Rome! The army was evolved. The Quirites were dissolved. The social war swamped them polidcally and, having no further military character, they could be of no further effecdveness. The senate's mismanage- ment was responsible for the troubles. Individuals reaped the laurels of the restoration. The time was come, and Sulla seized it ; but for his cause, not for himself. Pompeius was more selfish, but incom- petent, and Caesar triumphed. Could Sulla have saved the republic ? for if he could, the decline must be traced through the Ciceronian age. He could not. His frivolity and his indifferentism in morals cause him to be suspected of lack of thoroughness, but the suspicion is unjust. He left the slavery, the proletariat, the freedmen, the Italians, the proscribed, the politically annihilated ' ordo equester,' the discontented veterans ; the marshals of the civil war ; but could he have removed any of these fatal obstacles to the reaction ? After C. Gracchus, certainly not. The new army was a necessity for any strong government ; and the old scheme of land-grants, re- duced to an absurdity by Ti. Gracchus, in opposition to the whole trend of Roman history, was used wisely but in vain, to render it quiescent. The marshals were a necessity, for Sertorius and Lepidus, to say nothing of Mithradates, survived. The proletariat and the slaves were made the constants of revolution by the Gracchan reforms. The Italians were an irreducible element in the state after 89, and were also necessary in Sulla's scheme to abrogate, potentially at least, the comitia. The continued existence of the equites was necessary, for they supplied the organisation of the empire more than the senate itself, and should they have been totally massacred? And finally the ' animadversio in post futuros,' though to be deprecated, seems to have been rather the expression of the undying hatred of his party to the promoters of the civil war, than anything personal to Sulla, and necessary for a generation at least in order to prevent a new coup d'etat. On the consdtutional side he perceived the mistakes and the radical faults of the state-machinery, and remedied dicm ; he had only failed in two things, he had not taken account of tlie verdict of the Zeitgeist in favour of imperialism as against nation- alism, or still more as against civicism. He still thought of imperium civile; he had not reckoned with the inherent inadequacy of sena- torian government to maintain itself under the new ' historic category'; he could not see that it would be unable to control its pashas, and that it could not exist except as ' the old consUtution,' which under Sulla it was not. Or if he saw and recognised that the evils objected were ineradic- able, and that restored by force it must be retained by force, he must have shrugged his shoulders with Epicurean calmness and murmured the Greek equivalent for Apres moi le deluge. c 2 I 36 To sum up, then, the economic side of Roman decadence, we see the origin of the evil in the extinction of the middle classes — a fact which brought with it its own punishment in the decline of the landwehr and the necessiiy for those armies which became the merely personal followings of great leaders, and which slew no less than six leaders during the ' civil war,' notably Flaccus, Cinna, and Carbo ; which enacted in fact the part of the praetorians under the emperors. From the decay of the middle classes dates the rise of the prole- tariat. It became impossible for the man of small means to maintain himself in the competition of capitahsts, often assisted by direct legislation in favour of the strong holder. The proletariat grew, idled, and talked; slaves did its work, and the plantation system appeared. Emancipations changed the character of the proletariat for the worse ; it became the grand cause of anarchy ; it was organ- ised into clubs and claques ; it took bribes, and bullied and blustered for pay. It showed the incompetence of the old government, and became gradually an Adullamite party which was a good recruiting ground for the army of an imperator — the criminal, the spendthrift, the profligate and the like constituted a nucleus of i)olit cal discontent. Ti. Gracchus faced the evils, and attempted to combat the Hydra with the wooden sword of ' the vice in the old comedy.' For a time, if statistics are reliable, he stopped depopulation, but he invented fatal con>titutiunal precedents and died a martyr in the cause of the im- possible. And he left a socialistic negative propaganda to those who might come after. C. Gracchus, of malice aforethought, plunged the sovereign people into the depths of dehumanised pauperism. He taught them to lay their hands on provmcial revenues ; and to play off merchant prince and hereditary noble one against the other. He abolished corporal punishment anew, when it was most needed. He deposed the senate, roused Italy to fierce agitation, and accomplished nothing but the prelude to an amorphism which to the nihilist implies a perfect TraXiy^fffcTta. He gave a perfect exposidon of the revolution, and died to give it what it needed, a conscious martyr. Marius made a new army out of the material to hand ; Gladiators, slaves, Italians became soldiers and citizens during the bustling period that followed. The nation longed for peace, the provinces for relief, the less well-disposed longed for a struggle and a scramble. The struggle came, and after it the peace; a Cato is the caricature of senatorianism, a Cras^us of mercantilism, a Spartacus of the plan- tation system, a Verres of provincial administraUon, a Clodius of the mob-rule, a Pompeius of the new militarism ; and the onesided views represented by all these gave way before Caesar's political and eco- nomic genius, which yet failed to grasp all or nearly all the detail of the decline of which he was the outcome. Victrix causa deis and not too soon. Such is the account of Roman decline which we have to offer. But what, it may be asked, supposing this to be the whole account ^ tk "^ 37 of the decay, — what shall we say of the judgment of Romans them- selves \ that irreligion, luxury, cosmopolitanism, bribery, falsity, im- morality, were the true causes of Rome's downfall ? In our view they are rather effects and symptoms than truly efficient causes. And they are symptoms of degeneracy from the good old times, which are noted by historians haphazard, and each with an exaggerated prominence, and an emphasis which the original writers would probably disown. * The man died of gout ' is a fair expression of a certain fact, but on analysis it amounts only to this : he died of that for which gout is the outward and visible sign, and of which gout is even an outlet and a remedy. We will, however, consider them briefly, in turn. Doubtless it was an evil day for Rome when the Senatiis consultum de Bacchanalibus was needed ; no doubt the introduction of eastern orgiastic worships into the capital was in a sense the ruin of one more pillar of conservatism. It is equally true, too, that the religious char- latanism, wiiich so infected society as to cause a Marius to advise with his sorceress, a Sertorius to masquerade with his white doe, was a sad sign of changed times. The scandals of 1 14 b. c. and of 61 were similar symptoms of grave degeneracy, but to attach a serious im- portance to them as efficients is, we think, to label antecedents as causes much too hastily. The adoption of Greek philosophy by the Scipionic circle, the philosophical scepticism of Lucretius, the pantheism w^hich we find under the empire in Lucan "^ are politically not on a level with the Aufkldrung expounded by Voltaire and Rousseau ; and in the same w-ay Isis and Cybebe might perhaps depose Jupiter, but their votaries did not carry their propaganda into a war on Terminus. Such things are to be regarded as proofs of the way in which Rome had become a coUuvies of the nations, and nothing more. There was a really effective irreligion, but it was of an early intro- duction. It was that which prostituted priestly offices and functions to political purposes, and which brought in the Aelia et Fufia for its palladium ; that desecration of the auspices and other spiritual sur- vivals of the old Etruscan state-religion to purposes for which, after the days of the first sacred wars, the Greeks ^ had seldom used even oracles. It was, however, in the days of the most successful rule that Rome ever enjoyed, — that of the Carthaginian war-time — that this irreligious system of auspices and spectiones is found in its full vitality. And luxury, too, is at least as much an effect as a cause. Luxury may have helped to destroy the empire, but it in no sense ruined the republic — and this despite Montesquieu's judgment* that in a common- wealth luxury is fatal because against equality — in a monarchy helpful within limits as distinguishing classes. * V. Lucan Phars. i. 158-182 ; Sail. Cat. 10-13, etc. ^ E.g. ix. 580. ' For an instance to the contrary, see Thuc. v. 54. * Espr. des Lois, vii. 4. C3 38 Doubtless the aviaries and fishponds, the entertainments and spectacles, the villas and familiae which prompted that catena of sumptuary legislation which begins with the lex Orchia and does not close with the lex sumptuaria Augusti^ show at the least the existence of a grave evil. Legislators strove to preach it down and drive it under cover, and yet we have the debts of Curio, of Antonius, of C. Caesar himself. A Catiline, a Milo and a Dolabella essayed to save themselves and the Jeunesse dore'e by a resort to novae tabulae. Never- theless it is to be doubted whether, in a pre-industrial age, the excesses were beyond legitimate expectation, and whether they were really harmful in any marked degree. We are not of course concerned to offer an apology for luxury in general, even as constituting a rational reserve fund for times of exceptional distress; but surely there was much excuse for Rome. Was not the luxury which prevented the capitalistic racking of the provinces and the afforestation of Italy from an indefinite extension even a blessing ? The Romans had not studied industrial policy, but they at least understood usury, and the comes or attache' of a provincial governor was perhaps less of a curse than the respectable Atticus or the moral Brutus. A Roman bill of fare as described by Macrobius ''* or in ' Peregrine Pickle ' involved at all events a demand for labour in the better sense, and * enriched in passing many an industrious hand, and supported more poor than philanthropy with its expenditure of aims^' and many more than the capitalistic speculation of the second century b. c. With cosmopolitanism we need hardly deal ; for save through the fatal capitalistic slavery of declining Rome, cosmopolitanism would never have found a real inlet ; and with its cause we have already become familiar. As an element in demoralisation it is a secondary, not a primary cause. But what of bribery and corruption } Here, too, we see symptoms not causes of decay — ' invariable con- comitants ' which are yet not important factors in the result, of which they are, indeed, rather the creations. In so far as they are part and parcel of the political system, they come under the economic develop- ment of the proletariat, and so far only are they even of importance in Roman history. A Verres is a plague-spot in a nation, but a Verres and men like Verres are genuine products of Roman political and economic civilisation. The emancipated magistrate who must face an (xjSvvt) before publicani and negotiator es, if he have sufficient wicked- ness in him naturally becomes a Verres. Verritium jus is, in the decHne, a specialised version o^ jus Romanum. So, too, the long list of enactments de repetundis^ and the very exist- ence of the divinaiio as a regular feature of judicial procedure, may be and are ill-omened, but they are palliatives of an evil ingrain, of which we have treated. For the rest, bribery did little or no harm. The populus was proletarian, and without hope of becoming by reform or by revolution an efficient in government, and the bribes of a f * Tac. iii. 54 ; A. Gell. ii. 24. ' Mommsen, v. ii, vol. IV. p. 507. 111. 13. .X 39 Crassus no more pauperised them than the frumentaria lex of a Gracchus. Among a pauper-mob they might even do good, for they might divert capital from the enslavement, by compound indebtedness of industrial subject communities ^ The really harmful bribery, then, was not that of the elections • while that of the law-courts was, until Rome was actually totterinf X^ 41 Why, then, mention elements in Roman demoralisation which are not to be classed as causes or reasons for the decline .? There are many grounds for so doing; firstly, they are noteworthy as showing the effects of the Roman system, and, negatively, its sins of omission, for 'in all moral machmery the moral results are the test\' And again, they are remarkable as showing ttiat the state was sapped down to its very foundation, since the principium of Rome was sternly moral. They prove, too, the hopelessness of regeneration, when all alike shared in the rottenness ; they demonstrate the need for a tabula rasa when all things political, economic, social and moral are hope- lessly blurred. Or again, they are of value, since though effects, they must react, if a state be not merely mechanical but organic. And if none of these reasons are adequate, yet ' distinguendo copulentur' since they round off Roman life, by touching— lightly and superficially perhaps, but still touching— on the sins and failures of every class. For these reasons, then, a consideration of these so-styled factors in the decline is not unjustified. Leaving side-issues, however, the reason for Roman decline seems to lie in this : the Roman constitution was compounded, but not blended ; mixed, but not harmonised. It was a svstem of partial expressions of the political will, of which each was artificially and mor- bidly developed to limit the others, but none was in iiself efficient or self-determinant. The result was that reform was from the first incongruous and all but inconceivable, for it meant reconstitution ; and all measures for the prevention of decline were accordingly partisan, onesided, and personal. Economic legislation appeared indeed, at an early date, in the department of finance, and robbed one element in the state of its vitality without destroying it ; the populus was paralysed by the iributum, only galvanised by the evolution of the tributa comiiia and the tribunate, and yet it dragged on an existence, objecdess and devoid of any true aim. The first proletariat which represented it was a disorganised vX^ ; and later ensued a poisoning of the vk^ itself The protoplasm of the state was, from an early date, utterly corrupted. And yet the senate, which for the time controlled the magistrate, could not reach a real organisation and self-determination. While it prevented the upward evolution of populus and plebs, and made the nucleation of the organic life of the community in the magistracy an impossibility, it could not secure any permanent independent life for itself It did not assimilate, and therefore necessarily degenerated, except when its environment called for a real self-assertion when ^ it gained renewed vitality. It was not a ' tactical ' principle in govern- ment, and it failed to form a consistent TtSKvrda. The magistrates, too, who might have formed the state, were long powerless, because of the * Burke. ' On Doubleday's principle of population, which is in part a truism, if in part untrue. I 42 disintegration, the non-unitary character of the magistracy as a centre of organisation. They could not disencumber themselves of the dead mass of popular tendencies, which they could nevertheless by no means assimilate ; nor could they overcome the organised imperium in imperio — the senate which was their council. The magistrates were undoubtedly the only formative element in the state, for only with the possibility of an effective democracy, primary or representative, could the populus, and of course the plebs, become more than vXj}; and while lying between these two ideals — one its Eden, the other iis Paradise — the populus was extinguished. And the senate was dumb and paralysed, except when it used other mouth- pieces and hands ; it was in no sense formative. And so when iht populus became proletarian, and its hopeful elements died out with the growth of agrarian distress and usury and taxation and militarism, and when no ' Colbertism*' could prevent that decay of the yeomanry which was the bane of antiquity, the senate attempting an o/ganic creation failed ; for it needed something more than its bastard animation to enable it to convert matter into life. And there was left only the magistrate. But there was schism in the magistracy, and a double or multiple organisation seemed probable. The partition of the true nucleus of imperial life was favoured by the senate, and as the senatorian activity decayed, a dismemberment of empire might have appeared feasible in which senatus or populus should acquire a true vitality as a centre of national organisation. Such a development however was checked by two influences, — the condition of the Medi- terranean peoples external to Rome, and the fatal Roman conserva- tism. The first of these, which resulted in the constant augmentation of the material elements of empire, by the accession of the devitalised components of the aticiefis regimes of Carthage and of Greece, might have seemed likely, taken with the constitutional primacy of the populus in Rome, to issue in the premature evolution of nationalities. But the reverse was in fact the case, for the Greek and Siceliot and African power of self-determination had worn itself out, and the demoralisation of the sovereign and subject-peoples could alike issue only in anarchy. A Viriathus must fall by assassination ; a Sertorius could not maintain a Rome of the west. The Gallic peoples had no efficient organisa- tion ; the northern nations had scarcely arisen. No formation was possible. The leges Salpensa et Maluginensis were the first origins of a true nationalism, and they were not yet. Anarchy and its natural event in autocratic rule were the only possible issues. And when a magistrate escaped the trammels of senatorian routine, he might conquer in east or west, but sooner or later he made his aim and object Rome. St. Peter's in mediaeval Rome was not more the focus of all roads and all pilgrimages than was the Capitol under the Commonwealth. Conservatism might yield to the superficial varnish of Greek culture and foster the serpent of Punic imperial policy, because Rome had no real culture and no real political genius, but it never gave way to any sentiment anti-Roman. It was perhaps ,- v v;^ - > A 43 Chauvinism and Jingoism, and not patriotism, but it looked to the civic Rome as oncpdXos of its world. Anarchy, then, and a saturnaHa of the dangerous classes were the natural issue of the breakdown of the senatorian machinery and of the economic system. The struggle of the orders ensued and a rush for the spoils, and the fittest survived, i. e. the people as strongest. But the people too were an element in the empire unfitted for government, and they succumbed to the arms of the organisers of the principate. The decline worked itself out, and ended in what divus Augustus chose to call the restoration of the commonwealth in B.C. 27, but which the historians term the Roman empire. ' The old age of a polity is rarely venerable,' and the decline of the Roman Republic is no exception to the rule. It is moreover a decline which begins with the Republic itself, and de^•elopes throughout its history. It is as a study of disease and decay therefore that Roman history, and especially Rome's internal history, is scientifically valuable. And scientific value in general implies artistic worthlessness. The fall of the empire lends itself to expression in a work of art, for it is the gathering of the nations round the dying lion. The fall of the empire can be presented in the likeness of a spectacle in the Coliseum. But the Republic's decline is not picturesque, for it is a lingering death under internal disease ; no eagles gather round it, for its physical strength is not burned out. It is the grim reality of some Hogarth's picture representing in detail the horrors of a prolonged struggle, in isolation, against the grip of inward pain and tribulation. It is the death-agony, not in battle, but in the chamber, and it is therefore thoroughly revolting. But as a study, not from the studio but from the mortuary, it is deeply and permanently interesting. It is the greatest example in history of a constitution balanced, not harmonised — a constitution doomed to perish because its unstable equilibrium will not allow of its assimilating the necessary nutriment of life. And it is the grand example of a state versed in the expedients of finance and commerce, but dying because it did not and could not know that economics to be real and wholesome must before all things consider men and their needs. And finally, it is remarkable as the first empire or universal dominion known to European history ; and the result is discouraging. Rome verily in the freshness and purity of her early life had great possibilities ; and the decline of her polity is the greatest political and moral failure that the world has yet seen. Mole ruit sua. FINIS i • ^ p^ s I i I! I ^ .ASE RETURN TO THE LOAN DESK THE LOAN D^K 18 REQURBD W im THIS BO(»K mm THE LIBEAEI 4 I COLUMBIA UNIVEP'stTV iiRRARIES I 010683283 ^ I pife. ^